Some Monday morning questions:
- Should articles that appear in the news sections ever contain opinion?
- If so, should they be clearly labeled as columns or commentary?
- Is the line between opinion and straight news blurring more and more each day, and is this a bad thing?
These are questions that I hear from readers all the time.
And then, once in a while, something comes along to sharpen and focus the discussion.
Consider the first few paragraphs of an article that ran in the Texas edition of The Times, as well as in the news sections of the Web site.
From Mitt Romney’s slap at 47 percent of the population that he says mooches off the government to President Obama’s heavily mocked quote about businesses that take too much credit for their success, gaffes are all the rage on the presidential campaign trail these days.
Invariably we are told these verbal boo-boos are bad enough to bring a presidential campaign to its knees, that somehow the blunder in question has set a new low, a dubious milestone.
Two words: Rick Perry.
I am not making light of the fallout from the nominees’ recent gaffes. They surely have incurred — or will incur — a political cost.
The point is that, having covered the Texas governor’s botched presidential campaign from mid-August 2011 through mid-January 2012, I have witnessed the birth of a whole new level of faux pas. Think of it as the political equivalent of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Super-Gaffe, if you will.
It is not just the magnitude of Perry’s face plants that make them so different from what we are seeing out of the Romney and Obama camps. It is the reasons they happened in the first place.
Despite the grass-roots enthusiasm and financial support that greeted Perry when he joined the race last year, he was not anywhere near ready for the presidential campaign spotlight. His late entry and lack of debate experience clearly hurt him.
It certainly sounds like something other than straight news coverage, doesn’t it?
Here’s another section from the same article, which was produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization that provides local coverage for Times readers in the Texas area.
I hate Orlando, by the way. It’s like Vegas without gambling or scantily clad women. Sprawling hotel complexes. Flip-flop-wearing Disney-goers. I shudder. But I’ll say this: The Fox News-Google debate there on Sept. 22, 2011 had the best press filing center I’ve ever been in.
The décor screamed Google: multicolored beanbag chairs, plush white wall-to-wall carpet, leather furniture with Google-colored pillows, modular plastic chairs and plexiglass tables. They had a popcorn machine. A huge smoothie bar. Hamburgers with bacon strips. Pasta. All kinds of drinks and candy.
This is what the article looked like when it appeared in the Texas edition of The Times:
(To see the layout of the entire article including the author identification at the end of the first column of type, click here.)
So it’s easy enough to see why a reader, Michael Thaddeus, wrote to me as follows:
I am an Upper-West-Side liberal and no defender of Rick Perry.
But I am appalled that The Times would run an article like this.
Does The Times draw any distinction between news and opinion pieces any more?
Are its news reporters expected to strive for objectivity, or are snide and snarky comments fair game?
Is their reporting supposed to consist of facts or spin?
Are they asked to avoid the first person, or may they freely inject a breezy personal narrative?
For this story consists almost entirely of snark, spin, and prattle. Instead of leading off with factual statements, as a news story ought to do, it begins with an extended smackdown of Rick Perry that could have been lifted from Jon Stewart. It is an embarrassment to see it under The Times’s name.
The historic shift from newsprint to the Internet has led the Times to many new initiatives, like its alliance with The Texas Tribune. Why should it abandon its journalistic standards in the process? The Times has a venerable tradition of precision and rigor; why is it steering in the direction of the British press, preferring invective and anecdote to serious news?
I spoke with The Times’s managing editor, Dean Baquet, about the article. He saw two problems: one about placement and layout; one about labeling.
“The layout was too much like a normal news story,” he said. That was misleading in the print edition, which the reader above never saw. The online version presented a different issue: labeling a story clearly.
“We needed a way to signal to the reader that this is a little bit different,” Mr. Baquet said.
After we spoke, he arranged for the author’s identifier to be placed at the beginning of the article, making it clear that this was an excerpt from a book. (You can view it here.)
As for the broader issues about news and opinion, “we have a constant discussion about this. We don’t want them blended,” Mr. Baquet said. Even columnists who appear in the news pages ought to be less opinion and more analysis, he said. “They don’t have the same license as a Brooks, a Dowd or a Krugman.”
Mr. Baquet said he appreciated the reader’s response. “He’s right to hold us accountable and tell us to be vigilant,” he said.
There’s nothing wrong with opinion, analysis and commentary in The Times. They are part of what makes it interesting.
But readers ought to know what they’re getting. A book excerpt (or a column, for that matter) shouldn’t masquerade as news.
Newspapers are sometimes criticized as having “the view from nowhere.” And that’s a big discussion, something for another day.
But when the view is as clearly from somewhere as this, readers ought to know just where that somewhere is.