Michael Wolff: Why they call it storytelling at 'The New York Times'
The New York Times has had a recent run of journalistic blunders: the San Bernardino terror couple had, the Times said, talked about their jihad ambitions on social media — not true; it reported that Hillary Clinton was the subject of a criminal investigation over her email server issues — she wasn’t; in an exposé, it detailed a catchall of exploitive practices at New York-area nail salons — a story taken to task by its own public editor.
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by producers of the show Sleep No More, an interactive production in New York in which the audience mixes with performers, everyone in a mask in a darkened setting. The Times had written a recent story under the rubric “Crime Scene,” headlined “Spotting a Thief in a Room Full of Masks at ‘Sleep No More.’” The wallet of an audience member, the Times said, had been stolen, the result, the story implied, of the performance. Though there was a lost wallet, there was, in fact, no proof that it was stolen (it may or may not have contained $25). The show had been running for more than five years to largely sellout audiences with no reports of any thefts ever. The producers, believing the Times story unfair and potentially damaging to their business, contacted the paper for a correction or clarification. Gaining no satisfaction — “We regard the case closed,” the Times said after an exchange of emails — the producers reached out to me.
I was curious about how editors at the paper of record reacted to the flagging of a story obviously more fulsome and embroidered than the facts reasonably allowed. I wrote to the Times’ top editor, Dean Baquet, who was immediately more responsive to me than to the show’s producers, possibly suggesting that the Times sees this as much as a PR problem as a journalistic one. He passed my letter for official response to Phil Corbett, the standards editor. Baquet also responded himself, albeit not about the wallet but, with heightened defensiveness, to my reference to the nail salon story.
“It is Richard Bernstein and others who have mired themselves in factual issues without bothering to take on the story as a whole,” Baquet said. Bernstein, whom I had not mentioned in my email, is an author and longtime former Times reporter who speaks Chinese and whose wife owns a nail salon. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Bernstein maintained that one of the Times’ central assertions, that Chinese-language newspapers were filled with nail salon employment ads offering a $10-a-day salary, was flatly untrue.
“Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others,” declared Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ public editor, in reviewing recent Times errors, missing the point that the view of which one is worse will change for victims of each mistake.
This relative hierarchy of errors lets the Times correct itself in a daily column that mostly fixes details such as spellings and dates while staunchly defending the “story as a whole.” If it becomes necessary to walk back the whole story, the strategy is to blame meta issues. Regarding the report of the California terrorists' use of social media, Baquet offered that the paper needs to be more careful with anonymous sources. This, of course, is a diversion. Why should it matter whether the source was anonymous or not? Both kinds of sources should be subjected to the same scrutiny. Rather, the Times got it wrong, as most happens with journalism errors, because it too ardently wanted it to be right — a meta issue of a different quality.
As to the perhaps more prosaic, but to the theater producers no less damaging, theft of the wallet and to my suggestion that the attractive elements of the story — nice scene, local flavor, human interest — took precedence over the reality: “The column explicitly said that no theft was reported to the police,” Standards editor Corbett wrote to me, “that the circumstances surrounding the missing wallet were unclear, and that the show's staff were extremely helpful after the incident.” That is, to say the least, an Orwellian characterization of the story’s actual meaning, which was, without equivocation, that a theft had occurred, and that everybody is at risk at Sleep No More.
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To my question of how many stories about a possible theft of $25 the Times has run in the past, Corbett replied that to ask that question (the answer, I suppose, being rather too obvious) “would be like asking why The Times wrote a huge page-one news story recently about the death of a guy no one ever heard of, George Bell,” referencing a recent story about how a man’s life had led to an unnoticed death.
"We think storytelling is deep in the blood supply of The New York Times,” Times CEO Mark Thompson said recently. This is the kind of meaningless thing news executives say these days, but it suggests a modern way of looking at the world that is likely to often be more intuitive than accurate: The nail salons are exploitive because we think they probably are. Terrorists use social media, don’t they? Is a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton so far-fetched? Are you surprised there might be pickpockets in a darkened venue where people might touch each other?
The inherent flaws of journalism — bias, arrogance, oversimplification, overdramatization, plain laziness, basic lack of fairness — are so obvious and so common at every news organization and, given search engines, so problematic for the victims of those flaws, that the news business finds itself in a permanent defensive crouch. (The Times, in fact, seems to believe it, too, must vigorously defend itself against the inherent unfairness of journalism.)
The problem is that, even knowing the nature of journalism, we have all come to think that it is, or should be or can be, something better than it is. In that, everyone will be disappointed, wounded or misled.