Taibbi: The News Media Is Destroying Itself

While I agree that the Post piece is terrible, let's give a special shout out to Reason for this gem:
"Washington D.C.'s Malcom X park..."

If you can't spell Malcolm X and if you don't have editors who can actually edit but I'm glad Robby Soave got paid.

 

Would've been funnier if Malcom Ex got thru.

 

Taibbi definitely needs to boink Google on the head.

 

That is simply not true. Off the top of my head, Mizzou and Evergreen State are examples of non-elite universities with the problem you describe.

The professors and administrators are all products of the same system, regardless of where they work. And as a whole they don't get smarter as you go down the ladder.

 

Wesley Lowery

Opinion | A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists

Perhaps the most recent controversy to erupt because of such thoughtlessness and lack of inclusion was provided by The New York Times Opinion section, when it published an essay by Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, calling for, among other things, an “overwhelming show of force” by the American military in order to quell civil unrest at protests that, while at times violent, have largely been made up of peaceful demonstrations.

A method of moral clarity would have required that leadership think very hard before providing the section’s deeply influential platform to any elected official — allowing him or her to opine, without the buffer of a reporter’s follow-up questions, using inflammatory rhetoric. It would require, at the very least, that such an Op-Ed not contain several overstatements and unsubstantiated assertions.

“We find the publication of this essay to be an irresponsible choice,” the NewsGuild of New York, a union that represents many Times staffers, said in a statement. “Its lack of context, inadequate vetting by editorial management, spread of misinformation, and the timing of its call to arms gravely undermine the work we do every day.”

Let’s take a moment to be honest about what actually happened in this case: An op-ed page accepted an essay from a firebrand senator. It published that column without adequate line or conceptual editing. Then it got called out for it, leading to the resignation of one man in top leadership and the reassignment of another.

It was a rare case of accountability, yet it remains to be seen if the changes at The Times will include aggressively tackling a culture that leaves its own staff members so internally powerless that they have to battle their own publication in public.

Despite the suggestions of an increasingly hysterical set of pundits, this fallout was not an attack on the very concept of public debate. It’s the story of a group of Times staffers concluding that a specific piece of content and the process by which it was published was beneath the standards they are asked themselves to uphold — then having the audacity to say so.

The journalists — the black journalists — who pushed back most forcefully on the Cotton Op-Ed essay were not calling for an end to public discourse or the censorship of opinions they dislike. They were responding to the particularly poor handling of a particularly outlandish case during a particularly sensitive moment. The turmoil at The Times and the simultaneous eruptions inside other newsrooms across the country are the predictable results of the mainstream media’s labored refusal to racially integrate.

 

Citing ...

predictable results of the mainstream media’s labored refusal to racially integrate.​

... as the reason for a poor editorial decision at the New York Times is dumb.

It was a poor editorial decision regardless of labored refusal to racially integrate.

Implying (inferring?) that the Times wouldn't have run that op-ed with a more racially integrated newsroom is to believe the Northern Illinois shooter stopped to look at himself in the mirror. Uh-huh, sure.

 

?

 

!

 

Conceptual editing...

 

ie, "do we really need a piece from a US Senator advocating a show of military force in the streets - without running a rebuttal directly next to it?"

 

Nothing ever gives you much pause, does it? If it's left, it's deft.

 

not in the case of "conceptual editing," no.

I've said from the outset that the problem with the Cotton piece was strictly a newspapering problem. Not a political problem.

All of this upset - including the upset within the Times - arose because the piece ran as a standalone.

Run it in tandem with an opposing viewpoint, and it's a debate.

And no one inside or outside the paper thinks twice about it.