The New York Times recently published a reader-contributed opinion written by an Army reserve officer. Then on Friday they actually came clean that they had incorrectly 'edited' it. I have a couple of issues with their characterization of the situation...
I can understand taking a submission from a non-journalist and editing it for grammar, spelling, brevity, or even for clarity. But you can't call adding things the author didn't even say, editing. If a 5 year-old did the same thing, we'd call it making stuff up. If a 15 year-old did it, we'd call it lying. When did it become different for journalists?
Second, not only did they add new stuff, but the edits actually skewed the author's opinion significantly. If you ever had questions about the motivations of the New York Times, this should remove all doubt.
I brought this up with a friend of mine and he pointed out that if the New York Times was indeed trying to skew the article, then why would they have published a correction? Well, let's face it, newspapers only post corrections when they have to. But with opinion pieces, corrections are usually only necessary with factual errors. This wasn't an error of fact. It was a skewing of opinion. Who would object to an opinion being skewed a different direction? Uh, I don't know, maybe the original author of the opinion. Did I mention that the author, the Army reserve recruiter Phillip Carter, is also an attorney? It makes me wonder if all the past op-ed contributors' opinions got the same respect.
I poked around on the net a bit and found out that I'm not the only one with concerns like this. The Captain spent some time elaborating on the subject as well. He brings up the most interesting points of all...
This also explains why the media always makes a point in their journalism vs. blogger debating to point out its layers of editors as a quality control check. Apparently, they need one level for making stuff up, and another level to stop the first level from getting caught at it, at least at the New York Times. And this is on the Op-Ed page, where the only function of an editor should be to correct spelling and grammar and to cut out text for article length, not to make things up to pad it out.
Just imagine what all those editors do to their news articles!
Indeed.