How Well Has The Times Advanced a Story That It Didn’t Break?

The New York Times did not break the story that has dominated national security news all summer: revelations of widespread surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. I explored the reasons for that in a recent Sunday column.

But how well has The Times done in covering or advancing that story since it first appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post? Is The Times holding its own, gaining or losing ground, and how hard is the paper of record pushing, on this extremely important story?

I’ll offer some initial observations, in what may turn out to be a continuing consideration of that question:

1. The Times has broken some notable stories of its own and provided some good analysis. The lead story on Wednesday’s front page, by the prolific Charlie Savage, was an example of this, describing how the federal government is developing facial scanning techniques to enhance the surveillance of the future. An earlier story by Mr. Savage, also on the front page, reported that the N.S.A. is not just intercepting e-mail but is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” It moved the story forward significantly. Eric Lichtblau reported in July on th power and secrecy of the nation’s surveillance court, contributing a new, important angle. And a valuable analysis piece by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane provided perspective.

In addition, Peter Maass’s article on Sunday in The Times Magazine on the video journalist Laura Poitras gave a frightening glimpse of the intimidation brought to bear on those involved in breaking the N.S.A. story.

2. Less positively, The Times sometimes has played down the importance of other papers’ reporting on this subject. One example came last week. The Times rewrote a Washington Post blockbuster story on the N.S.A.’s breaking of federal privacy rules, but then buried it in a one-column format on Page A12. The underplaying of a competitor’s story is nothing new in journalism but unfortunate nonetheless, given what’s at stake for citizens.

In fairness, the story did get good display on The Times’s home page when it first broke, and it got a one-sentence mention on the front page of the paper, referring readers to the article inside.

3. On some occasions, The Times has seemed less than intensely interested in the developing story and its ramifications. I wrote recently, for example, about The Times’s exclusive interview with President Obama, a 40-minute session in which â€" astonishingly, in my view â€" no surveillance issues were raised.

In addition, the articles about the British government’s intrusions into press freedom â€" including the appalling destruction of The Guardian’s hard drives â€" were well written by the London bureau chief Steven Erlanger but played on inside pages of the paper. The headline on one of them, “British Newspaper Has Advantages in Battle With Government Over Secrets,” seemed to miss the larger point of what had happened. One reader, Jim Michie, was angry about The Times’s “superficial” treatment of the British assault on the press and wrote to me calling The Times’s quiet coverage “amazing and disgraceful.”

4. While The Guardian and The Washington Post have maintained their edge, continuing to break stories, other news organizations who came in later than The Post and The Guardian are digging up other angles: The Wall Street Journal got in the game Wednesday, leading its front page with a story that said the N.S.A. is reaching 75 percent of Americans’ Internet communications. And NBC News on Wednesday had a report that an “overwhelmed” N.S.A. still doesn’t know the extent of what Edward J. Snowden took from the agency. The NBC report was widely picked up elsewhere.

And notably, it was not a mainstream news organization like The Times, but a free speech and privacy rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sued to obtain the court ruling that made front-page news on Thursday: A federal judge in 2011 found that N.S.A. surveillance had violated the United States Constitution.

I asked Dean Baquet, the managing editor at The Times, to respond to these observations. He told me that he thinks The Times has done a good job of advancing the story and disagrees that it has played down the stories of its competitors. “Once you get past the first stories by The Guardian and The Post, no one has broken more ground than we have,” he said, admitting that the first stories were by far the most significant.

He disagreed with the premise that The Times’s interest has been anything less than intense. “We reacted the way you’re supposed to react when you get scooped,” he said. “They beat us, that’s life. We’ve followed it and we’ve had some significant stories.”

I’ve heard a great deal from Times readers on this subject. Here are two e-mails â€" making quite different points â€" that give a sense of a frustrated tone that is becoming familiar to me on this subject.

John Shepard of Horsham, Pa., who describes himself as “an old soldier and defense contractor,” wrote that he would like to read deeper, more explanatory coverage of the surveillance revelations: “As a regular online reader of The Times, I find that something has been missing from the reporting on the materials leaked by Edward Snowden over the past few weeks. Much of the reporting â€" both in The Times and other media â€" has focused on Snowden, his statements, his movements and his travel status. Little, at least that I have seen, has been said about the materials Snowden has released.” He described himself as tired of the “hyperventilation” and looking for deeper answers from The Times.

And George Hickey, “a decades-long fan” of The Times, wrote that he had become disenchanted: ”The New York Times today is not The New York Times of the Pentagon Papers era. Although The Times still does good journalism you have lost a good deal of courage and are much too compliant with government demands/requests to be completely trusted. The American government is creating a police state and you are not resisting nearly enough.”

Mr. Baquet took issue with Mr. Hickey’s statement when I read it to him, calling it “an unfair criticism,” and pointing to a number of stories in recent years â€" including many disclosures from WikiLeaks â€" that have shown the paper’s willingness to push back against the government.  He also noted that it was The Times, in 2005, that broke the original story, by James Risen and Mr. Lichtblau, of a government spying on its citizens in the Pulitzer-winning story about warrantless wiretapping. It took courage to print that, he noted, even considering the much-criticized long delay while The Times considered the government’s request not to publish.

So this is a mixed report. But like many readers, I would like to see a greater and more consistent sense of urgency reflected on The Times’s news pages in dealing with this subject, which has such profound implications for civil liberties, for press freedom, for the privacy of American citizens and for democracy.  This story is not going away. Given The Times’s resources and reporting talent, there’s still plenty of opportunity to make up ground.