What are newspapers for?
Greg Sargent:
Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times public editor, has posted a remarkable piece that’s generating attention on Twitter, because it gets at a core question: What is the role of newspapers in a political world that’s awash in distortions and lies?
Brisbane suggests it’s an open question whether reporters who are amplifying assertions made by candidates should tell readers whether those assertations are true or not. As Brisbane’s headline puts it: ‘Should the Times be a truth vigilante?’
…snip…
The Times itself has amplified the assertion — made by Romney and Rick Perry — that Obama has apologized for America, without any rebuttal, at least three times: Here, here, and here. I urge Brisbane to check them out. If he does, he’ll see that any Times customer reading them comes away misled. He or she is left with the mistaken impression that Obama may have, in fact, apologized for America, when he never did any such thing.
In other words, in all those three cases, the Times helped the GOP candidate mislead its own readers — with an assertion that has become absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. Whatever the practical difficulties of changing this, surely we can all agree that this is not a role newspapers should be playing, particularly at a time when voters are choosing their next president.