Readers have weighed in to complain about The New York Times’s Aug. 5 piece on U.S. Olympics hurdler Lolo Jones. Below is the response I have sent to those who e-mailed me about this:

Thanks for your message. I have received several complaints about this. The article by Jere Longman appeared under the Olympics-coverage “In the Rings” signature, which The Times uses to signify that the article is a point-of-view piece and not straight news coverage. This means, in The Times’s style, that the writer has some latitude to insert his own perspective.

I have written in the past about problems that arise with this approach, which sometimes translates into too much opinion appearing in the news columns. In this particular case, I think the writer was particularly harsh, even unnecessarily so.

I queried the sports editor about it, and his response was that “One person’s harsh is another person’s tough minded,” and that the writer, “while acknowledging Jones’s accomplishment and qualities of perseverance and candor, thinks this female athlete fell short.”

I believe writers like Jere Longman, who does have a long and worthy track record at The Times, should have some room to express their hard-earned perspective. But this piece struck me as quite harsh and left me, along with others, wondering why the tone was so strong.

Thanks for expressing your view. The sports desk is certainly aware at this point that a number of readers were unhappy about the piece.

Sincerely,

Art Brisbane
public editor

In my column of reader letters, which appeared in print on Sunday, I didn’t have enough space to publish the full response from Jonathan Landman, culture editor for The Times, to reader Philip McGrath, who asked about the credentials of critics.

To remedy that, here is Mr. McGrath’s letter and Mr. Landman’s complete response. Read more…

The New York Times Sunday Magazine article on abuse by teachers at Horace Mann School (“Prep-School Predators,” June 10, 2012) was a highly unusual artifact of journalism, a journey into a black hole of a kind.

In this article, three faculty members were accused of various degrees of sexual abuse of students. Most of the allegations dated back 30 years. All of the accused are now dead, and so weren’t available to speak with article’s author, Amos Kamil. None of the victims would allow their names to be used – the only named victim being a student now dead of suicide.

The current school administration’s statement on the matter, meanwhile, said essentially that it was not in a position to comment on events of so long ago. Read more…

In Sunday’s column, I wrote about the obituaries in The New York Times. I didn’t have space to bring a number of elements in so I would like to supplement the column with some additional stuff relating to obits, which I find to be one of the most interesting content elements in The Times.

Please read on for a brief discussion with Bill McDonald, the obituary editor, about advance obits, those pieces about the famous and influential that are prepared ahead of time. Also look for a Q & A with Tim Bullamore, an award-winning obituary writer with the Daily Telegraph in London. He offers comments on obits in The Times and the differences in the ways The Times and the British press handle obituaries.

Finally, I include a bit on dead pools and the people who follow obituaries with a surprisingly keen passion. Read more…

I am not a foodie, to be candid. Food and I have a transactional relationship. I eat it but I don’t contemplate it.

I do know who Rachael Ray is because I’ve seen her on TV and on the covers of some of her 18 books. What always struck me about her was her overwhelmingly buoyant personality, always on display as she whips things up in her kitchen on the tube.

The Rachael Ray who called me last week, though, was a very unhappy, annoyed Rachael Ray. The object of her upset: The New York Times. The cover of the March 14 Dining section carried a boldly-illustrated feature headlined, “I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter.” The sub-headline said, “Finding the words chefs wish they had.” Read more…

Much has been written about Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that enabled corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited sums to support or oppose political candidates, so long as the spending was independent of the campaigns.

I won’t undertake to identify the many ways that this ruling has animated passions in different sectors of the body politic. But I do want to address a narrow, but intense, controversy that has arisen over the many references to Citizens United in New York Times news articles and editorials, and in other media.
Read more…

When is a reporter doing the essential work of journalism by interviewing a victim, and when is it an invasion of privacy that yields no benefit to the public?

Readers often express strong views about this on articles that they see as clearly unwarranted intrusions. Two recent cases illustrate the point, one involving coverage of a 15-year-old Afghan girl, Sahar Gul, who was reportedly tortured by her husband’s family for her refusal to become a prostitute, and the other a story about a fire in Stamford, Conn., that left three young sisters and their grandparents dead. Read more…

I have appended a statement from Jill Abramson, the executive editor, responding to this post.

