NYT: Air America scandal fell through cracks; no liberal bias here

The New York Times ombudsman has ordered that the following completely voluntary confession be promulgated to the bourgeois reactionary forces:

Readers of The Times were poorly served by the paper's slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network. The Times's first article on the investigations finally appeared last Friday after weeks of articles by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere.

The Times's recent slowness stands in contrast to its flurry of articles about Air America in the spring of 2004...

..."We were slow in the first place and need to do more," Rick Berke, an associate managing editor at The Times, told me Monday. While it's no excuse for such a belated response to the brewing scandal, it's true that pieces of the unfolding story fell in the domains of three different parts of the newsroom: the metropolitan desk, the business desk and the culture desk. There was, my inquiries suggest, a lack of coordination and awareness of what the paper's competitors across town were writing...

There's another reason to get to the bottom of the scandal. It's the perception problem - a perception of liberal bias for which I haven't found any evidence after checking with editors at the paper.

Failing to cover the story until late last week has led numerous readers, especially those who seemed inspired by conservative bloggers, to write in saying that a liberal bias in the newsroom caused the paper to downplay the budding scandal...

Posted in Meta at August 18, 2005 11:31 PM

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