Reporting simple news

Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York times, recently said that the biggest threat to US journalism was news pieces which betray a political point of view, the way things are done in Britain. (The story was reported by the FT, which now requires a subscription to read it; if you have one, you can find it here.)

Raines was brought down by the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg affairs – the two were both star journalists who were deft at purple prose and who therefore got their pieces on the front page without the scrutiny their work deserved. And one of the things which I think Raines should have spent much more time doing – and which his successors ought to be doing as well – is thinking about the very American idea that front-page stories should be long and elaborately written, rather than simply reporting the news.

Look at a front-page story today, about the fact that the official death toll from the World Trade Center attack is now 2,752 rather than 2,792. It's an interesting fact, and I can certainly see why the Times put it on the front page. But once that decision was made, it seems that they needed to gussy it up a lot, since a just-the-facts-maam approach would have been too boring.

The headline – "A New Account of Sept. 11 Loss, With 40 Fewer Souls to Mourn" – is portentious, and the article itself is worse. It starts with this:

The sun inched across a cloudless sky yesterday, the breath of October rustled trees, and the number of people killed in the World Trade Center disaster dropped by 40. Just like that: 40 fewer souls to imagine rising from the dust; 40 fewer people to include in nightly prayers.

Eight hundred and eighty words later, it ends with this sentence: "The fewer the better, perhaps; the fewer the better."

Of course, since the story is so long, it can't all fit on the front page. Most people, it is well known, don't read past the jump, especially when, as in this case, the rest of the story is on an inside page of a completely different section of the newspaper. So the last thing that most people will read of the story is this:

But what do we do with this information — this 2,752, down from 2,792? Do we grieve less? Are we happy? What does it mean?
"The question is, does it make it any less tragic?" said Jonathan Greenspun, the commissioner of the

Five questions, no answers. One assumes that Greenspun goes on to answer his own question, but many of us will provide our own answers – mine would be "yes, about 0.18% less tragic, assuming that the degree of tragedy is proportional to the log of the number of victims".

By that point, we're 268 words into the story – more than enough space to put the whole thing on the front page if you're anybody but the New York Times. But given all that extra space, the writer, Dan Barry, actually contrives to add literary ambiguity to a very simple story. Look at that first sentence again: "the number of people killed in the World Trade Center disaster dropped by 40".

This is the kind of reporting you'd never find in the business section. If the US government thought that the economy grew at 2% in 2002 and then gets new data showing that in fact the real figure is 1%, you'd never find the Times saying that "the 2002 US growth rate fell to 1% from 2%". But in order to accommodate Barry's extravagant riffs, the front page is perfectly happy making it sound as if the number of people killed that day has actually changed.

What's more, Barry is a lazy writer. Most accounts of September 11 start off with a description of the beautiful cloudless sunny day that morning, and so today we have to slog our way through suns inching across equally cloudless skies. It's a completely random and pointless way to begin a feature; it has no place whatsoever in a news article.

This week, the Times appointed its first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent. Speaking to the New York Observer, Okrent said that "I’m not going by whether those people are good journalists, whether they write well." This, I am sure, is a failing, and I would urge Okrent to change his mind.

If Okrent takes his job description this narrowly, he will end up skirting some of the most important questions about how journalism is practiced at the New York Times. At the moment, it is clear, there is very much a culture of overwriting front-page stories. Since a byline on A1 is a key sign of success at any newspaper, there's a strong incentive to follow in the footsteps of Bragg and Blair, writing stories which read like cheap literature rather than simply giving us the who what when why where how. It is that incentive, and not opinions finding their way into news stories, which is the real threat to journalism at the New York Times.

Posted by Felix at 23:02 EST

Comments

And the NY Times adds insult to its journalistic injury of literaturizing the news by including obvious (to many people) political slant.

Here is my impression of an example:

Baghdad: The stillness of the morning was still baking when the marketplace was interrupted by another ambush against the imperialistic U.S. troops.

Posted by: Steve at 9:21 EST, October 30, 2003

great post, felix. well done, top notch, et cetera et cetera. though my praise may sound glib, you seriously threw together an excellent sampling of the editorial slant of this coverage. my fave quote from the times: ""The fewer the better, perhaps; the fewer the better."

i'm not kidding when i say i laughed out loud for many many seconds.

the repeating of the first clause reads like some wizened tribal elder commenting on the sad end to some long long war. i can practically see the "fade into sunset" which follows the line-reading.

Posted by: jean-paul tremblay at 14:41 EST, October 30, 2003

Now THAT is a blog post.

Posted by: stefan at 8:04 EST, October 31, 2003

While you're at it, could you also get them to fire the headline writers and whoever it was on the editorial page who endorsed the Boston Red Sox against the Yanks? Thanks.

Posted by: Simon at 17:14 EST, November 03, 2003