Romenesko weighs in ... sort of

Jim Romenesko of St. Petersburg's Poynter Institute got around to addressing the New York Times ad issue today.

He printed an open letter he received addressed to Clark Hoyt, the public editor who panned his own paper over the issue.

The letter, from Leonard Witt ("Associate Professor of Communication at Kennesaw State University"), related how Witt was about to have an op-ed published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution criticizing the Senate resolution ("sense of the Senate") condemning the MoveOn.org ad referring to a General Betray Us. Witt said he was "dismayed" over Hoyt's column.

Why was he dismayed with Hoyt's column?

Let's let Romenesko tell it:

Times public editor Clark Hoyt (left) says he would have have demanded changes to eliminate 'Betray Us" in MoveOn's ad, "a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier." Leonard Witt responds: "I would argue having any one person at The New York Times decide how a public body can properly address a United States general is a particularly low blow to free speech."
(Romenesko)

Witt appears to have unhinged himself. MoveOn.org can express themselves however they wish. Hoyt simply pointed out that accepting the ad went against the written standard that the New York Times instituted to judge such issues.

Hoyt:

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.”
(New York Times)

One doubts that Witt would be quite as sanguine about such standards if I placed an ad in the New York Times suggesting that he is a politically unhinged academic.

Romenesko also links to a blog entry that criticizes Hoyt for not addressing the main issue attached to the ad controversy.

Greg Sargent of a blog called "The Horse's Mouth" apparently thinks that Hoyt should have denied that the Times offered MoveOn a lower rate because of ideology. Is that the job of the city editor?

Hoyt looked into the matter, determining that a person in the ad department gave an inappropriate discount to MoveOn.org. Hoyt went easy on the Times, however. He could have made a bigger deal about the Times' defense of itself: the insistence that the ad rate was the standard rate. It could be a lie, or it could be a second staffer with questionable ability.

I think Hoyt answers the question better than Sargent will allow. Hoyt's account implies that the individual staffer erred, and gives no attention to the Times' slow admission of an error (assuming that account is accurate).

Hoyt almost certainly knows how ridiculous the charge of ideological collusion is. Why didn't he say so, then? By failing to reach for a conclusion about the question at the center of this whole controversy, Hoyt succeeded only in giving more ammo to right-wing critics -- and let down the paper's readers, who deserve to hear a journalism expert like him pronounce judgment on the assumptions and questions at the core of this whole assault on the paper.
(The Horse's Mouth)

Defend us, damn you!

Chill, Sargent. He did defend you (objective journalism, that is). He just avoided using the type of stridency that would understandably give rise to the thought that they doth protest too much.


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