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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}The journalist and filmmaker Sheila Turner-Seed interviewed Henri Cartier-Bresson in his Paris studio in 1971 for a film-strip series on photog raphers that she produced for Scholastic. After her death in 1979 at the age of 42, that interview, along with interviews that Ms. Turner-Seed had conducted with Bruce Davidson, Cornell Capa, Lisette Model, W. Eugene Smith, Don McCullin and others, sat like a time capsule in the archives of the International Center of Photography in New York.
That is, until 2011, when Ms. Turner-Seed's daughter, Rachel Seed, learned of their existence and went to I.C.P. to study the tapes. It was a profound experience for her, since she was 1 when her mother died and did not remember her voice.
Ms. Seed, herself a photographer, has been working on a personal documentary, “A Photographic Memory,†about a daughter's search for the mother she never knew through their shared love of photography. She is raising money with a Kickstarter campaign.
The following interview was transcribed from tape by Sheila Turner-Seed and has been lightly edited. A DVD of the Cartier-Bresson interview, with his photos, is available from the International Center of Photography's online bookstore.
I'm not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I'm a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won't have an assignment and you'll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist.' â€
All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to the surrealists. But Capa was extremely sound. So I never mentioned surrealism. That's my private affair. And what I want, what I'm looking for - that's my business. Otherwise I never would have an assignment. Journalism is a way of noting - well, some journalists are wonderful writers and others are just putting facts one after the other. And facts are not interesting. It's a point of view on facts which is important, and in photography it is the evocation. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
That's a wonderful thing with a camera. It jumps out of you. I'm extremely impulsive. Terribly. It's really a pain in the neck for my friends and family. I'm a bunch of nerves. But I take advantage of it in photogra phy. I never think. I set, quick! I hit!
How did you start in photography?
When I was very young, I liked the life of adventure and I knew only one thing: that I was strongly appalled by the idea of working in the family textile business. My father's brother was a painter who got killed in the first days of World War I. I was 5 or 6 when he died, and I had always been dreaming about painting. And my father said, “Well, all right.†He was nice enough not to force me into the business. So I was painting at a friend of that uncle who died. And later, I studied two years in a studio of André Lhote, who was not a great painter, but a very important teacher. It is from him I know everything - between him and Jean Renoir, the filmmaker.
These are the two pictures I remember very well. One is a picture by Munkácsi of three kids running into a hug e wave on a beach. And that - it's so perfect, the relations, the design of all the plastic problems. And their movement is wonderful. That struck me very much. Otherwise, it was not photography that influenced me. I just thought that the camera was a quick way of drawing intuitively.
Do you think you see more now than you saw when you were 20?
Different things, I presume. But not more, not less. The best pictures were in that book, “The Decisive Moment.†I took them when I was 20. Immediately, after a fortnight. The first day I started pictures. It's in that book.
That's why teaching and learning is nothing. It's living and looking. All these photography schools are a gimmick. What are they teaching? Could you teach me how to walk?
It provides work for photographers.
Yes, but it is a phony world. And it affects the way you work. To work with people is something different.
Josef Breitenbach, the photographer, once told me that he felt most good photographers were good from the beginning.
I agree. Either you have a gift or you have none. If you have a gift, well, it's a responsibility. You have to work.
Brian Seed, courtesy of Rachel Elizabeth Seed Sheila Turner-Seed and her daughter, Rachel.Do you think a photographer's art can mature?
Mature? I don't know what that means. It's always re-examining, trying to be more lucid and freer and go deeper and deeper. I don't know if photography is an art or not an art. I have no idea of all this.
I see children painting beautifully well, and at puberty sometimes there's a curtain that drops, and then it takes a lifetime to get it back. Not the purity of a child, because you never get it back once there is knowledge, but to get back the qualities of a young child takes a whole lifetime.
The freshness of impression is extremely important. Blasé is an awful thing.
What has made you decide to visit certain countries?
Well, certainly, everything is interesting - your own room. But at the same time, you just can't photograph everything you see. In some places the pulse beats more than others.
