October 23, 11:47 a.m. | Updated
The lead news article in Sunday’s Times raised questions for a number of readers, who were either puzzled or angered by its apparent contradictions.
In the “bulldog” edition, published Saturday afternoon, The Times reported that Iran and the United States had agreed to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The news – certainly a major development on a hugely important subject– was attributed to unnamed Obama administration officials.
In subsequent online editions and in the late print edition, which now appears on NYTimes.com, new information was added to the article, and here’s where the confusion began. The White House now denied that an agreement had been reached. So the words “in principle” had been added to the first paragraph to describe the agreement, and a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, was quoted denying there was an agreement.
(If you want to see the different iterations of the story throughout Saturday, visit NewsDiffs.org.)
By Monday’s paper, both sides – the White House and Iran’s foreign minister — were officially denying an agreement.
Readers wanted to know a few things: Is this story for real? Is there indeed an agreement? Whom are we to believe?
I posed the questions to the executive editor, Jill Abramson, who called the Sunday story “solid and true.” She said that the White House was “hair-splitting” when it denied that there was an agreement, and that information was added to the original article to reflect the denial while still standing by its original reporting.
“Good journalism practice sometimes involves changes between editions. We did not see these changes as significant,” Ms. Abramson said.
Complicating the issue is that the reporting is based on unidentified sources, described only as “Obama administration officials” or “U.S. officials.”
One reader, Bill O’Fallon of Brentwood, Tenn., expressed his reaction this way:
Who are these “U.S. officials?” How strong are the sources? Strong enough to contradict Mr. Vietor? Who shall we believe in this obvious contradiction?
The prominent display of the article, and Ms. Abramson’s answer, says that there is indeed an agreement and that the denials are relatively unimportant.
A former foreign editor of The Times, Bernard Gwertzman, was another who wrote, calling himself an “unhappy reader.”
I would like The Times to be more specific. Is there an agreement or not? If there is, the White House is lying. If there is not, The Times is guilty of overplaying a phony story.
When newspapers use unidentified sources – as sometimes they are justified in doing – they say to the reader: “Trust us. We know what we’re talking about.” And that trust is earned over time.
The more information about the sources that can be included, the more the reader has to go on. It makes for a more transparent and far better process.
It’s unfortunate that there wasn’t much information offered about the unidentified sources in this case. While that may not have been feasible, the result of the vagueness is that it puts the reader in the position of not knowing quite what to believe.
Update: At Monday night’s final presidential debate, President Obama firmly branded the Times report on Iran as false: “Well, first off, those are reports in a newspaper. They are not true.” Click here for The Times’s fact-check on Mr. Obama’s statement.