Daniel Okrent, the NY Times’ first public editor, is moving on, and in his final column “13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did” he notes problems at that paper. They are no news to anyone who regularly browses the web, but it’s still nice to hear someone inside the NYT say:

#2. Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman 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. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales “called the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint’ ” nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd’s way, and some of Krugman’s enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn’t mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn’t hold his columnists to higher standards. I didn’t give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.

and

#5. Reader Steven L. Carter of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., asks, If “Tucker Carlson is identified as a conservative” in The Times, then why is “Bill Moyers just, well, plain old Bill Moyers”? Good question.

They’re not abolishing the public editor position, so those columns may yet get written.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 9:36 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.