After World War II, I had a feeling with my friends, Bob Capa and Chim, that going to colonial countries was important. What changes were going to take place there? That's why I spent three years in t he Far East. We didn't know what was going to happen. There were different possibilities. Sometimes it's war. Sometimes it's not war. Sometimes it's peaceful. When a situation is pregnant - it's to be present when there's a change of situation, when there's the most tension.
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos The photographers David “Chim†Seymour, left, and Robert Capa, in Paris. 1952.Can you talk a bit about your China experience?
Well, I don't want to say anything. It's as if you invite someone for dinner and serve wine in a decanter instead of the bottle with the label. People should guess if it's a good wine. But no, they want to see the label. This is awful. That's why there shouldn't be any captions. People should just look. We should awaken our sensitivity. But people don't. If it's in a decanter, they won't dare say it's a good wine or it's a bad wine because they haven't seen the year. They don't know which chateau. That's what I resent. I think photographs should have no caption, just location and date. Date is important because things change.
I hate tourism! I like to live in a place. I don't like to go for short time. Rodin said, “What is made with time, time respects,†or something like this.
And at the same time, when something happens, you have to be extremely swift. Like an animal and a prey - vroom! You grasp it and people don't notice that you have taken it. Very often in a different situation, you can take one picture. You cannot take two. Take a picture and look like a fool, look like a tourist. But if you take two, three pictures, you got trouble. It's good training to know how far you can go. Whe n the fruit is ripe, you have to pluck it. Quick! With no indulgence over yourself, but daring. I enjoy very much seeing a good photographer working. There's an elegance, just like in a bullfight.
But the most difficult thing for me is not street photography. It's a portrait. The difference between a portrait and a snapshot is that in a portrait, a person agreed to be photographed. But certainly it's like a biologist and his microscope. When you study the thing, it doesn't react as when it's not studied. And you have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing, because you steal something. The strange thing is that you see people naked through your viewfinder. And it's sometimes very embarrassing.
I'm always nervous when I go to take a portrait, because it's a new experience. Usually when taking a portrait, I feel like putting a few questions just to get the reaction of a person. It's difficult to talk at the same time that you observe with intensity the face of somebody. But still, you must establish a contact of some sort. Whereas with Ezra Pound, I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eye. He was rubbing his fingers. I took maybe altogether one good photograph, four other possible, and two which were not interesting. That makes about six pictures in an hour and a half. And no embarrassment on either side.
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos Ezra Pound, 1971.What do you see for yourself now? Do you have an idea of what you want to do next?
I was to draw this afternoon. I carry a camera. I don't know. It d epends. I don't plan life, period. I would like to draw much more calmly and I would like to see other photographers. You see, I feel very lonely in a way. I mustn't have nostalgia about the past, because, I mean, it was not easy between Capa, Chim and I either. We had different habits.
Yet one gets the feeling that you really miss them.
Well, it is very strange. I don't realize that Capa and Chim are dead. Because in this profession, we are gone for a year or two years and we don't see each other. And then he comes. I knew Capa was dead when I saw the book “Images of War.†Before that, he was not dead at all, just somebody you don't see for some time.
The influence of Capa went beyond his lifetime. He was on the same wavelength with everybody socially. He was not impressed by queens. He was impressed by everybody as a human being. He was facing them front. I liked Capa for that very much.
At the same time, we were utterly different. We didn't read the same books. He was staying up at night and I was waking him up at 10 a.m. and he was borrowing my money without telling me - all sorts of things. But there was a fundamental unity between Capa, Chim and I. Capa was optimistic and Chim was pessimistic. Chim was like the head of a chess player or mathematician.
David Seymour/Magnum Photos David “Chim†Seymour, left, greeting Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, 1938.Where do you place yourself in there?
I have no idea - impulsive.
There were only a few photographers in the early '30s in Paris. We were taking café crème at the Dome in Montparnasse. I was painting there in Montparnasse, which, before the war, was something extremely lively. It was my city.
Did your association with Capa and Chim influence you to concentrate more on photography and less on painting?
Not at all. We never talked photography.
Tomorrow, we present the second half of the interview, in which Mr. Cartier-Bresson discusses his distaste for color photography and the liberties taken by Robert Capa in bookkeeping in the early Magnum days.
