I heard about this issue at:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/968
which in turn referred to:
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_21_atrios_archive.html#107245279191262700
I've inserted below the response of Mr. Okrent (NY Times ombudsman) to my note. The exchange is printed in reverse chronological order.
Dear Mr. Okrent,
I truly appreciate your taking the time to write such a detailed response. Thanks to your explanation, I understand better the process by which the article was edited.
However, as you anticipated, I am dissatisfied with the explanation. I have to tell you that I could not disagree more with the assertion "But of course on any debatable point, our position must be right down the middle."
I believe this is exactly wrong. The position of a newspaper story should be the truth that the reporter finds after diligently performing the investigation that is his or her job. I simply cannot accept that the role of a reporter or an editor is to be content with merely presenting unquestioned statements from both sides. "And what is the difference in lives saved between full new-source-review enforcement and the president's own proposal? None, the Bush
people say. Are they right? I have no way of knowing." This sounds to me like an abdication of responsibility. If the reporter doesn't know, and the editor doesn't know, then they should do some serious work.
I also question the assertion that it's better to excise a statistic than to name its source. Even in print, I can hardly imagine that the identification of a source would make the article burst its seams. On the Internet, where
the size of an article is not restricted by column inches, the need to perform this particular form of trimming seems even more questionable.
The editor you quote seems to suggest that leaving out the figure of 19,000 altogether is a minor issue. In fact, if members of this administration are responsible for public health, and if they know or should know that their policies are arguably responsible for up to 19,000 deaths, then the omission of that figure deprives THEIR statements of the context we need to evaluate them.
I recommend that you and your staff read the article "Re-thinking Objectivity" by Brent Cunningham (available online at the Columbia Journalism Review site, http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/4/objective-cunningham.asp) if you have not done so already. It raises some excellent points that I feel are central to this discussion.
Once again, I thank you for your respectful response to my query. I hope that you will take my response in the same vein.
Sincerely,
Alan Frankel
---
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:37:41 -0500
The copy editor responsible for the final edit on the December 24 article, "Court Blocks U.S. Effort to Relax Pollution Rule," has returned from vacation, and I've been able to track down the origin of the change that you
brought to my attention. First, I should point out that articles that pass through The Times's continuous news operation - the conduit for providing staff stories on breaking news to the web site - change frequently as they are
edited and updated. The articles that are printed in the newspaper are often different from early web site versions based on news developments, additional reporting and The Times editing process.
In this instance, the editor reports, "The reason much of the passage at issue was removed was that the piece had to trim. And the reason the piece had to trim was to make way for three or four paragraphs that dealt at least in some modest way with the history of new source review, indeed how the concept itself came to be. My judgment, to which
I remain faithful, was that without such an explanation, no uninitiated reader could much understand what was going on in the story.
"In retrospect, of course, it is always easy to see how this fact or that could have been saved, but in this case the early story that moved on the Web did report the 19,000 figure, out of all context. As a result, the
administration was made to seem as if it were pursuing a policy that it understood might be killing 19,000 people a year (a statistic that is hardly new, by the way).
"But the fact is something quite different. Here's the point: The figure of 19,000 --- derived, as I recall, from an N.I.H .-financed study sometime back in the 90's --- is the difference between full enforcement of new source review and a status quo in which the power industry continues to defy the spirit of the Clean Air Act amendments by engaging in a substantive ugprade of its plants (or so it is described by the industry's opponents) while insisting on calling this work nothing more than routine maintenance.
But the figure takes no account of the fact that the president has his own proposal for addressing the status quo. His is a Republican administration, of course, so I guess it is no great surprise that his solution is a market-
based program, which would cap all emissions and permit companies to trade the excess.
"And what is the difference in lives saved between full new-source-review enforcement and the president's own proposal? None, the Bush people say.
Are they right? I have no way of knowing. But of course on any debatable point, our position must be right down the middle. All of which, I suppose, is a long-winded of saying that if I had allowed the statistic to live in
the story at issue, there's no way I would have done so in the absence of this context."
For my own part, I find this an acceptable explanation, although I realize you may not. Nonetheless, I do hope you appreciate that your concerns have been taken seriously.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Okrent
Public Editor
At 09:54 AM 12/28/2003 -0800, you wrote:
Mr. Okrent,
Can you explain to me why the paragraph has been
dropped?
[Signature]
---
Bush EPA Loves Death
The EPA has expressed disappointment that, by their
own estimates, 19,000 lives will now be saved.
... an alert reader notes that the paragraph from the
NYT article ("Court Blocks U.S. Effort to Relax
Pollution Rule", Dec. 24) is no longer actually in the
article. Down the memory hole...
It's in the cache at google news, but not at the
article it links to.
The new paragraph appears to be:
The Environmental Protection Agency, which had
proposed the new rule, said in a statement that it was
"disappointed with the court's decision" and that
neither the regulation nor the court's stay of it
would have much effect on emissions.
The old one was:
The Environmental Protection Agency expressed
disappointment with the court's decision but did not
say whether it would be appealed. The court order,
while only two pages in length, was a strong statement
in one of the most contentious environmental and
public health battles of the last several years --
whether aging coal-fired power plants must install
controls as they increase their pollution emissions.
The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that
full enforcement of existing rules on power plant
pollution would save 19,000 lives per year.
Daniel Okrent
Public Editor
N.B.: Any opinions expressed here, unless otherwise indicated, are solely my own
