NY Times reporter asks editor if its columnists are misrepresenting facts
"Equivocal bulls**t": Editor who hired climate denier offers weak defense to staff.
JOE ROMM
FEB 28, 2018, 3:48 PM
New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet has been widely criticized for a series of hires, including columnist Bret Stephens, a longtime climate science denier.
On Tuesday, Columbia Journalism Review wrote about “a crisis in confidence within the newsroom” as a result of Bennet’s miscues. The decision by Bennet and the Times to hire Stephens and then run his opinions apparently without fact checking has received widespread criticism, including from ThinkProgress.
But until now, there has never really been a full explanation of why Bennet kept hiring such controversial columnists. This changed on Tuesday, when HuffPost published the leaked transcript of a meeting Bennet had with Times employees back in December, which was recorded and shared with HuffPost.
As a person who attended the meeting, and is quoted by HuffPost, said, Bennet’s answers are “equivocal bullshit.” I agree. Bennet gives no defensible explanation of why opinion columnists should not be held to the same standards of accuracy as reporters. And he simply has no answer to the question of how he knows columnists “aren’t misrepresenting facts.”
https://thinkprogress.org/ny-times-editorial-board-problems-e90bc19db3f0/
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