Follow @ICPhotog and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Photos from Pakistan, Singapore, Iraq and Russia.
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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}In 1971, Sheila Turner-Seed interviewed Henri Cartier-Bresson in his Paris studio for a film-strip series on photographers that she produced, w ith Cornell Capa, for Scholastic. After her death in 1979 at the age of 42, that interview, along with others she had conducted, sat like a time capsule in the archives of the International Center of Photography in New York.
That is, until 2011, when Ms. Turner-Seed's daughter, Rachel Seed, learned of their existence and went to I.C.P. to study the tapes. It was a profound experience for her, since she was 1 when her mother died and did not remember her voice.
Ms. Seed, herself a photographer, has been working on a personal documentary, “A Photographic Memory,†about a daughter's search for the mother she never knew through their shared love of photography. She is raising money with a Kickstarter campaign.
The second part of that interview, transcribed from tape by Sheil a Turner-Seed, continues where we left off yesterday. It has been lightly edited. A DVD of the Cartier-Bresson interview, with his photos, is available from the International Center of Photography's online bookstore.
Have you ever really been able to define for yourself when it is that you press the shutter?
It's a question of concentration. Concentrate, think, watch, look and, ah, like this, you are ready. But you never know the culminative point of something. So you're shooting. You say, “Yes. Yes. Maybe. Yes.†But you shouldn't overshoot. It's like overeating, overdrinking. You have to eat, you have to drink. But over is too much. Because by the time you press, you arm the shutter once more, and maybe the picture was in between.
Very often, you don't have to see a photographer's work. Just by watching him in the street, you can see what kind of photographer he is. Discreet, tiptoes, fast or machine gun. Well, you don't shoot partridges with a machine gun. You choose one partridge, then the other partridge. Maybe the others are gone by then. But I see people wrrrr, like this with a motor. It's incredible, because they always shoot in the wrong moment.
Can you bear to talk a bit about your equipment?
I am completely and have always been uninterested in the photographic process. I like the smallest camera possible, not those huge reflex cameras with all sorts of gadgets. When I am working, I have an M3 because it's quicker when I'm concentrating.
Why the 50-millimeter lens?
It corresponds to a certain vision and at the same time has enoug h depth of focus, a thing you don't have in longer lenses. I worked with a 90. It cuts much of the foreground if you take a landscape, but if people are running at you, there is no depth of focus. The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don't like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don't like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments.
If you have little equipment, people don't notice you. You don't come like a show-off. It seems like an embarrassment, someone who comes with big equipment.
And photo electric cells in a camera - I don't see why it is done. It is a laziness. During the day, I don't need a light meter. It is only when light changes very quickly at dusk or when I'm in another country, in the desert or in the snow. But I guess first, and then I check. It is good training.
In some sense, you impose your own rules that are like disciplines for yourself, then.
For myself - I'm not speaking for others. I take my pleasure that way. Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible. Maybe I'm classical. The French are like that. I can't help it!
Martine Franck/Magnum Photos A triple portrait of Henri Cartier-Bresson taken by his wife, Martine Franck.Photography as I conceive it, well, it's a drawing - immediate sketch done with intuition and you can't correct it. If you have to correct it, it's the next picture. But life is very fluid. Well, sometimes the pictures disappear and there's nothing you can do. You can't tell the person, “Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.†Life is once, forever.
How do you feel about color photography?
It's disgusting. I hate it! I've done it only when I've been to countries where it was difficult to go and they said, “If you don't do color, we can't use your things.†So it was a compromise, but I did it badly because I don't believe in it.
The reason is that you have been shooting what you see. But then there are the printing inks and all sorts of different things over which you have no control whatsoever. There is all the interference of heaps of people, and what has it got to do with true color?
If the technical problems were solved and what you saw on the page would really be what you saw with your eyes, would you still object?
Yes, because nature gives us so much. You can't accept everything of nature. You have to select things. It'd rather do paintings, and it becomes an insoluble problem. Especially when it comes to reportage, color has no interest whatsoever except that people do it because it's money. It's always a money problem.
There are some very good young photographers. They want to do photographic essays and there is no market for it.
