Matt Langer

This Clay Shirky comment that everyone’s so giddy over is crap.

Let’s start at the beginning here. Second graf: “Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times)”—ok, FULL STOP. That could’ve/should’ve been the end of the story right there, because the rest of Shirky’s gripe is predicated entirely on the belief that what this man says in in ANY way representative of the Times at large. Which it isn’t!

Next sentence: “Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments.” Wrong again! He wasn’t asking if they should have the freedom, he was asking merely if they should, asking if this is something readers would want to read, so many lengthy dispatches along the lines of “BREAKING: Man In Capital Says False Thing.” Which: no thanks! PolitiFact is boring enough in its current incarnation; I don’t need two pounds of it landing at my door every Sunday morning.

The mid-section of his piece can be safely ignored, seeing as he doesn’t raise any points that weren’t later rendered irrelevant, either by Romenesko’s interview or Jill Abramson’s statement. So let’s jump to the conclusion here:

Having asked, in a completely innocent way, whether the Times should behave like an advocate for the readers, rather than a stenographer to politicians, the question cannot now be unasked. Every day in which the Times (and indeed, most US papers) fail at what has clearly surfaced as their readers’ preference on the matter will be a day in which that gap remains uncomfortably visible.

This is the money line that I’ve seen bouncing all over the internet today, and it’s predicated on a pretty false assumption. Yes, readers want the Times to be our advocate, this is true! And yes, we’ll raise holy hell whenever they fall short of this—something they most certainly have done and something they’ll most certainly do again. But what “clearly surfaced” yesterday was an accidental, misguided, manufactured outrage stemming entirely from one man who is only very tenuously associated with the Times who made a horrifically worded statement, one in which he tripped over basic fundamentals of the English language in an attempt to ask a question that was ultimately entirely different from the one that legions of angry commenters later answered. 

Ultimately, so much of the political blogging and meta-media-blogging that we see is premised on a fundamental confusion between “what a media outlet should report” and “what I’d like a media outlet to tell me,” and the only thing that “clearly surfaced” yesterday was the perfect reason to lazily conflate the two.