It’s Ok to Manipulate the Facts if It’s an Editorial, Right?
06/13 06:45 PM
Friday afternoon, blogger Will Franklin sent me an e-mail with a link to a post on his blog http://www.willisms.com that told the story of a dispute between Exxon-Mobil and the New York Times over an editorial that appeared in the Times May 22 titled, “Inside the Kill Zone.” The story interested me because I think it contributes to the discussion of journalism, objectivity and accuracy that was the subject of my last post.
Times editorial writer Adam Cohen, on assignment to write about “security holes at chemical facilities” for the Times editorial series “An Insecure Nation,” traveled to an ExxonMobil refinery in Chalmette, LA. Cohen wrote that the security holes at this “time bomb” are “glaringly obvious.” As proof, Cohen offered up the following:
Cohen neglected to mention that during the 15 minutes he stood around in the nearby park, the refinery’s security personnel and employees had him under surveillance, taking pictures of him with a hand-held camera, and that as Cohen started to leave, a security guard approached Cohen, told him that security had observed him and that he was causing concern.On a recent visit to Chalmette Refining, a Times editorial writer had no trouble standing in the nearby park for 15 minutes with a large knapsack.
After Cohen told the security guard he was working on a story for the Times, the guard continued to watch Cohen until he drove away.
According to a series of e-mails provided by ExxonMobil spokesman Tom Cirigliano, an ExxonMobil employee wrote to Cohen after the editorial was published and asked him why he had not included these facts in his account. Cohen responded as follows:
The employee was not satisfied by this answer. He wrote back:Here’s what we wrote in the editorial: “On a recent visit to Chalmette Refining, a Times editorial writer had no trouble standing in the nearby park for 15 minutes with a large knapsack.” That is, sadly, just what happened. I was the editorial writer in question. Before driving away, I crossed over St. Bernard Parkway — walking away from the refinery — to look at an historic site in the highway median. It was at that point, when I was done with my experiment and had left the park, that a guard came up to me and asked who I was. I told him that I was finished and was leaving. It was our estimation that a terrorist attacking the refinery would probably plan to begin the job within 15 minutes of making a highly visible appearance on the periphery of it.
Don’t you think that you should have pointed out to your readers that you were in fact approached by a security guard and advised that your presence had been observed and that it was a cause for concern. Also, if you had conducted this experiment, in all fairness should you not have shared that with me last week when we spoke, for our comments?
Cohen answered:
The employee continued to question Cohen:What we wrote was accurate, and the concerns we raised were completely reasonable. I have no doubt that if ExxonMobile [sic] had written the piece, it would have read differently and included different facts. Remember, also, that this was an editorial, that ran on our opinion pages (emphasis added).
Adam, I am attaching pictures taken in real time during the period that you assumed you were not being observed. While I clearly understand that this was an editorial that ran in your opinion pages, don't facts count in an editorial? Given that the photos (attached below) prove that we observed you within your 15 minute deadline, and that you were directly approached and questioned by our Security Manager, don’t we and your readers deserve a correction/clarification of this report/editorial (emphasis added)?
Don’t facts count in an editorial? I asked Times deputy editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal this same question, more or less.
Then why leave it out? Why not just add one sentence: “Plant officials did not bother checking the writer out until after he’d left the area, which only underscored the laxity of security.” Twenty-two words.The reference in Mr. Cohen’s email to the opinion page had to do with the judgments made in the editorial. Your last question is hard to answer directly, because it is written in a way that presumes the facts were somehow misused in the editorial. They were not, and we did not deny the readers the full story. If anything, the fact that plant officials did not bother checking the writer out until after he’d left the area only underscores the laxity of security.
Then there’s the matter of the pictures. Rosenthal had this to say:
This rebuttal is unpersuasive. The point is not when the guards looked at the pictures, but that they were taking them, i.e. Cohen was under observation during his time in the park. Had he started taking pot shots at chemical tanks or trying to climb the fence into the facility, personnel could have seen him and acted.We have seen the pictures you mention. They merely confirm that our writer was in the park, and that no one approached him while he was there… Indeed, we have no idea whether [security officials] saw the pictures while he was in the park, or afterward.
It would have been easy to include these details in the editorial but it would have weakened the Times’s argument. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for that reason, and not because the facts were irrelevant, they were omitted.
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RACK this guy.
Why did the Times refuse to write the whole story, including the companies security manager's notification that the writer had been under photo surveillance the entire time?
Facts do matter on the editorial page just as they matter in typical news articles.
Perhaps the Times circulation wouldn't be hurting if it paid more attention to publishing facts rather than articulating a biased agenda...