In 1946, when we started Magnum, the world had been separated by the war and there was a great curiosity from one country to know how the other was. People couldn't travel, and for us it was such a challenge to go and testify - I have seen this and I have seen that. There was a market. We didn't have to do industrial accounts and all that.
Magnum was the genius of Bob Capa, who had great invention. He was playing the horses and the money paid for the secretaries. I came back from the Orient and asked Capa for my money and he said, “Better take your camera and go work. I have taken your money because we were almost in bankruptcy.â€
I kept on working. Now it is a very big problem because there are hardly any magazines. No big magazine is going to send you to a country because everybody has been there. It's another world. But there are heaps of specialized magazines who are going to use your files. A nd you can make quite a decent living just by files. But it means you have to add pictures for years and years. For a young photographer to start is quite a problem nowadays.
Martine Franck/Magnum Photos Henri Cartier-Bresson with a photograph of his mother, Marthe Leverdier.There are necessities of life, and everything is getting more expensive in a consumer society. So the danger is that photography might become very precious - “Oh, a very rare print.†There's not a very real place for it. But what does it mean? That preciousness is a sickness.
Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It's absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yo urself? It's the gimmick of money.
I think a print should be signed. That means a photographer recognizes that the print has been done either by him or according to his own standards. But a print is not like an etching, where the plate wears out. A negative doesn't wear out.
Perhaps the only lead that photographers had was to imitate painters, and they still have to learn their own identity.
Yes. Why be embarrassed? We are not what you call “misfit painters.†Photography is a way of expressing ourselves with another tool. That's all.
Can we go back to something we were discussing earlier? What is it like to return to a country you have visited before? Is there a difference between the first time and when you return?
I like very much going back to a country after a while and seeing the differences, because you build up impressions, right or wrong, but always personal and vivid, by living in a country and working. You accumulate things and leave a gap, and you see the changes strongly when you've been away for a long time. And the evolution in a country is very interesting to measure with a camera.
But at the same time, I am not a political analyst or an economist. I don't know how to count. It's not that. I'm obsessed by one thing, the visual pleasure.
The greatest joy for me is geometry; that means a structure. You can't go shooting for structure, for shapes, for patterns and all this, but it is a sensuous pleasure, an intellectual pleasure, at the same time to have everything in the right place. It's a recognition of an order which is in front of you.
The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters - small, small differences - but it's essential. I didn't think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe.
What is important for a photographer is involvement. It's not a propaganda means, photography, but it's a way of shouting what you feel. It's like the difference between a tract for propaganda and a novel. Well, the novel has to go through all the channel of the nerves, the imagination, and it's much more powerful than something you look at and throw away. If a theme is developed and goes into a novel, there is much more subtlety; it goes much deeper.
Poetry is the essence of everything, and it's through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinkin g it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict - a spark between two elements. But it's given very seldom, and you can't look for it. It's like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.
You have to forget yourself. You have to be yourself and you have to forget yourself so that the image comes much stronger - what you want by getting involved completely in what you are doing and not thinking. Ideas are very dangerous. You must think all the time, but when you photograph, you aren't trying to push a point or prove something. You don't prove anything. It comes by itself.
If I go to a place, it's not to record what is going on only. It's to try and have a picture which concretizes a situation in one glance and which has the strong relations of shapes. And when I go to a country, well, I'm hoping always to get that one picture about which people will say, “Ah, this is true. You felt it right.â€
T hat's why photography is important, in a way, because at the same time that it's a great pleasure getting the geometry together, it goes quite far in a testimony of our world, even without knowing what you are doing.
But as for me, I enjoy shooting a picture. Being present. It's a way of saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!†It's like the last three words of Joyce's “Ulysses,†which is one of the most tremendous works which have ever been written. It's “Yes, yes, yes.†And photography is like that. It's yes, yes, yes. And there are no maybes. All the maybes should go to the trash, because it's an instant, it's a moment, it's there! And it's respect of it and tremendous enjoyment to say, “Yes!†Even if it's something you hate. Yes! It's an affirmation.
Martine Franck /Magnum Photos Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1996.Follow @ICPhotog and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Photos from Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore and India.
