Margaret Sullivan was the fifth person to have the title of public editor, which is synonymous with the term “Ombudsman” the Swedish word going back hundreds of years. But the position, one who is given authority within an institution to correct excesses or abuses of the public they are established to serve, goes back to China during the Qun Dynasty (221 BC) The Times decided to establish one after a series of false stories, including the biggest one, publishing pure fiction by Judith Miller that led the way to the catastrophic Iraq war of 2003. and its ongoing consequences.
Here’s her last article (she gets one a week to say what she wants, what is part of the deal) that starts with Five Things I Won’t Miss at The Times…….. She wrote a paragraph on each of five impediments to her doing her job, which had been raising the standards and integrity of The New York Times
I began my comment that I submitted by quoting #3 which is a very diplomatic way of saying that she could not break through this intransigence with all of her authority and interpersonal skills — or the “hubris”of individuals and the institution.
"3. Defensiveness. Although The Times runs many corrections and has two staff people, including a senior editor, whose main job is correcting errors, it’s safe to say that many Times journalists find it hard to admit they got something wrong. In fact, what’s much more likely than any such admission is the tendency to double down"
My comment continued:
In a world where spin, distortion and lack of integrity is almost ubiquitous, I had somehow believed that the N.Y. Times rose above it. The example of this “doubling down” on errors that effected me is about something that would have been meaningless in a lesser newspaper, but the Times is seen as special. Friends challenged my claim, arguing that the writer as esteemed as being not only a reporter, but a professor of law and journalism would have no motivation to write such an obvious distortion. Your paragraph above #3, gives the reason, and there’s even a word for it, “Hubris.” But it takes digging into the meaning, complex as the definition in Wikipedia that puts a label on what I’ve been trying to get my arms around over hundreds of hours, now going on four months.
Here’s what the Times reporter wrote about a federal appeals court decision that denied first amendment protection to a student for a rap song he posted:
A divided 16-member panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected Mr. Bell’s First Amendment challenge. Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, writing for the majority, said the song was “incredibly profane and vulgar” and contained “numerous spelling and grammatical errors.” “If there is to be education,” Judge Barksdale wrote, “such conduct cannot be permitted.”
If you are pissed off because “spelling and grammatical errors” disqualifies one for constitutional protection, you should be. If you think that Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale (a man) is a racist pig, you would have justification ----— that is, if his decision really said that.
It didn’t.
If this interests you enough to follow the story you can start at this link for working papers, and correspondence with officials at the Times and several legal scholars. This is an investment of at least an hour of one’s time for the entire story, or ten minutes to get the gist.
Or this narrative on why it’s important for individuals to fight a larger institution, with links to all of the documents.
========
But at this point, after all this personal effort, I learned something rather meaningful once I got past my frustration. It is how masses of people want to follow authorities, especially if it enhances their core ideologies; and often turn on those who point out the irrationality of what they are doing.