Media criticism galore
John Brummett

Everyone is a media critic, which is how it goes when you have free expression.

One of my favorite types of media criticism is when someone writing in the media blasts the media as if the one doing the criticizing is not in the media, but, perhaps, an extraterrestrial.

This critic usually treats the word "media" as if it's singular. But it's plural, meaning many - as in the many disparate elements, one being the person criticizing the media of which he or she seems to have forgotten that he or she is a part.

The full phrase bearing the brunt of this criticism is usually "national media." Perhaps this is based on the old herd mentality of the press corps traveling with presidential candidates. Now, though, the Internet makes everybody the "national media" by a click of the mouse. And the herd is on a permanent stampede.

Alas, I've wandered a bit from my intended subject, which is the criticism being leveled the past 48 hours or so at what is, by light-years, the best newspaper in the world. Of course I mean The New York Times.

Yes, the Gray Lady makes mistakes. She appears to have made one with this John Mc- Cain non-affair article.

But when she errs, it's almost always because she's pioneering in uncharted territory, possessed of more information than anybody else because she deems it her responsibility to invest more in reporters and reporting.

The Times is seldom at liberty to sit back and react to what's happening in the vang uard. It is the van- guard.

It acts. It breaks ground. It makes difficult calls. Sometimes it gets one or two of those calls wrong, at which time its followers, its envious pale imitators, rise up like Sumo wrestlers accusing Lance Armstrong of being out of shape.

I have a pretty good idea what happened, at least as gleaned from the seemingly insightful background reporting on the blog of The New Republic. That magazine had been dogging the Times for sitting on this McCain thing since December.

It seems there had been talk for years about how McCain was friendly with a young female telecommunications lobbyist. The Times wondered if his altogether overt and indiscreet chumminess - and his reported favors for the woman's clients as either Senate Commerce Committee chairman or ranking member - contradicted his politically popular reputation as a maverick straight-shooter contemptuous of politics as usual in Washington.

The Times set out to investigate, not on account of sex, as such, but on account of untoward relationships with lobbyists and a pattern of behavior that might not match the pristine, heroic reputation.

In December, four reporters delivered the story. But the editor, Bill Keller, read the effort and decided the piece was unworthy. It apparently made the suggestion of a sexual relationship the centerpiece. The New York Times is famously squeamish about just sex. It didn't write about Paula Jones for the longest time.

Keller and other editors decided that the article needed to be redrawn on a broader canvas. They thought it should become about how McCain's professed disdain for the lobbyist-dominated culture of Washington was belied by his relationships with some lobbyists, not just one female about whom there had been unsubstantiated and roundly denied rumors.

The editors were interested in an idea the reporters were getting from sources that McCain held such an exalted view of his own integrity that he believed he could associate openly with lobbyists without having that integrity fairly or legitimately questioned.

Last week the piece was put together in a way the editors thought appropriate. It was published on the front page. Still, the key lobbyist mentioned was this woman. The Times felt it had no choice but to report that a romantic relationship had been suspected - even to the point that McCain's staff had told the woman to stay away - then to have everyone deny it.

The article also produced a letter written by McCain to the FCC advocating quick action in a case brought by one of the woman's telecommunications clients. But the letter didn't ask for a specific ruling. That made the letter merely an inappropriate favor, not an outright scandal.

What the Times ended up with was an overly edited and overly mitigated mess that was susceptible to criticism that it exploited the sex angle in tabloid fashion while failing to nail down any clear broader point.

I'd have spiked it, which is easy for me to say days later from out here in the hinterlands.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews. com.