More on the NY Times / McCain story, thanks to the NY Times’ publication of reader questions and the responses of its senior staff. A couple of fun quotes:
Much as we prefer on-the-record (or even documentary) information, and editors and reporters push hard on sources to let us use their names, without the ability to protect sources newspapers would not have been able to report on important activities of the government and other powerful institutions, and political reporting would be much more a kind of event-driven stenography.
Nice to see the Times come out and say that simply reporting the news (“event-driven stenography”) is too boring, and it’s much more interesting to do something else. Of course, by this they mean investigative journalism, but it applies too to hatchet jobs, doesn’t it?
Another quote plays nicely to / helps explain the “Two papers in one!” narrative used by James Taranto of the WSJ occasionally in his Best of the Web column:
The short answer is that the news department of The Times and the editorial page are totally separate operations that do not consult or coordinate when it comes to news coverage and endorsements or other expressions of editorial opinion.
It also repeats the claim that timing was unaffected by anything other than the editorial process, and states that the endorsement process occurred entirely separate from the writing of the article (though it concedes that it was public knowledge from December onwards that it was working on the article, thanks to Drudge.
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