THE MEA CULPA VERDICT

Now that Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times, has given us his opinion about the Times' mea culpa, what's the verdict? Okrent writes, "I think they got it right. Mostly." He blames the paper in general for hyping its dead-wrong reports that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction during the run-up to the war and for not adequately correcting them, either by allowing the mistakes to stand or by failing to give equally conspicuous play to the corrections.

"The failure was not individual, but institutional," Okrent maintains. "When I say the editors got it 'mostly' right in their note this week, the qualifier arises from their inadequate explanation of the journalistic imperatives and practices that led The Times down this unfortunate path." He cites "The Hunger for Scoops," "Front-Page Syndrome" and "Hit-and-Run Journalism."

Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten writes of the NYT Editors' Note that "the Times' explanation looks like a leaky lifeboat launched in the teeth of a gathering storm."

The Straight Up verdict, courtesy of our friend William Osborne, offers another take. Osborne's analysis is so cogent and well expressed that it's better than anything we've read on the subject: "They were surely aware of the falseness, but they were just counting on a victor's justice and a victor's writing of history."

Osborne's comment in full:

The NYT's claim that they didn't see the hype during the build up to the war is so fatuous it boggles the mind. Every other country in the world saw the truth except, presumably, America. So we're supposed to think the newsroom of America's best paper is so completely unaware and incompetent? Isn't that a newsroom filled with people from the best universities? They were surely aware of the falseness, but they were just counting on a victor's justice and a victor's writing of history. Now that the thing has turned into a debacle they have to create a mea culpa in order to keep up the illusion of credibility. After all, the corporate interest must be maintained. This takes the sort of propagandistic juggling that indeed requires our very best journalists.

Cynical? Some may think so, but we don't. Skeptical? Absolutely.