NYT Ombudsman Finally Does His Job!

Hat tip to the Black Republican for this one.

Well, well, well. Another Horseman of the Apocalypse appears on the horizon! The NYT's Ombudsman actually criticizes his Newspaper in the interest of readers. Byron Calame takes the Gray Lady to task for nodding off while competitors ran wild with the Air America Scandal. He even compares the NYT's slow response to the investigation of the alleged improprieties with the Time's quick coverage of Air America's debut:

Readers of The Times were poorly served by the paper's slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network. The Times's first article on the investigations finally appeared last Friday after weeks of articles by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere.

The Times's recent slowness stands in contrast to its flurry of articles about Air America in the spring of 2004, when the network was launched. "Liberal Voices (Some Sharp) Get New Home on Radio Dial," read the headline on The Times's article the morning of March 31 when the network went on the air. The article noted that the network had a staff headlined by comedian Al Franken and hopes of establishing a counterpoint to conservative radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh.

Two months later, The Times reported that the network had come close to running out of money in April but had received an infusion of an undisclosed amount of cash from sources that weren't identified. The article noted that Evan M. Cohen, a primary early backer and the chairman of the network, had resigned.

Yet The Times was silent as other publications reported that city and state investigators were looking into whether the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx had made improper loans of as much as $875,000 to Air America. Mr. Cohen, it turned out, had served simultaneously as a top executive at Air America and as the club's development director. And since the club operated largely with grants from government sources, any money passed to Air America may have come from the public till.

Perish the thought! Mr. Calame admits that the Lady let herself get scooped! Ah, that paper of record mystique! Where has it gone?

I haven't followed the Air America scandal in any depth as other bloggers, such as Captain Ed, have. Air America doesn't interest me. If the Reasonable mouth-foamers of the political left want a talk-radio outlet to further ruin the carpet, more power to them! That's why America is such a wonderful place. Everybody gets to voice their opinions. Some even get to make money doing opining! Besides, a network of Reasonable mouth-foamers gives fools more laughs. I've listened to Air America's sputtering on about three occasions, and each time I nearl crashed my car from laughing so hard.

When I first heard that the NY Times had essentially ignored the story of the liberal talk-show network's emerging scandal, I wasn't surprised. I had been aware of their glowing coverage of the network's debut. Reasonable elites tend to stick together for the good of the Agenda. Why should the NYT pile on Air America? That would be so un-Komradlike of them. Other bloggers, as I mentioned, stayed on top of the story and had more valuable insights to offer then your humble Fool did. I moved on to other pastures. However, today's pseudo-admission of error by the Gray Lady's ombudsman demands a response from yours truly.

And what would this be? One word: typical. The NY Times has once again proudly exposed her blindness to her own liberal bias. Further into his critique of NYT's Air America lack-of-coverage, Mr. Calame rules out such bias as the cause:

There's another reason to get to the bottom of the scandal. It's the perception problem — a perception of liberal bias for which I haven't found any evidence after checking with editors at the paper.

Failing to cover the story until late last week has led numerous readers, especially those who seemed inspired by conservative bloggers, to write in saying that a liberal bias in the newsroom caused the paper to downplay the budding scandal. One reader put it this way: "If a conservative radio network had been started with money improperly 'borrowed' from a charity like a boys and girls club, it would be front page news for weeks in your paper. Once more, your left-wing bias is showing."

The ombudsman, instead, locates the blame in a lack of coordination and awareness on the part of three beat editors within the Newsroom:

"We were slow in the first place and need to do more," Rick Berke, an associate managing editor at The Times, told me Monday. While it's no excuse for such a belated response to the brewing scandal, it's true that pieces of the unfolding story fell in the domains of three different parts of the newsroom: the metropolitan desk, the business desk and the culture desk. There was, my inquiries suggest, a lack of coordination and awareness of what the paper's competitors across town were writing.

Captain Ed rightly scoffs at this ridiculous assertion. He notes that the Gray Lady suffered no such internal coordination when it came to reporting positive stories of the liberal talk-show network:

A search of the phrase "Air America" since January 2003 results in 64 matches, only two of which relate to the scandal, and one of those is a correction of the other. The New York Times had the resources to coordinate information on 62 other Air America stories, almost all of them positive public-relations stories about the startup and the personalities involved in Air America and its programming. Obviously, the news desk had no issues pulling together across the beats to produce those stories, and yet when it came to looking at a scandal involving a corporation dedicated to broadcasting a liberal message, the Times suddenly became The Gang That Couldn't E-Mail Straight? That explanation beggars belief.

Now, I double-checked the Captain's search. Since NYTimes online only makes introductory abstracts available for free, I could not determine how positive or negative the coverage of Air America was in those search results. Some didn't even address the network in the briefs. Unless NYT online's search technology is hopelessly out of step with reality, however, it's a safe bet that a vast majority of them do. The ones that I read that did reference Air America were indeed puff P.R. pieces. The Captain's point remains valid: How did the Gray Lady go from smooth media operator to sputtering incompetant? Mr. Calame's reason for the Time's dereliction of duty doesn't pass the smell test.

I'm not surprised that the ombudsman does not see liberal bias in the paper. He and most of the staff of the Gray Lady are blind to it. They're all Reasonable people, after all. They share the mainstream view of all Reasonable people. Their view is the moderate, mainstream view of all clear-thinking Americans, they might say. In this light, they look at a story about Air America and notice that most of the dust-up surrounding them has been kicked up by those "Right-wingers" or "conservative bloggers". Well, they probably surmised, let them chew their bone. It's clear Reasonable people aren't going to care about this. It's just too Foolish. Blind to the truth of their own ideology, the NYT staff dismissed an important story that every New Yorker had a right to know about.

The other factor at play here is their perception of Air America. Sure, many times reporters and headline editors referred to the network as "liberal". But many of the staff sympathize with the perspective of the Air America talk-show hosts. They appeared delighted that these Reasonable commentators were willing to stand tow-to-tow with the Right-Wing Juggernaut of Conservative Talk-Radio. Air America was doing its part to support the Agenda, after all. Then puffs of smoke appear on the Network's horizon, but it's only the "conservatives" that point it out. And the Gray Lady won't sell out an ally just on those Right-Winger's say so, now will she? Oh, no! That would be Foolish.

Blinded by their own ideology, and blind to the truth of their worldview, the staff of the NYT proved incapable of reporting the growing scandal for a full three weeks. Even their ombudsman can't see straight enough to keep the paper of record honest. The readers of the Times have once again been back-handed by the unacknowledge bias of their paper.

The irony of all this is that conservatives are fast becoming the NYT's best friend. Constant coverage by the New York Sun, bloggers such as Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin, and eventually, disgruntled NYT readers eventually woke Gray Lady up. The constant barrage of those rabid "right-wingers" might actually help the Paper of Record seize the day next time and start doing some real journalism again. She had better--if she wants to preserve and enhance what's left of her reputation. And her business.