NYT's Hoyt: We missed ACORN because we weren't tuned in

Clark Hoyt, New York Times public editor, has come up with an explanation of why the Times was out to lunch--some twelve days, by the way, after NewsBusters' Clay Waters called them on it.

Mr. Hoyt's piece makes for some fascinating reading. To his credit, he does not attempt to deny the obvious: that the story was worth covering and that the paper completely dropped the ball. It is his rationale for the omission, however, that astonishes:

"But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself."

You see, it is not that the Times is really "partisan itself," although it may look that way; they just have "trouble dealing with stories" from those "polemical" outlets like FOX News and the Drudge Report. (As opposed, of course, to the august Times itself, the self-styled paper of record, which is never polemical...right!!!) Further along we get to an even more interesting reason for the Times being AWOL for so long courtesy of one of Mr. Hoyt's colleagues:

"Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was 'slow off the mark,' and blamed 'insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.' She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person 'a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.'"

The idea of "insufficient tuned-in-ness," both verbally awkward and clunky as a concept, skirts the question of why no one at the paper was tuned in. Could it be that a liberal ideology that assumes nothing the so-called "polemical world" says would possibly be newsworthy, except as a subject of derision, was the reigning one at the Times? That would seem to explain the story "Conservatives Draw Blood from Acorn" by Scott Shane, which Mr. Waters highlighted on Sept. 16th and whose biased appearance, at least, Mr. Hoyt acknowledged today:

"By stressing the politics, the article irritated more readers....I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities...." 

One other thing that struck me as rather funny was Mr. Hoyt's remark that "Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com." Evidently a very harsh strain of Charlie Gibson syndrome has been making the rounds in newsrooms across America over the past two weeks!