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Danish Siddiqui/ReutersAbove, a man pleaded with a soldier to allow him to board an army helicopter on Friday as the death toll from monsoon flooding in mountainous northern India reached nearly 600.
Associated PressRight, a pony was rescued from the Mandakini River.
Danish Siddiqui/ReutersBelow, buildings around the Kedarnath Shrine, one of the most revered sites in India, were heavily damaged.
AT the end of the 1975 thriller “Three Days of the Condor,†a C.I.A. researcher played by Robert Redford, with the code name Condor, stands in front of The New York Times building. His life in danger, he is trying to save himself by taking his tale of government malfeasance to The Times.
But they may not print your story, a C.I.A. deputy director taunts him. “They'll print it,†Condor insists. “How do you know?†comes the rejoinder.
With that, and a last shot of Condor looking over his shoulder, the film draws to a close.
These days, the game has changed. When news sources want to go public with a major revelation, they don't need The Times. Look no further than Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed widespread government surveillance of phone records and Internet activity.
He took much of his story to Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and lawyer known for objecting to the excesses of government surveillance after 9/11 and for championing civil liberties. As a result, The Times found itself playing catch-up to this crusading columnist for the United States Web site of The Guardian, a British newspaper. The Washington Post, also given information by Mr. Snowden, broke an important piece of the story too.
Forty-two years after The Times published the Pentagon Papers - that crucial story that revealed the lies the American government had told its citizens about the Vietnam War - a news source has more choices. Still, The Times imprimatur is powerful, and its national security reporters are, for good reason, extremely well respected.
Peter Hutchings of New York City, one of many Times readers who wrote to me, asked: “Did Snowden contact The Times? If so, we readers need to know that The Times decided against running the story and why.â€
Dean Baquet, the managing editor, told me last week that, to his knowledge, Mr. Snowden made no such contact. “It's an important story, and clearly I would have loved for us to have had it,†Mr. Baquet said. “But he chose to go to someone who had a clear point of view.â€
That is undoubtedly a part of the answer, but not all.
Let's go back eight years. The first important piece of the National Security Agency surveillance story was revealed by the Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in late 2005 - notably, not based on a big leak but on painstaking investigative reporting from many sources over many months. Its disclosures about government eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants were extraordinary enough to win a 2006 Pulitzer Prize. But The Times had held that story for more than a year at the urging of the Bush administration, which claimed it would hurt national security.
In a 2008 article for Slate, Mr. Lichtblau, who had chafed at the delay, described the surreal scene “as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House†to be greeted by officials including the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the White House counsel, Harriet Miers.
Would Mr. Snowden want to risk another 13-month delay? Not when he had other options. Mr. Baquet told me that if The Times had been given the leaked information, “we would have worked fast as hell to get it published.†(It's not simply a matter of deciding to publish and then doing so, he said, noting that handling the voluminous WikiLeaks revelations in 2010 took several weeks, and that in the Snowden case, both The Guardian and The Post took time to consider national security concerns and did not publish all that was offered.)
A reader from Paonia, Colo., Ed Marston, expressed “sorrow and anger†to The Times: “Given Mr. Snowden's decision to shun The New York Times and go to The Guardian and Post due to your 2004 cover-up, is your reputation irretrievably damaged?â€
Certainly not. The Times continues to do excellent journalism on many subjects, including national security. And, as the executive editor Jill Abramson said of the 2005 article, “The important thing is that we published that story.â€
BUT the delay hasn't been forgotten. The video journalist Laura Poitras, who worked on the N.S.A. stories in both The Post and The Guardian, said the earlier delay by The Times influenced Mr. Snowden's decision on where to take his information. What's more, when a video or article released anywhere can go viral in minutes, the outlet is less important. David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, which released the famous “47 percent†video of Mitt Romney, told The Times last week: “If the leak is big enough, it doesn't matter what platform you choose. If it has merit and wow factor, you will get your story out.â€
The N.S.A. story certainly has that “wow factor.†Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers source, told The Associated Press: “There has been no more significant disclosure in the history of our country. And I'll include the Pentagon Papers in that.â€
Mr. Baquet told me he disagrees, and Ms. Abramson said it is too early to say. But in what can safely be called an understatement about not having the story first, she said, “I will admit to some degree of disappointment.â€
Some Americans shrugged off these blockbuster disclosures, apparently believing that the secret surveillance practices are acceptable if they serve to fight terrorism - and, after all, they are legal. Others think that their very legality is the most outrageous part of all.
