Clark Hoyt's Media Bubble

When I was a stock broker, we had an office known as compliance. It was the job of the compliance office to make sure that each and every stock broker followed the rules prescribed by the industry. A compliance office that incompetent or itself corrupt allows stock broker to put retirees into penny stocks. They allow stock brokers to make trades for their clients without their commission. In other words, an absent or corrupt compliance officer allows for corrupt stock brokers to commit corruption with impugnity.

An ombudsman performs the same function in newspapers that a compliance officer performs for stock brokers. Similarly, a corrupt or incompetent ombudsman allows for a corrupt press to run wild with impugnity. That's why this piece by New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt should trouble everyone. In it, Hoyt defends the New York Times' reporting on Sarah Palin in the last week. Here are some of the most important points he made.

The article, researched by five reporters and written by Elisabeth Bumiller, quoted anonymous sources as saying that McCain had been holding out hope of choosing Senator Joseph Lieberman instead, and that a campaign team assigned to vet Palin more thoroughly had not arrived in Alaska until the day McCain asked her to be his running mate. A number of Alaska political figures said on the record that they had not found anyone who had been asked anything about Palin by the McCain campaign.

The Times article seemed dramatically at odds with one in The Washington Post two days earlier. The Post article quoted McCain advisers as saying that Palin had been thoroughly vetted, including an F.B.I. background check, and that, “Far from being a last-minute tactical move or second choice when better-known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain’s thinking from the beginning of the selection process.”

So was The Times story wrong, as the McCain camp said? It did contain one error. It said that one potentially embarrassing revelation about Palin was her membership for two years in the Alaskan Independence Party, which favors a vote on whether the state should secede. The assertion was based on an announcement by the party’s chairwoman, Lynette Clark, which The Times failed to tell readers. That was a mistake. “We should have attributed it,” Bumiller said. The next day, Clark said she had been wrong. It turns out that Palin’s husband, Todd, had belonged to the party for a time, and she had addressed its annual convention. The Times corrected the error in two follow-up stories.

But the main thrust of its reporting on the vetting process appears to be holding up. The Post said the next day that a lengthy in-person background interview of Palin by the head of McCain’s vetting team did not happen until the day before she was chosen. It also acknowledged that it had been incorrect when it reported that the F.B.I. had checked out Palin. In her home state, the Anchorage Daily News reported that it had found only one person who was asked anything about the governor before McCain selected her. That was the attorney representing her in an investigation of whether she had abused her power in office.

There are several troubling things going on here. The entire Times narrative that McCain didn't vet Palin was done using "anonymous sources". What exactly have the times found out that backs up their claim that she wasn't fully vetted? Nothing that has come out about Palin's background would disqualify her from being the Vice Presidential candidate. What Hoyt doesn't say is that Rick Davis and others from the campaign went on the record to flatly deny this.

Hoyt goes on later in the piece to point out that he chided his newspaper when they didn't pursue the John Edwards' story, but that this doesn't mean the pregnancy of Bristol Palin is not a story. This of course is nonsense. Bristol Palin is running for no office. John Edwards was running for office while the Times was supposed to be vetting him.

Also, Hoyt points out that they sent out five reporters to vet Palin. Well, the Annenberg Challenge recently released thousands of pages of documents relating to the time Barack Obama spent as its head. How many reporters do you think the New York Times sent to investigate these papers?

Furthermore, while Hoyt acknowledges that the Times falsely reported that Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party, what he didn't mention was that the Times hid the retraction on their blog which is only available on line.

Finally, Hoyt ignores that the Times had three above the fold first page negative articles against Sarah Palin all on the same day. Fully vetting a candidate is one thing, but that sort of negative reporting is only done when a media source has an agenda. The reason the Gray Lady has lost credibility and mostly readers is because their far left partisan forces have taken over. It is exactly the job of the ombudsman to make sure such corruption doesn't occur. Once the ombudsman ignores that corruption, then it runs wild as it does at the New York Times.