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

To illustrate the difficulty of it, the first example I used in my blogpost concerned the Supreme Court’s official statement that Clarence Thomas had misunderstood the financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings.

If you think that should be rebutted in the text of a story, it means you think a reporter can crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice and report back. Or perhaps you think the reporter should just write that the “misunderstanding” excuse is bull and let it go at that. I would respectfully suggest that’s not a good approach.

The second example I used in the blog post was Mitt Romney’s quote about the president “apologizing” for America. This one isn’t a slamdunk, either. It certainly isn’t being systematically rebutted in the paper’s news coverage now. Maybe this is one that should be. My point is: the question is worth a reasoned discussion.

By the way, I should add that I did receive some thoughtful responses to the blogpost from people who recognize that the issue is timely and unresolved. Here is one from Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:

//www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/what-are-newspapers-for/2012/01/12/gIQAuUCqtP_blog.html

And another from Rem Rieder at AJR:

//ajr.org/Article.asp?id=5237

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Art,

In your blog, you ask “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” Of course we should and we do. The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.

We do it every day, in a variety of ways. On the most ambitious level, we sometimes do entire stories that delve into campaigns to distort the truth. On a day to day basis, we explore the candidates’ actions to see if what they’ve done squares with what they are saying now — for example, this story about Newt Gingrich’s work for clients:

//www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/us/politics/gingrichs-health-care-policy-history-at-odds-with-gop.html

A typical day-to-day example came in John Harwood’s Political Memo on Jan. 6, examining Mitt Romney’s assertion that Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” That may be an opinion or political rhetoric, but we supplied the context for readers to assess it. We pointed out: “The largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

We quickly called out Romney’s misleading ad that quoted Obama out of context on the economy:

On the other hand, in Romney’s defense, we quickly explained in detail the true context of his “I like being able to fire people” quote — that he was talking about choosing an insurance company, not firing workers.

And of course, as you pointed out, we routinely have a team or reporters fact-checking debate assertions in something close to real time; here are examples:

//thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/fact-check/

These are just a few recent cases. And providing facts to challenge false or misleading assertions isn’t just part of political coverage. We do it routinely in policy stories from Washington and business stories from Wall Street. We do it in science coverage, too — for example, we constantly point out the scientific consensus on climate change,

Of course, some facts are legitimately in dispute, and many assertions, especially in the political arena, are open to debate. We have to be careful that fact-checking is fair and impartial, and doesn’t veer into tendentiousness. Some voices crying out for “facts” really only want to hear their own version of the facts.

Could we do more? Yes, always. And we will.

Sincerely, Jill Abramson

The Times published 3,500 corrections last year, a huge volume that in itself requires a great deal of work to shepherd into print. I usually agree with its decisions about what to correct and not correct, although there are sometimes cases where The Times’s judgment call and mine are not the same. Here are a couple of recent instances:

In a January 5 article, The Times reported that European nations were nearing a decision to impose an embargo on Iranian oil in response to Iran’s purported efforts to build a nuclear bomb. In the article, the paper referred to “a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective.” Read more…

Under its new editor, Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times Sunday Magazine underwent a nicely-executed redesign last spring. One change, though, troubles me.

In its “Reply All” department, the magazine redefines a traditional letters department by aggregating reader input from a wide variety of sources: signed letters, blog post excerpts from around the Web, comments on NYTimes.com and unsigned tweets. Read more…

Reporting on the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran and their complicated plight at Camp Ashraf in Iraq has proved challenging for The New York Times. So when reporter Tim Arango had the opportunity to visit the camp with Ambassador Lawrence E. Butler, an American diplomat negotiating with the group, he took it.

Because the camp has been off-limits to journalists, Mr. Arango “embedded” with Mr. Butler’s contingent and did not identify himself to the group. The result of going incognito was, unfortunately, more problems and more complications.

A bit of background is helpful. The group of 3,000 at Camp Ashraf had once been, as Mr. Arango’s story reported, “a powerful paramilitary organization bent on overthrowing the government in Iran. In the 1970s, the group killed Americans in Tehran, and after being given refuge by Saddam Hussein its members were suspected of serving as a mercenary unit that took part in his violent suppression of the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shiites in the south.” Read more…