Whatever their outrage or acceptance, Americans ought to know about the activities of their ever-more-secretive government. As Richard A. Clarke, a counterterrorism official under three presidents, wrote in The New York Daily News last week: “The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.â€
I'm glad the truth came out, no matter who published it. Looking ahead, one might ask if every potential leak recipient has the resources to verify information and make responsible decisions about using it. Perhaps not, and that is a significant downside to what is over all a positive development.
In today's world, Condor wouldn't have to wonder if his story would see the light of day or how long it would take.
That new reality may pain The Times as a competitive news organization - and would have wrecked the ending of a classic movie. But in a democracy threatened by excessive secrecy and the criminalizing of news gathering, the more sunlight the better.
Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com. The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 16, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Sources With Secrets Find New Outlets for Sharing.
In my Sunday column, I wrote about the new era for news gathering, in which the number of outlets for a news source has expanded exponentially. In it, I mentioned The Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in late 2005, the groundbreaking disclosure of extraordinary surveillance of Americans by their government.
Here are a few follow-up items on the same subject that have come my way:
â€" A reader, Stanley Green, wrote to mention an important piece â€" a cover story by James Bamford - in Wired magazine last year which, he believes, laid out much of what was in the recent leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post, and, he thinks, should have been prominently mentioned in the recent National Security Agency coverage. Mr. Green wrote:
That story, headlined “The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),†contained virtually all the “revelations†supplied by Snowden's “leaks,†including this paragraph:
“… the N.S.A. has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through millions of e-mail messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it's all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the adage that the N.S.A. stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.â€
It seems to me that Snowden didn't reveal anything of importance that had not alrea dy been reported.
â€" Somewhat along the same lines, Walter Pincus wrote last week in The Washington Post that USA Today, in 2006, published â€" and then, seemed to qualify â€" revelations about the N.S.A.'s surveillance of Americans' phone records.
The Times had a front-page story soon after that with phone company denials. On June 30, 2006, a story and editors note in USA Today reported that the phone companies were now saying that they had had no contact with the N.S.A. Other media outlets, including The Times, interpreted that as USA Today hedging on its original piece.
The article ended up largely forgotten; part of the reason for that was that the documents that Edward J. Snowden has now provided were not released. There's nothing quite like documentation to make the definitive case and to send the naysayers scurrying.
In a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker published on Monday, Hendrik Hertzberg mentions the revelations in a “60 Minutes†report in 2000 and a May 2006 article in “a national newspaper†(he somewhat mysteriously does not name USA Today). With these in mind, he calls the recent disclosures “more in the nature of confirmations than revelations.â€
I mention these only to further the discussion and give credit where credit is due, not to take anything away fro m the recent stories. Without a doubt, they have been significant â€" or in Mr. Hertzberg's term, “scoops of a high order.â€
And, as another reader, Stephen Barrett, has pointed out, one of those I quoted in my column, Ed Marston â€" identifying him only as a Times reader - is a well-known journalist in the Rocky Mountain area. He was the longtime publisher of High Country News, a magazine that focuses on land use and environmental issues in the West.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the plane that didn't crash â€" that is, about a Lives piece in The Times Magazine that has drawn significant criticism from aviation experts including Patrick (“Ask the Pilotâ€) Smith and from James Fallows, a well-known journalist who writes for The Atlantic.
The magazine article, written in memoir style by the contributor Noah Gallagher Shannon, contains a number of assertions that these critics justifiably say are either murky or apparently false.
