‘Public Editor’ Daniel Okrent, Recruited After Scandal, Draws Ire of Reporters

By James Bandler
2004 © The Wall Street Journal

When the New York Times decided to hire a “public editor,” it wanted to heal a damaged institution. The Jayson Blair scandal — which began with a reporter’s fabrications and ended with the firing of two top editors — had badly bruised the paper’s credibility. The public editor would scrutinize the Times’s future performance and act as an advocate for readers.

Daniel Okrent, a veteran magazine editor, has been the Times’s public editor for seven months. But instead of bringing calm, the experiment has created fresh tensions within the Times about …

The press, male gender…

Folha’s Letters to the Editor receives about 600 letters and e-mails per week. With the space that it has, two columns daily on page A3, it takes advantage of very few, not even 10%. This generates a lot of frustration, and the ombudsman frequently gets messages from readers who are unhappy about the difficulties that they encounter getting their opinions published.

Demands for more space are not new and have been dealt with unsuccessfully by other ombudsmen. But what caught my attention this week was a different complaint, coming from Belo Horizonte and …

Internal contradictions on NPR?…

Sometimes a report airs on one NPR program that contradicts what was reported by another program. When programs are produced in different cities, this may be a failure to communicate among the far-flung units. But when it happens inside the same building in Washington, D.C., it is less tolerable.

Inconsistencies make NPR sound confused. They are a disservice to the listeners because audiences don’t know which version is correct. They also indicate that the producers and managers at NPR aren’t listening to stories for which they may not be directly responsible.

That’s not …

Bringing government into the open…

Chula Vista reader Maria Love is disgusted with the media and what she says is its misuse of the First Amendment “to pry into people’s lives and damage them beyond all repair.”

In an e-mail, Love cited three stories that appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune on June 26, all of them about the media’s battle with courts over sealed records or closed proceedings. One of the stories she cited appeared on Page A2 and was about U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois, who dropped out of the race after The Chicago Tribune …

Use and abuse of polling…

It was a week of surveys about voter intentions and assessments of incumbent administrations. Readers don’t need to have any doubts: We are in an electoral season, and the polls are here to stay. It is wise, however, to be cautious.

Folha published its own during the week. The main one was on Sunday, when the newspaper’s headline was: “Serra way out in front in So Paulo.” (It referred to Jos Serra, the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB, candidate for mayor). There was also an assessment of the administration of incumbent …

When the reviewer becomes the reviewed…

Last weekend, filmmaker Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 became the first documentary to rank No. 1 at the box office. The movie’s unabashed criticism of President Bush’s politics and character and his handling of post-9/11 events and of the war in Iraq has become such a promotional and word-of-mouth success that it appears the film will be a hit for weeks to come.

The review by The Sun’s chief film critic, Michael Sragow, was less than enthusiastic. The newspaper gave the film two stars in its one- through four-star rating system.

“Too bad this movie doesn’t …

Campaign coverage is a complex creature…

It’s July 4, and readers are not without fireworks.

Just in time for consideration on Independence Day are bursts of criticism aimed at (release the bunting, please) the Star-Telegram’s coverage of the presidential campaign.

As with critics of our Iraq coverage, critics of our election coverage cast us as slime — the liberal news media mugging President Bush while using their big corporate blades to clear a Nov. 2 path to the White House for Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate.

Some short-fused readers are certain that’s the reason behind the Star-Telegram’s coverage …