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"I could recite chapter and verse of the test drive, the decisions made along the way, the cabin temperature of the car, the cruise control setting and so on. I

"I could recite chapter and verse of the test drive, the decisions made along the way, the cabin temperature of the car, the cruise control setting and so on. I don’t think that’s useful here." Yes, yes it would be, especially when addressing the integrity of one of their journalists! She wore kid gloves when she rendered the comments regarding his "mistakes". Kid gloves are not appropriate. It appears the sentiment of this editor's blog post is essentially "we'll defend our journalists even when their articles have been exposed as unfairly biased." It feels like the journalistic equivalent of the thin blue line.

wpietri 14y ago
I was blown away by that as well. She might as well have written, "I have come to my conclusion, which is that we are fine, but since you people on the internet are meanies who are just going to argue your preconceived conclusions, I'm not going to tell you how I got there." The weird thing is, I think she's probably right. But I think the job of the public editor is precisely to address controversies of their reporters in sufficient detail that we don't have to trust her. Ombudsmen have to be seen as scrupulously fair to outsiders or there's no point in having them.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Well, to be fair, from the POV of an insider, I could see how it's a gray area when you get to the point of saying someone thought they were doing a good job, but it looks like he's incompetent at getting facts right and curbing his own bias. Sometimes you have to stop short of even being close to saying a colleague needs to be fired, and let those matters play out quietly later on.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    That is understandable in any other employee at the Times, but it's a total failure in an ombudsman. They don't have to recommend firing; they can just say what happened and characterize is honestly. But they do have to always take the public's side, and they have to do it visibly. This particular position was created after the Jayson Blair scandal, so it's particularly important that they are frank in calling out bad reporting. Or, in this case, explaining why they think it wasn't bad reporting.

wpietri 14y ago

I was blown away by that as well. She might as well have written, "I have come to my conclusion, which is that we are fine, but since you people on the internet are meanies who are just going to argue your preconceived conclusions, I'm not going to tell you how I got there." The weird thing is, I think she's probably right. But I think the job of the public editor is precisely to address controversies of their reporters in sufficient detail that we don't have to trust her. Ombudsmen have to be seen as scrupulously fair to outsiders or there's no point in having them.

stcredzero 14y ago
Well, to be fair, from the POV of an insider, I could see how it's a gray area when you get to the point of saying someone thought they were doing a good job, but it looks like he's incompetent at getting facts right and curbing his own bias. Sometimes you have to stop short of even being close to saying a colleague needs to be fired, and let those matters play out quietly later on.
- wpietri 14y ago
  That is understandable in any other employee at the Times, but it's a total failure in an ombudsman. They don't have to recommend firing; they can just say what happened and characterize is honestly. But they do have to always take the public's side, and they have to do it visibly. This particular position was created after the Jayson Blair scandal, so it's particularly important that they are frank in calling out bad reporting. Or, in this case, explaining why they think it wasn't bad reporting.