NYT Public Editor Utterly Fails In Her Defense Of Clinton Coverage

The New York Times Public Editor, Liz Spayd, wrote a piece over the weekend in which she attempts to defend her newspaper against the accusations of creating a false equivalence with its excessive focus on the Clinton Foundation that has yet to turn up any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, her response even raises more questions about the Times' coverage of the upcoming election. Spayd presents the idea of false equivalence as meaning that they feel a need to go after Hillary a bit harder in order to balance out all the outrageous positions and statements that Trump makes. She defends the paper by saying, "The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates. Take one example. Suppose journalists deem Clinton’s use of private email servers a minor offense compared with Trump inciting Russia to influence an American election by hacking into computers — remember that? Is the next step for a paternalistic media to barely cover Clinton’s email so that the public isn’t confused about what’s more important? Should her email saga be covered at all? It’s a slippery slope."

Of course, no one is suggesting that the Times should not be investigating Hillary's emails or that they should not be looking into the activities of the Clinton Foundation. The problem is that their reporting intimates that something improper was going on with the Foundation while at the same time admitting that the reporters found no wrongdoing. And, in fact, Spayd readily admits to that just three paragraphs later, writing, "On the other hand, some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did. That’s not good journalism. But I suspect the explanation lies less with making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records than with journalists losing perspective on a line of reporting they’re heavily invested in." For Spayd, then, the flawed reporting on the Clinton Foundation isn't a problem of false equivalence. It is a problem that the journalists were too invested in their stories and wrote misleading stories. Ergo, there is no false equivalence issue.

Spayd then goes on to impugn the motives of those who have criticized the Times about their "not good journalism", to use Spayd's own words, by saying, "I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates." Well that might be because liberals have seen this movie before with the Clintons. As Spayd notes in her article, one of the big reasons the Times has become a target for this criticism is because of its aggressive coverage going back to Whitewater, the non-scandal that the Times most whole-heartedly took mainstream.

Spayd then goes on to make the point that, again, no one is disagreeing with and that is that both candidates need to be looked at with "forceful, honest reporting — as The Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating Trump University." Of course there are two big problems for the Times with this statement. First, Spayd has already admitted that some of the paper's Clinton Foundation stories were not honest but bad journalism. And second, she mentions the real scandal at a charity and it was the political contribution from the Trump Foundation. It is not so much that the Washington Post broke that story. It is the fact that it took the Times over four days to include it in what they lovingly refer to as the "newspaper of record".  And it was that delay more than anything that really got the Times' critics up in arms.

Spayd's defense of the paper has so may holes and so many admissions of error, both explicit and implicit, that you wonder why she wrote it all. All it does is confirm to many people that, when it comes to the Clintons, the Times has lost all perspective.