Herman: Okrent's Revealing Closeout as Public Editor of the NYT

[paineinthearse]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=7928

Daniel Okrent's Revealing Closeout as Public Editor of the New York Times

by Edward S. Herman; May 24, 2005

In his final column as Public Editor of the New York Times, Daniel Okrent discusses "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did" (May 22, 2005). His list is interesting for what it tells about Okrent's biases, and indirectly those of his bosses, who knew what they were doing when they selected him as public editor. In his first item, he mentions his newly discovered reservations about the First Amendment, which he still prizes but wishes that journalists did not depend on so much. He would rather see them "invoking more persuasive defenses: accuracy, for instance, and fairness." He goes on to discuss the legal problems of Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and others, who have been relying on the First Amendment in the Plame case but may end up in jail. Nowhere in his list of 13 does he mention Judith Miller any further, and it is interesting that his list of defenses (accuracy, fairness) fails to include scepticism and unwillingness to use sources that are contaminated and not subject to cross-examination and independent verification. In short, he excludes the fatal weakness of Miller and other Times personnel that allowed them to be managed by the Bush administration and to be collaborators in disinformation contributing to an illegal war based on lies.

His second item is a denunciation of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, and to a lesser extent William Safire. Krugman, he says, "has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults." He is also "ideological" and "unfair." Dowd is chastised for citing Alberto Gonzales' use of "quaint" as applied to the Geneva Convention limits on torture, long after it had been shown that he used the word only about "commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments." Safire "vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess."

It is interesting that Okrent gives not a single illustration of Krugman's abusive use of statistics, so this is a cheap-shot, hit-and-run attack, and perhaps a bit ideological. While calling Krugman ideological, Okrent never explains what the word means. Krugman no doubt has a set of beliefs that underpin his work, but to an extraordinary extent for a regular columnist he appeals to fact and builds an argument based on fact. This is in contrast with a columnist like Thomas Friedman, obviously highly ideological, but whose ideology-to-fact ratio is vastly greater than Krugman's. Friedman is not listed in Okrent's 13-apparently his ideology is OK, and his regular call for the United States to commit war crimes doesn't bother Okrent either (see my "Thomas Friedman: The Geraldo Rivera of the New York Times," Z Magazine, November, 2003 ).

What this tells us is that Okrent simply doesn't like Krugman's views. And I suspect that Okrent is expressing the views of his bosses here. When they brought Krugman on as a columnist Times officials thought they were getting a free-trade-friendly economist who would stick to his free trade guns and possibly offer some modest criticisms of rightwing economics. But Krugman blossomed, and became a liberal-left critic of broad scope and exceptional intellectual force. It would have been hard to fire him, so one compromise solution was to add the rightwing David Brooks as an offsetting regular and perhaps hope that Krugman would some day make an error that might justify termination. He hasn't done that yet, but Okrent's smear may be an early step in a termination process.

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[roguevalley]

1. Okrent is a dimwit. Good riddance.