Dumping the Public Editor to Save Face

Cross-posted from WhereIStand

Yesterday, I shared with you how New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame blew the cover off the Times shotty reporting on El Salvador’s abortion laws. Now a story in the Observer indicates that coincidentally (mind you) the Times is considering dumping the public editor spot:

The New York Times will soon decide whether it will do away with its public editor.

The two-year term of the current public editor, Byron (Barney) Calame, will conclude in May. There may, or may not, be another. 

Mr. Keller wrote in his e-mail that “some of my colleagues believe the greater accessibility afforded by features like ‘Talk to the Newsroom’ has diminished the need for an autonomous ombudsman, or at least has opened the way for a somewhat different definition of the job.”

Four years after the Jayson Blair case, they no longer need an autonomous position.  Nonsense. The latest report shows how much an Independent voice is needed as an umpire to expose things that the editors care not to share. Indeed, the rest of the media would rather not touch it. Dawn Eden pointed out the Observer was less than honest about the controversy:

And how does the New York Observer report the story? By avoiding the word "abortion" altogether, mentioning only that Calame wrote an "attack on a story in The Times Magazine that mischaracterized a Central American court ruling."

That’s the type of shoddy reporting you can respect from the mainstream media and why someone at the New York Times would rather not have an independent ombudsman looking over their shoulder. For this reason, they’ll continue to lose market share. The losers will only be those citizens that keep reading publications that tell blatant untruths and fail to issue corrections when they’re called on it.

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