by Thomas Lipscomb

October 26, 2005 12:05 PM ET -- The Judith Miller incident has raised more questions about New York Times management than the Jayson Blair affair did. This reaches all the way to the top… with top down direction.

Blair was a thief. He stole for himself and fooled whomever he had to for his own personal gain and took advantage of decades of trust built up by hundreds of NYT reporters who never would have dreamt of games like his.  Others suffered because he got away with it for so long, but it was a contained incident. Every trusted institution in the world has a few Blairs…from banks, corporate America, and governments to universities and nonprofits.

The Judith Miller case is far, far worse. She is a high-minded ideologue and a gifted reporter who has done great work on the Islamic world, too easily forgotten in the furor over her WMD reporting. She had credibility of her own. And she was allowed to use that credibility to get a free hand over her superiors and the best interest of her paper from the Publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

EVERYONE needs an editor … even the finest editors in the world respect that. Even the most arrogant reporter in his heart of hearts knows his ass has been saved numerous times by some lowly rewrite man, or editor on the desk who will never see a byline. The accumulated wisdom and experience in a news organization slows things down.. but what emerges should be
changed for the better.

To let anyone pass directly through to a paper's readers is an abdication of responsibility that shames everyone in the newsroom of the New York Times and bankrupts their credibility at a time when the paper is already reeling from financial and circulation problems. Bill Keller's diffident admission that she directly disobeyed his beat instructions and he knew it and did nothing
about it , means his title should be changed from “ executive editor” to “editorial observer.”

It is up to the publisher to decide if he wants to allow that to become a permanent new job description when he is laying off hundreds of valued staff. But this time the apology needs to come from the Fourteenth Floor. And it needs to be accompanied by drastic remedial action.

This isn't a departmental clean up. It is a failure at the highest level of corporate responsibility to maintain and improve the asset owned by The New York Times Company's shareholders. Keller's explanation that probably he shouldn't have been such a nice and considerate guy in handling the Judith Miller case is almost as absurd as Arthur Sulzberger's sweet notion in his aside to The Wall Street Journal that “we can all hope this period is behind us. ...” Somehow, it is hard to believe his Board of the Directors will take quite so casual a view.
 

This piece first appeared in  Editor and Publisher.  Permission to reprint by the author.  © 2005 Thomas Lipscomb