Thursday's instantly infamous New York Times piece exhausted a great bit of willpower in me. It was all the rage that morning, though I first heard of it Wednesday evening as "Breaking News" on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown." Normally there's some news in news that "breaks," yet the more I heard of it, and then the more I read and reread the story itself, the more it took on a burlesque of the old "Saturday Night Live" news flashes: "Franco is still dead."
Nevertheless the temptation to immediately pile on -- in either defense or prosecution of the Times, not to mention its target, John McCain -- was damn near irresistible. The story had swallowed up all manner of news and discussion outlets, from television networks to print to the blogosphere, and had nearly approached the intense excitability level of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But resist I did, because to me the story had the smell of 24-hour decay, 36 tops. It seemed, that is, to be going nowhere, fast.
And sure enough, by Friday evening the story was pretty much history. That's not to say it won't be debated for years to come in journalism schools as an extraordinary test case of journalistic (in)judiciousness, or that the GOP won't milk it for all it's worth in right-wing fundraising value for the next eight months. For academics and reactionary moneygrubbers, it was truly a gift of lasting utility. But the story itself swiftly became history because it was, at bottom, history itself.
Would I have run the story as written had I been its executive editor, Bill Keller? I can't say with absolute certainty that I would have, principally because if I couldn't get my reporters to get their sources on the record, with respect to the journalistically distasteful effort to tie some vague, unprovable romantic involvement to legislative favors, then the coming and consequent cries of foul would likely not have seemed worth it -- especially not for a paper with the New York Times' reputation for avoiding the sexually scandalous.
Nonetheless Keller's was a valid judgment call; he was the one deepest inside the story and it was his professional ass on the line and not mine. I give him an A+ for guts, if nothing else. And the subsequent, manufactured outrage by the right was more than worth any journalistic stink. I just love it when it gets angry. Naturally had a similar piece centered on the likes of, say, Barack Obama, the legendary right-wing noise machine would had plastered the airwaves with hosannas about the Times' occasional fairness, objectivity and journalistic integrity.
What I do not understand, however, is why the Times, Keller, Jim Rutenberg et al did not make stupendously clear in the story's text that the story itself was part of the paper's in-depth series on presidential candidates, "The Long Run." Which is to say, they did not make clear it was merely another piece on another candidate's past -- nothing of breathtaking revelation here, folks, just another delving into the historical contours of a particular candidate. We've done the same for -- to -- others, dozens of time, quite literally, and you can read them all, right here in the archives.
The Times slapped "The Long Run" in smaller and light gray type above the original headline, but it seems astonishingly clear in this case that some pointed, textual caveat was in order, given the partial subject material's sensitivity and the rather stretched anonymity of sources behind it. We are, gentle readers, simply letting you know what we've learned, or rather what we think we've learned. And we're making the call that you have the right to know what it is.
But, as we do know, this the Times did not do. Instead, it waited to explain all this after the brouhaha fact.
For a year or so, in addition to pieces on issues, candidate interviews, investigations of their business dealings, polling and reporting from the campaign trail, we have been running this series called "The Long Run." It is a kind of serial biography of the candidates. We pick key events or themes or questions [my emphasis] about a candidate's life that reflect on his or her character and qualifications.... The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.
If only someone had thought -- or fought -- to include this in the original story, the Times' landing would have been so much softer, and McCain's, perhaps, bumpier. Indeed, the historical "questions" themselves would have taken on more prominence, while the Times would have protected itself somewhat by confessing to subordinating provable fact to journalistic speculation.
But it didn't. And if there was one salient boneheaded play in its original coverage, I'd say that was it.
As for McCain's contemporary history of figuratively bedding down with come-hither lobbyists, you can read this morning's Washington Post and rightfully draw your own conclusions, as readers could have more easily done with the Times piece, had it done it right.