10/11/12, "Why Wasn’t Libya Hearing on Page A1 of The Times?"
NY Times Public Editor, Margaret, Sullivan
"Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libya were prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning.
The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages.
But The New York Times was not among them
. The six stories on The Times’s front page included one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis. The major artwork on Page A1 was from Syria, and the only mention of the hearing on Libya came in a one-paragraph summary at the bottom, leading readers to a well-displayed story on Page A3.
I talked with Jill Abramson, the executive editor, about the decision, which she said she may have set in motion while running the morning news meeting on Wednesday.
“I said that I wanted us to weigh the news value against the reality that Congressional hearings are not all about fact-finding,” she said. In other words, they are often deeply politicized.
She described The Times’s Libya coverage in recent weeks as “excellent and very muscular,” and she said that for her and the managing editor Dean Baquet, “it’s been one of the absolute key stories – getting to the bottom of what happened and why.”
She suggested that she puts more emphasis on The Times’s original reporting. “We have done a lot on the security issues in Libya and will continue, with our own reporters, to pursue this,” she said.
Mr. Baquet, who ran the afternoon news meeting at which the decision was made, said the reasoning was simple enough: “I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it,” he said.
Like Ms. Abramson, he was wary of the political nature of the hearing, noting that “It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing, but if they had made significant news, we would have put it on the front.”
And, he added, “There were six better stories.”
But many readers wrote to me Thursday morning in dismay. They were disturbed not only by the lack of Page 1 coverage, but also by what they see as not enough attention paid to Libya and the events surrounding the fatal attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi.
This e-mail, from Brendan DuBois of Exeter, N.H., was typical:
After a day of Congressional testimony where two public officials outlined the numerous times that their request for extra security for our diplomatic offices in Libya were ignored, time and time again, no doubt contributing to the slaughter of four Americans on 9/11/12, and when it was clear that the days of stories coming from the White House that the attack began after a nonexistent spontaneous demonstration outside of the U.S. Consulate …Another reader, Sharon Hastings of St. Petersburg, Fla., wrote as follows (her e-mail is abridged here):
The lead story in today’s paper is about Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong!
The Libya story isn’t even on Page 1. It’s on Page 3.
What does this say about The Times’s news judgment?
- I am writing to say how shocked I am at The NYT’s coverage of the Benghazi events and, more so, the coverage of the hearings. This is a major scandal and The Times has more often than not buried the story. The hearings, which made major revelations, are presented as simply partisan wrangling. The major elements on the story this morning are not brought up until the end of the story.
- This is deeply shameful, and it reinforces the widely held perception of The Times as deeply partisan — especially before the election. Does The Times truly believe — can it possibly believe — that it is neutral in its news coverage? Either The Times is deeply deluded or extremely cynical in its claims in this regard. Sadly I suspect cynicism.
I can’t think of many journalistic subjects that are more important right now, or more deserving of aggressive reporting." via Free Republic
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The NY Times has downplayed the entire Libya scandal, not just its congressional hearings:
9/27/12, "Pat Caddell Says: Media Have Become “Enemy of the American People"," Accuracy in Media, Roger Aronoff
"“We’ve had nine day of lies over what happened because they can’t dare say it’s a terrorist attack, and the press won’t push this,” said Caddell. “Yesterday there was not a single piece in The New York Times over the question of Libya. Twenty American embassies, yesterday, are under attack. None of that is on the national news. None of it is being pressed in the papers.”
Caddell added that it is one thing for the news to have a biased view, but “It is another thing to specifically decide that you will not tell the American people information they have a right to know.”
He closed his talk with these words: “ The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power.
When they desert those ramparts and go to serve— to decide that they will now become an active participants—when they decide that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people.
And it is a threat to the very future of this country if…we allow this stuff to go on, and…we’ve crossed a whole new and frightening slide on the slippery slope this last two weeks, and it needs to be talked about.”"
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