Mr. Fallows summarized the problems this way: “The most consequential discrepancies were maintenance records showing that the plane never had any real or suspected landing-gear problems, though a landing-gear failure was the main narrat ive premise of the piece; and that its entire flight time from takeoff in Washington to unexpected landing in Philadelphia was 42 minutes, versus the tense two hours of circling over Philadelphia to burn off fuel described in the article.â€
Mr. Fallows last week interviewed the author, who is not a Times staff member. Mr. Shannon agreed that he should have been more careful and he apologized to both The Times and its readers:
I guess the last month has instilled in me a greater need for careful scrutiny of my own work. It was driven home to me that it was wrong to give the impression of certainty, of fact, and the things I was a little uncertain or hazy on, I should have qualified those observations, and I think that would have been the better journalistic thing to do - or done more background research. But I didn't at the time, and I have to apologize to the readers and The New York Times for t hat, and I take full responsibility.
The Times has continued to look into the accuracy of the article, even after publishing a blog post from Hugo Lindgren, the magazine editor. That post defended the piece on the grounds that it represented the author's feelings and his memories accurately, which was its purpose.
I still feel the same way about the magazine article. As readable as it was, it wasn't fully accurate in the way that Times journalism is expected to be.
A reader, Frank Spencer-Molloy, wrote to me about it this week, expressing his thoughts in strongly worded terms:
I hope you will find time to follow up on the now-ironclad case made by James Fallows and other aviation experts that a personal essay appearing in The New York Times Magazine recently was so factually flawed that it should have never been published. That case was cinched this weekend by the author's admission that the premise of the article â€" and many incidental factual assertions â€" was wrong.
Hugo Lindgren's dismissive reply to Fallows that the piece's recitation of factual accuracies was secondary to the author's subjective experience was insulting. Absolution by reason of truthiness covers a multitude of sins.
Readers, he concludes, had the feeling that they “were blown off.â€
I understand his concern. The Times needs to stand for truth, not truthiness â€" yes, even in a memoir-style feature article in the magazine.
However, I disagree that Times editors have dismissed these concerns. I know that over the past several weeks they have been rechecking the article's facts and talking repeatedly to the author.
I have reason to believe that in the next day or so, Mr. Lindgren may amplify his current note to readers. I'll update this post if that comes about.
It woul d be a good move - as would linking to that blog post from the online version of the original article, which is not the case now. A straight-up acknowledgement of the factual problems of this article is the only way out of this.
5:01 p.m. | Updated An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to Noah Gallagher Shannon as Mr. Gallagher on second reference. He is, of course, Mr. Shannon.
June 21 | Updated Mr. Lindgren has updated his post on The 6th Floor blog about the controversy, and the Lives article now links to it. In his update, Mr. Lindgren says the editors could have handled the piece somewhat differently but stops short of agreeing with the criticisms of its essential truthfulness.
As The Times continues to change â€" becoming more digital, becoming more global, looking for new ways to make money as print advertising declines â€" it frequently adds new features or puts more emphasis on established ones, like video.
Hardly anyone complains about that. But, in the process, when some features are eliminated to devote more resources to the new, readers notice â€" and often register their disagreement.
I wrote a few months ago about one such decision I strongly disagreed with: the elimination of the Green blog, which had served as a useful clearinghouse for good information, aggregation and fresh reporting about the environment.
At that time, Dean Baquet, the managing editor, told me that The Times would be exami ning many of its blogs and deciding which ones to maintain. He explained it as a matter of allocating resources and changing with the times.
Now, some of those decisions have been made. In addition to the Green blog, Media Decoder and The Choice (about getting into and financing college) have disappeared. Dozens of Times blogs remain, but more will be eliminated, as Joe Pompeo of Capital New York reported this week. He wrote that “a decision has been made to pull the plug on most, if not all of The Times's sports blogs, which include Bats (baseball), Straight Sets (tennis), Slap Shot (hockey), The Rail (horse racing) and Off the Dribble (basketball), although each of those appeared to still be publishing content at this writing.â€
I asked Mr. Baquet to explain what's behind the recent changes and those that are to come. While not confirming precisely which blogs will be eliminated, he confirmed the general trend.
“We are rethinking blogs â€" actually, we're always rethinking them,†he said.
He suggested that the golden age of blogs at The Times may be over: “Blogs proliferated early on because they were seen as a way for desks and subjects to get into the Web game. They taught us a different way of writing and thinking, created a way to move fast on coverage. But I'd argue that as we've matured, the sections themselves now act like blogs.â€
And Eileen Murphy, The Times's spokeswoman, elaborated on that point, especially in reference to the sports blogs.
