https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/24/the-new-woke-times/
An excerpt from “Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism” by Sharyl Attkisson (Harper, 320 pages, $28.99)
There’s no more exemplary sign of the death-of-the-news-as-we-once-knew-it than the public unraveling of the New York Times, once perhaps of the most well-respected news organizations on the planet. The newspaper’s series of unfortunate, self-inflicted events, highlighted in a disastrous summer of 2019, led one insider to refer to the publication as “The New Woke Times.” A leaked transcript of a staff meeting following a string of public embarrassments punctuated the point.
I can’t help but think that the angst-filled newsroom at the New York Times might not have to expend so much effort dodging flak if management had allowed the paper’s public editor to do her job. The public editor was the internal ombudsman assigned “to help keep the Times and its coverage honest in an increasingly commercialized and politicized news environment.” This was the person assigned to address major public criticism and, to some degree, inoculate the newsroom from having to get mired so deeply in controversies over its coverage.
The position of public editor at the Times was first created after the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair was the Times reporter who resigned in disgrace in 2003 after it was discovered that his stories—some of them published on the front page—were fabricated and plagiarized. The controversy led to the resignation of Times executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd. The new public editor would serve as a check and balance to help uncover and remedy journalistic misdeeds sooner.
In May 2016, Elizabeth Spayd became the Times’ last public editor. During her relatively short tenure, she fielded criticism about controversies such as the Times’ increase in “native advertising,” meaning ads seamlessly worked into the fabric of the publication as if they were a news story. Spayd called the uncomfortable mix of commercials and journalism a proven winner in terms of revenue. She noted that “The vast majority of readers apparently find it un-objectionable.” She drew that conclusion in part, she said, because she had received few complaints about it. Actually, the lack of complaints might have been because most readers don’t recognize native advertising when they are reading it. That’s the whole point: it is advertising disguised as news.
