The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact
By DANIEL OKRENT
Published: March 28, 2004
IT sounds like a simple question: Should opinion columnists be subject to the same corrections policy that governs the work of every other writer at The Times? So simple, in fact, that you must know that only an ornate answer could follow.
For the news pages, the rule is succinct. "Because its voice is loud and far-reaching," the paper's stylebook says, "The Times recognizes an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and small (even misspellings of names), promptly and in a prominent reserved space in the paper." But on the page where The Times's seven Op-Ed columnists roam, there has long been no rule at all, or at least not one clearly elucidated and publicly promulgated. When I began in this job last fall, I was told The Times considered the space granted Op-Ed columnists theirs to use as they wish, subject only to the limits of legality, decency and publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.'s patience. Columnists decided when to run corrections, and where in their columns to run them.
But several days ago, editorial page editor Gail Collins handed me a memo in response to my inquiries. (You can read it in its entirety at
www.nytimes.com/danielokrent; look for posting No. 22.) Less a formal statute than an explanation and justification of practice, the document lays out the position of both Collins and her boss, Sulzberger, who bears ultimate responsibility for hiring and firing columnists. Collins explains why columnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but insists that they "are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column." Corrections, under this new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, "to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere," a reference to the wide syndication many of the columnists enjoy.
But who is to say what is factually accurate? Or whether a quotation is misrepresented? Or whether facts are used or misused in such a fashion as to render a columnist's opinion unfair? Or even whether fairness has anything to do with opinion in the first place? Can you imagine one of the Sunday morning television screamfests instituting a corrections policy?
In the consciously cynical words of a retired Times editor, speaking for all the hard-news types who find most commentary to be frippery, "How can you expect fairness from columnists when they make up all that stuff anyway?"
Of course they don't make the stuff up (at least the good ones don't). But many do use their material in ways that veer sharply from conventional journalistic practice. The opinion writer chooses which facts to present, and which to withhold. He can paint individuals he likes as paragons, and those he disdains as scoundrels. The more scurrilous practitioners rely on indirection and innuendo, nestling together in a bed of lush sophistry. I sometimes think opinion columns ought to carry a warning: "The following is solely the opinion of the author, supported by data I alone have chosen to include. Live with it." Opinion is inherently unfair.
Columnists also attract a crowd radically unlike the audience that sticks to the news pages. Judging by my mail, the more partisan of The Times's columnists draw two distinct sets of fanatical loyalists: those who wish to have their own views reinforced, and those who enjoy the hot thrill of a blood-pressure spike. Paul Krugman, writes Nadia Koutzen of Toms River, N.J., "makes more sense (along with Bob Herbert) than anyone. He states irrefutable facts." Paul Krugman, writes Donald Luskin of Palo Alto, Calif., has committed "dozens of substantive factual errors, distortions, misquotations and false quotations - all pronounced in a voice of authoritativeness that most columnists would not presume to permit themselves."
For a wider audience, Luskin serves as Javert to Krugman's Jean Valjean. From a perch on National Review Online, he regularly assaults Krugman's logic, his politics, his economic theories, his character and his accuracy. (If you want to see what kind of a rumble can evolve from a columnist's use of a quotation, go to posting No. 23 of my Web journal to find a series of links relating to a recent charge against Krugman: can you figure out who's right?) Similarly, David Corn of The Nation has taken aim at William Safire, charging in one recent piece that "under the cover of opinion journalism," Safire is "dishing out disinformation." And Maureen Dowd is followed faithfully around the Web by an avenging army of passionate detractors who would probably be devastated if she ever stopped writing.
Anyone who calls the Internet's bustling trade in columnist-attack a cottage industry might more accurately liken it to the arms bazaar in Peshawar. Peace and calm were not enhanced a few weeks ago when Times lawyers took a legal sledgehammer to an imaginary Op-Ed corrections column published by Robert Cox of the Web site The National Debate - but peace and calm rarely accompany arguments about political opinion in a polarized age.
This sort of contentiousness makes a clear, publicly stated corrections policy necessary, and finding a bright line in such murky precincts isn't easy. At the very minimum, anything that is indisputably inaccurate must be corrected: there is no protected opinion that holds that the sun rises in the west. Same with the patent misuse or distortion of quotations that are already in the public record. But if Safire asserts that there is a "smoking gun" linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, then even David Corn's best shots (which include many citations from Times news stories) aren't going to prove it isn't so. "An opinion may be wrongheaded," Safire told me by e-mail last week, "but it is never wrong. A belief or a conviction, no matter how illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, is an idea subject to vigorous dispute but is not an assertion subject to editorial or legal correction."
Safire good-humoredly (I think) asked me to whom he could complain if I quoted him out of context. I had a ready answer: "No one - I'm a columnist."
I generally don't like to engage in comparative newspapering, but I thought it was worth knowing what other papers do with (or to) their columnists. At The Boston Globe (owned by The New York Times Company), editorial page editor Renee Loth's practice is almost identical to the one now in place here; so is the policy of Paul Gigot, who presides over the opinion pages at The Wall Street Journal (definitely not owned by The Times). The Los Angeles Times actually allows its readers' representative to participate in decisions on columnist corrections. (No thanks, I'd rather not.) At The Washington Post, if a columnist doesn't want to write a correction recommended by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, Hiatt will put one on the op-ed page himself. At every one of these papers, the final arbiter is the editorial page editor.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would have made an excellent editorial page editor if he could have put up with the meetings, once said that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Gail Collins's determination that corrections will appear on their own at the end of a succeeding column, and not disappear into an unrelated digression, is on its own a significant piece of progress. But it's her assertion of responsibility that matters most. Critics might say her statement of policy is very gently phrased, but when I asked her if there was wiggle room, she was unequivocal: "It is my obligation to make sure no misstatements of fact on the editorial pages go uncorrected."
In the coming months I expect columnist corrections to become a little more frequent and a lot more forthright than they've been in the past. Yet the final measure of Collins's success, and of the individual columnists, will be not in the corrections but in the absence of the need for them. Wayne Wren of Houston, a self-described conservative and "avid reader" of National Review Online, expressed it with great equanimity in a recent e-mail message to my office: "If Mr. Krugman is making egregious errors in his Op-Ed column, they will catch up with him." Same goes for Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, Herbert, Kristof and Safire - and, most important, for The New York Times.
