1671 Ah Judy, we hardly knew ye

There are some key phrases in the memo from Bill Keller, New York Times, to Jim Romanesko (journalism industry news and forum, published by The Poynter Institute) absolving himself and the Times of any credit or blame in the WMD stories preceding and during the Bush administration, or in defending Judith Miller. This message is so full of “shoulda, coulda, woulda,” I’d be embarrassed to have it out there where reasonable people can see it. I've selected a few phrases, and added some of my own under the breath comments. I don't think I could have gotten away with this many excuses in my job. Could you?

what I should have done differently

I wish I had chosen my words more carefully

we wish we had made different decisions

the clarity of hindsight

I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor.

It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors

a huge new job

get the paper fully back to normal [after the last big scandal of lack of oversite]

I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction [it wasn‘t on my radar because we all believed it]

[it was] a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy [WMD]

published a long editors’ note acknowledging the prewar journalistic lapses [does not list these lapses]

we intensified aggressive reporting aimed at exposing the way bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war [does list these points, but now we know why all the negative reporting]

By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester [this is soooo touchy feely]

we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. [well, you’ve certainly corrected that one, haven’t you, by hanging Miller out there]

If we had lanced the WMD boil earlier [but you didn’t know it was a boil--your paper supported WMD stories, especially during Clinton years]

wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed [what is your usual routine when a reporter is subpoenaed?]

and [wish I’d] followed up with some reporting of my own

under other circumstances it might have been fine [what would those circumstances be?]

I missed what should have been significant alarm bells [finally, some admission of guilt]

I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel [but I didn’t]

This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper [but I didn’t]

I’m pretty sure I would have concluded [but we’ll never know, will we]

we were facing an insidious new menace in these blanket waivers [huh?]

But if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement [I try never to ask reporters about their sources or truth of the stories]

I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense

[there should be] a contract between the paper and its reporters [long list learned in journalism school]

how we deal with the inherent conflict of writing about ourselves [as I’m doing now, badly]

rival publications are unconstrained [everybody’s doing it, especially that mean right wing]

I don’t yet see a clear-cut answer to this dilemma [but please, I don’t want to be fired like the last guy]