“In most cases,†she said, “we're eliminating blogs that essentially duplicate section fronts. Each sport had its own blog and also has its own subsection front on the Web site; same for Media Decoder. There are oth er instances like this and those blogs will also be eliminated at some point. The goal is to decrease confusion for readers about where to find information on various subjects by eliminating the duplication of publishing platforms. We are not reducing our reporting or editing staffs devoted to coverage of any of these subjects.†(On a related note, Grantland's Bryan Curtis wrote on Tuesday about the slow demise of the storied Sports of The Times column.)
Readers who have written to me are particularly disappointed about losing The Choice.
“Those of us with high school-aged children, as well as children in college, are all avid readers of the blog, and have found it to be an unbiased voice in helping us navigate the college admissions process,†wrote Abby Farber, who called it “extremely disappointing†that The Time s was discontinuing the blog.
Ms. Murphy explained that decision in an e-mail, though the answer probably won't satisfy unhappy readers: “The content of that blog was evergreen and will remain available on the site and we'll continue to cover college admissions in a variety of ways. But the decision to eliminate the blog was made in order to focus some of its resources elsewhere.â€
As for The Public Editor's Journal, the blog you're reading right now, I haven't heard even a whisper about its disappearance. If it happens, though, I'll try to report it here first before I vanish.
An obituary of the journalist Michael Hastings missed an opportunity to convey to Times readers what a distinctive figure he was in American journalism.
The obituary, which has drawn criticism - most notably in a strongly worded e-mail from Mr. Hastings' widow, Elise Jordan, to the executive editor, Jill Abramson, and others at The Times, including the public editor's office - is not factually inaccurate, as far as I can tell.
But it doesn't adequately get across the essence of Mr. Hastings' journalism or the regard in which he was held. And, in the way it presents the Pentagon's response to his most celebrated article in Rolling Stone, which brought down Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the obituary seems to diminish his work's legitimacy.
That section of t he short obituary reads:
An inquiry into the article by the Defense Department inspector general the next year found “insufficient†evidence of wrongdoing by the general, his military aides and civilian advisers. The inspector general's report also questioned the accuracy of some aspects of the article, which was repeatedly defended by Mr. Hastings and Rolling Stone.
It provides a link to a 2011 Times article, the headline of which many find overstated and misleading: “Pentagon Inquiry Into Article Clears McChrystal and Aides.â€
Ms. Jordan noted that the Pentagon also accepted the validity of some of Mr. Hastings' findings, and she made this salient point about the headline of the earlier article: “Insufficient evidence to prosecute is not the same as ‘clearing' someone of a misdeed.â€
I asked the obituaries editor, Bill McDonald, to respon d to the complaints that the obituary gave the Pentagon inquiry undue emphasis. He disagreed:
In a 12-paragraph obit, that aspect of his story came up in paragraphs 6 and 7, after calling him in the lead paragraph “intrepid,†noting the Polk Award for his work and recounting the considerable impact his article had. Only then did we report - as we must, if we're going to write an honest obit about him - that the article triggered a Pentagon investigation and an inspector general's report, which challenged Mr. Hastings' reporting. That was a pretty newsworthy development and an inescapable part of his story, and in an obit of 425 words or so, we dealt with it in about 50.
Granted, an obituary is not intended to be a tribute. It is a news story about the life of a notable person. And because of The Times's reputation and its reach, its obituaries carry great weight for establishing a person's legacy. They matter.
In this case, the Pentagon references, suggesting a debunking of the Rolling Stone article's conclusions, got more space than what many consider to be essential information about Mr. Hastings: that he was a fearless disturber of the peace who believed not in playing along with those in power, but in radical truth-telling.
A quotation from the BuzzFeed Web site appeared initially in the online version of the article. It read:
Michael Hastings was really only interested in writing stories someone didn't want him to write - often his subjects; occasionally his editor. While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave.
The quotation was cut for space reasons in the print edition, and that version is the one that is archived.
The obituary wouldn't have needed a lot of space to get that point across. On Twitter - a form that discourages rambling - a Freedom of the Press Foundation message made the point succinctly: