The ‘Mysterious\' Disappearance of a Quotation Has a Mundane Explanation

Was a quote about a pro-Israel group mysteriously scrubbed from a New York Times story? A number of online commenters, in blog posts and on Twitter, wrote Tuesday that a quote calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” had been taken out of an article without explanation, suggesting that The Times was responding to political pressure. On the face of it, it sounds mighty bad.

However, that's not really what happened. I'll explain, but first I will say up front that I'm not an apologist for The Times on this issue. I've written critically at least twice about instances when The Times, in my opinion, did not follow ideal transparency practices in making changes to articles, then archiving those articles. One had to do with a critique of Mitt Romney; another with Iran and nuclear weapons. In both cases, I concluded that The Times should have handled story revisions in a way that provided more clarity for the reader.

What happened here, though, seems quite different to me. On a moving story about President Obama and Syria, some information that appeared in a Sunday-to-Monday story (that is, an article that started online on Sunday and appeared on Monday's front page) was carried over to a new, Monday-to-Tuesday front page story.

That new story was, appropriately, assigned a new URL, assuring that it would be archived separately. Once new information came along, a great deal of old information, including the Aipac quote, was replaced.

But the quotation remains in the earlier article, which you can see here, and is archived accordingly. It also appeared in print Monday.

It is reasonable enough that the quotation was not repeated in the article that appeared in Tuesday's paper. For a while on Monday, the new story online included information from the previous day's article. It was, essentially, what old-school journalists call “b-matter” - background information that is not new and that may well be replaced when new information comes along.

New information did come along: Mr. Obama got the support of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and that development dominated the new story.

Was political pressure brought to bear on The Times for the Aipac quotation, as some have suggested? “None whatsoever,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. He added, “Aipac remains a newsworthy part of this story, and you'll see more about that soon.”

When compared on News Sniffer, an organization that keeps various versions of news articles, two versions of the Monday-to-Tuesday article look very different, and News Sniffer says that 11 versions may be seen. The early versions are, in some ways, rewrites of the previous day's article; the later ones contain a great deal of new information.

Should The Times archive many versions of each moving story? Some people think so, but Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, told me that would be impractical and confusing. I'm inclined to agree.

“It makes sense to archive one version for each news cycle, not 16 different versions,” he said, and to make the archived version the most heavily edited and refined one, which usually corresponds with the version that runs in print. A vast majority of readers, he said, “would only be lost and confused” if they tried to look up an article and found multiple versions, each slightly different.

The Times does not provide an editor's note for every revision, although it does append corrections if a version included a factual error. Given the number of changes - new reporting, different headlines, more complete editing, etc. - that may come along in the course of a single news cycle, an editor's note discussing each one would become absurd. If the meaning changes, as I believe it did in the Iran article I mentioned above, that ought to be explained. If, during a single news cycle, an article changes significantly, as in the Romney example above, a new article and new URL should be assigned.

Mr. Corbett said The Times's “standard approach” was more a practice than a firm policy. “It's something that we are always looking at,” he said.

Should The Times be more transparent, in some cases, about the changes it makes to stories? No doubt. But in this instance, the less exciting explanation is the right one.

On the ‘Inherent Problem\' of the Public Editor\'s Role at The Times

The Roman poet Juvenal posed this pretty good question that has traveled down the centuries: “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

It means, “But who watches the watchers?” In the context of a diatribe against marriage, it comments on how tough it is to enforce moral behavior when the enforcers themselves are corruptible.

The question came to mind this week when I received an acerbic e-mail from a reader, Gary Abramson. He was responding to my Sunday column, in which I reviewed my first year as public editor, a role that I described as “reader representative and internal watchdog.”

Mr. Abramson, from Goshen, N.Y., was critical of The Times and the whole idea of a public editor.

He wrote, in part:

I regret that your column this past Sunday did not address the inherent problem with your job itself: the public editor is appointed and paid by The Times. It's a conflict of interest no matter how honest the appointee is, and I am not questioning your or your predecessors' integrity. But your humanity makes you no less vulnerable to the Stockholm syndrome than anyone else. Moreover, I do question whether The Times, as much a club as a business, would or will select any public editor whose sensibility clashes with the paper's self-important, preppy culture.

Mr. Abramson said “a committee of scholars” should choose the public editor, and that he once suggested that to The Times but got no response. He then went through a number of his specific beefs with The Times from the overuse of the word “roils” to the Sunday features sections which “cheerily if not delightedly take the unequal distribution of wealth in New York City as a given” to hiring policies (“Is there any enterprise in America with more Yale graduates per capita - including Yale - than where you're working?”). The quality of the writing at The Times, Mr. Abramson said, has declined since the days of Russell Baker, the celebrated Times columnist. “Let's see what happens if you raise that concern,” he dared me. “I imagine homelessness in the Buffalo winter would not be to your liking.”

