Editor mocks The New York Times

(A warm welcome to visitors from Mudville Gazette's open post.)

Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown writes an opinion column in today's Washington Post. She mocks The New York Times for creating The Judy Millar Saga. Publisher Arthur Salzburger Jr and Executive Editor Bill Keller are among Times leaders Brown mocks.

Yes, mocks a strong word. But look at some of the things Brown says, and see if you don't agree it's an accurate descriptor.

Brown begins:

The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New York Times has become its foremost practitioner.

Brown then zooms in on The Times' explanations/not explanations of just what reporter Judy Miller has been doing the last few years.

After reading the 6,000-word takeout in Sunday's Times on the Judith Miller/I. Lewis Libby farrago in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak case, accompanied by Miller's own strangely cryptic narrative of her belated grand jury testimony, I know even less than I thought I knew before.

<...>

Readers would rather have waited and gotten a story they could at least understand. Newsrooms, however, can't handle that kind of old-fashioned restraint. The blogs are baying to be fed, the competition is kicking their butt on the story, the stock price is down. "Transparency" turns into a combination of partial truths and morose institutional venting that makes everyone, including the readers, feel worse about themselves and the newspaper than they did before.

<...>

For Brown, the Judy Miller saga is symptomatic of major institutional problems at The Times.

Don Van Natta's team-reported narrative included such baffling details as Times Executive Editor Bill Keller blandly noting that, after he took her off the Iraq story because of her lead role in co-authoring the erroneous stories of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Miller "kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm." Drifting? On her own? Is the Times after Blair ( Jayson Blair, a Times reporter, whose fake and inaccurate stories The Times published. - JinC) some sort of trackless sea, with lone castaways afloat on rafts? To whom do reporters report? IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?

Brown feels The Times needs adult supervision. But she's not looking to Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to provide it.

Such is the power of Dame Judith's mystique with Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that his paper quotes him as saying it was Miller's "hand on the wheel" throughout the course of the legal decision-making even though his editors seem to regard her as a less malleable version of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Brown isn't finished with Sulzberger. Further down we read:

You have to feel sorry for Sulzberger. Like every spirited young man who inherits a newspaper, he hankers after something more exciting than sitting in the front office fretting over the price of newsprint. He wants to feel as real in his role as valiant publisher as his reporters -- those driven, passionate, sometimes reckless seekers after truth -- feel in theirs. When he threw his support behind Miller's fight to protect her sources, he didn't think he was in a bad reality show. He thought it was an Oscar-winning movie -- "The Pentagon Papers 2."

Mocks an accurate descriptor, isn't it?

While I've been critical of The Times, I take no joy in reading what Brown tells us. I'd like to think things are better at The Times than we've been reading.
But if things are better there, why is The Times reporting what its reporting?

One caution on Brown's column. She touches on BBC/Gilligan and CBS/Rather, and falls into the "fake but accurate" pit. But that's a small part of an otherwise interesting column.

You can read all of what Brown says here.