Give the New York Times a C+ for candor after it fired Executive Editor Jill Abramson. The story started on Page 1 the next day with photos and more text inside. There were references to her combative relations with the subordinate who succeeded her and with her bosses, including NYT company CEO Mark Thompson.
Thompson is a former Director General of the BBC in London, where some aged or now-dead male TV personalities are accused of sexually abusing scores if not hundreds of children on and off the set for decades.
There is strong evidence that top BBC officials turned a blind eye and police flinched from investigating complaints from some of the girls. Part of the continuing scandal is who-knew-what-and-when. Why Thompson was hired to head the Times corporation in the middle of this mess and other systemic troubles at the BBC is a mystery.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweeted: “Thompson … was livid that Abramson sent investigative ed(itor) to UK to see if he had any role in BBC’s brewing child abuse coverup scandal.”
The Times story missed that part of Abramson’s fall.
• London’s Independent cast the sour Abramson-Thompson relationship at The New York Times this way:
“It was November 2012 and The New York Times news team had an interesting gift for their brand new president and chief executive, Mark Thompson. It was a lengthy article, questioning whether he had been entirely honest about what he did, and didn’t, know about the then burgeoning Jimmy Savile scandal before he left his previous job atop the BBC.
“The person finally responsible for the paper running the story was its executive editor Jill Abramson, only in the job since the previous year.
“… In earlier public statements, Mr. Thompson has denied any rift between himself and Ms. Abramson. But he can have barely have forgotten the Savile article that was published on his very first week. Its focus was a letter drafted by his own lawyers, on his behalf, warning The Sunday Times not to publish an article on the first revelations then percolating through the media about Mr. Savile’s inappropriate contacts with young female fans. Mr. Thompson was said at the time to have been unaware of the letter’s contents.
“In October, as he was preparing to move to his new job at arguably the world’s most prestigious media title, Mr. Thompson said in a statement that ‘during my time as Director-General of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.’ ”
“However, in its article The New York Times said the paper’s own inquiries about the content of the letter to The Sunday Times had made clear ‘the degree to which Mr. Thompson, in his final days at the BBC, had information at his fingertips about Mr. Savile’s alleged abuse.’ ”
• Times senior ranks are riven by personal and office politics. That’s not new. Even by its Usual, Customary and Reasonable standards, top editor Abramson’s recent firing was brutal. Gender and race are omnipresent issues. In the case of Abramson, the first woman to be top editor, it was inescapable. The online commentariat sees darker forces at work. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta said the complaint that Abramson was “pushy” has an “inescapably gendered aspect” to many. Abramson also was seen as “abrasive.” At least one other commentator says that’s code for “New York Jew.”
• A British scientist won her “name and shame” complaint against online publications that focused on her transgender status after she survived being gored by a stag in the Scottish Highlands.
With some exceptions, London’s Observer reported, British media used such headlines as “Deer spears sex-swap Kate”; “Sex swap scientist in fight for life”; and “Sex-swap scientist gored by stag.”
Dr. Kate Stone’s moral victory came in the closing weeks of Britain’s Press Complaints Commission. The PCC is to be replaced next month by what critics hope is a more forceful Independent Press Standards Organisation.
The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Sun, Scottish Sun, Daily Record and Daily Mirror agreed that the “sex swap” headlines and the reference to Stone’s transgender status were inappropriate, the Observer said.
“They acknowledged that such references constituted a direct breach of the discrimination clause in the PCC (voluntary) editors’ code. The code states that details of an individual’s transgender status ‘must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.’ All such references were subsequently withdrawn from the newspapers’ online stories.”
Here is part of the Stone interview with the Observer:
“The media tried to find out when I’d had my sex change. They tried to find out my previous name. All of which was upsetting and irrelevant to what had happened.
“A month before the accident I had been in a newspaper boardroom in a business meeting with senior management who were interested in utilising what my company does to bring paper to life. Transgender was never mentioned. Yet a month later their printing presses were rolling out all these deeply intrusive details about me.
“People are frightened of difference. Derogatory headlines feed into that objectification and justify dehumanising behaviour.
“I went to the Press Complaints Commission not for money or an apology but because I want a clear line drawn so it doesn’t happen to anyone else ever again. Many people who are transgender are terrified that if anything happens to them — as it did to me — they will be splashed all over the papers. One accident might mean that they lose their job, their family, their home, their colleagues.”
Unlike the United States, Britain has no First Amendment guarantee of press freedom and its new Independent Press Standards Organisation is the publishers’ best effort at avoiding legal restraints.
• Last time, I wrote how the New Yorker’s long-envied copy editing and fact checking might be history. Remove that “might.” In a recent lead essay, the writer has some history/arithmetic problems as she sets the scene.
Sigmund Schiller “spent the first two years of the Second World War in the Horodenka … ghetto.” That would be roughly September 1939 to September 1941 or later. Then Schiller spent “the next two hiding in bunkers …” That takes us to, say, late 1943 or early 1944.
But the writer says, “In 1942 … he was captured by the Germans and sent to a labor camp.”
• DR Show — Diane Rehm on public radio — had a smart two-hour discussion of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended legal public school segregation. Panelists talked about its impact then and current racial/educational situation in public schools.
Missing were the people about whom these affluent, elite opinion leaders, government and NAACP officials talked about. No one whose parents fled desegregation was heard. No one who grew up in “white academies” spoke.
It was especially painful during the hour devoted to contemporary public education. There were no black or white voices saying why they are avoiding urban public schools today for Catholic schools, suburban schools or charter schools.
It’s fine to have thoughtful, scholarly conversations among insiders who already agree, but there’s no balance and little to be learned in the absence of “others.” Carefully screened callers are no substitute.
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in May 21-27, 2014.