He's right about that last part - it's chilly there - and not wrong on some others. His Yale line, however, is unfair. It outrageously undersells Harvard's dominance at The Times. (In all seriousness, The Times has made a good effort to diversify its staff in recent years.)

He's also right about the “inherent problem,” as he called it, with the job. I am paid by the company whose editorial content I often have to criticize, although I am not a part of the editorial hierarchy. That's a situation that led the media critic Jack Shafer, lifting a phrase from the journalist Michael Dolan, to observe that ombudsmen tend to “gum the hand that feeds” them. Mr. Abramson referred to Stockholm syndrome â€" identifying with the captors. I prefer to call it “drinking the Kool-Aid,” and am well aware of the dangers.

How tough can I actually be on The Times's journalism when my paycheck comes from the very same organization? Self-grading is a dubious proposition, but I will say this: I try hard not to pull my punches, but also to be fair to those I'm writing about. No public editor worth her salt wants to be an apologist or cheerleader, and after all, one of The Times's earliest mottos was “without fear or favor.”

But I have some help staying honest. Backing me up are the serious readers of The Times who keep a wary eye on their advocate, the public editor. How do they do so? In critical e-mails. In blog posts of their own. Incessantly, on Twitter. In astute comments on my blogs and columns.

Readers are quick to detect any hint of the public editor's verging into being an apologist for The Times. They are quick to point out failures of logic, judgment or fact. They're a tough and smart crowd. (Also, often an encouraging and appreciative one, and I'm grateful for the many kind words in reader comments and e-mails this past week.)

In short, who watches the watcher? In this case, the rhetorical question has an answer: You do.

Decision to Publish Against Government Request Was ‘Not a Particularly Anguished One\'

The New York Times has come under fire in the past for agreeing to government requests to hold back sensitive stories or information, but it bucked such requests in publishing a front-page article in Friday's paper.

The executive editor, Jill Abramson, told me that while she and the managing editor Dean Baquet went to Washington to meet with officials and gave them “a respectful hearing,” the decision to publish was “not a particularly anguished one.”

The article says that the National Security Agency has the ability - and uses it - to break the encryption used in a great deal of Internet communication. It's an important part of a continuing set of stories on the N.S.A.'s surveillance and its implications for privacy, the early ones of which have been published largely in The Guardian and The Washington Post, as a result of a huge leak by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Top editors at The Times listened to government officials' concerns over national security but decided to publish despite their request, because it was in the public interest to do so.

“Our default position is to inform the public,” Ms. Abramson told me. “Publishing information in the public service is our mission in our democracy.” The balance between national security and the public's right to know must be considered, she said. In this case, the latter clearly prevailed.

She said that the conversations - in which Times editors described “in an impassioned way” the importance of the public's right to know and the need for an informed debate - “have been helpful in creating a background of understanding” on the government's part.

The Times has not always made that kind of decision, sometimes agreeing to government requests and coming under fire for doing so. In fact, Mr. Snowden has indicated that he gave his information to The Guardian and The Post, in part because he didn't trust The Times to withstand government pressure.

Ms. Abramson said that the three-way partnership on this story among The Times, The Guardian and ProPublica was one that played to the strengths of each one.

“I have a huge amount of respect for Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson, so I went in with a high level of confidence” after being approached by The Guardian, Ms. Abramson said. Mr. Rusbridger is The Guardian's editor, and Ms. Gibson is the editor of The Guardian U.S.

Ms. Abramson is on the advisory board of ProPublica, and knows its editor Stephen Engelberg well, so she said she also had confidence in that relationship.

“The Guardian at the beginning was highly concerned about working in a way that kept the material secure - we went to lengths to safeguard the material,” Ms. Abramson said, adding that The Times strictly limited the number of people, “a very small group of journalists.” The article that was published online Thursday and in Friday's newspaper was written by Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth and Jeff Larson; John Markoff contributed reporting.

Along with its version of the article, ProPublica ran a lengthy editor's note on the reasons behind publication. The Times handled that aspect - quite adequately, in my opinion - with a paragraph within the story itself.

The Times did agree to withhold some material from the story, Ms. Abramson said, describing it only as “a level of detail that caused concern.”

“The few particulars we did not publish were not essential,” she said.

Ms. Abramson said The Times is continuing to report, based on the material, and indicated there will be more to come.

My take: I've been critical of The Times in the past for agreeing to government requests too readily, including the long delay in publishing what is arguably the most important surveillance story of the past decade - the Pulitzer Prize-winning article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about the government's warrantless wiretapping of citizens in 2005.

And I have also written about The Times's efforts to play catch-up on this set of N.S.A. stories that it did not break.

The encryption article - an important story, published courageously - is a very welcome development. The American public has the right to know, and debate, what its government is doing. Times editors and reporters, as well as those at The Guardian and ProPublica, deserve plenty of credit for how they have handled this.

Updated, 12:08 p.m. | Reuters reported Friday morning that intelligence officials objected to the articles, saying that they provide a “road map” for adversaries of the United States.