Even Barney Calame Should Write A Fair Lede
Yesterday, NYT Public Editor Barney Calame weighed in on the Geraldo Rivera/Alessandra Stanley brouhaha. He thinks, strongly, that (a) it wasn’t a nudge, (b) the NYT should issue a correction, (c) Bill Keller‘s reasoning for backing Stanley was totally bogus, and (d) a “nudge”‘ is a fact, and a Geraldo-nudge in a Stanley-column is a wrong fact.
Great. But did he have to be such a dick about it?
That’s just one four-letter word. And apparently those are fine to sling at media colleagues from the pages of The Paper of Record.
Calame’s lede: “ONE of the real tests of journalistic integrity is being fair to someone who might be best described by a four-letter word.”
Whatever else could you mean, Barney? Several four-letter epithets spring to mind — toad, shoe, smurf — but I think we all know where you’re going with this. And frankly, it is beneath you, and beneath the New York Times.
Bottom line: it is unseemly for the NYT to gratuitiously insult a colleague in the lede of a story. Especially when that story admits that said institution has clearly misrepresented, gratuitiously insulted and arguably defamed that colleague. Not cool.
Calame writes: “I find it disturbing that any Times editor would come so close to implying – almost in a tit-for-tat sense – that Mr. Rivera’s bad behavior essentially entitles the paper to rely on assumptions and refuse to correct an unsupported fact.” Yet Calame’s headline “Even Geraldo Deserves a Fair Shake” totally gives that credence by implying that there is some question as to the shake Geraldo deserves just by nature of being Geraldo. See aforementioned reference to coolness, lack thereof.
We agree with you that Geraldo deserves an apology from the NYT — but you might want to throw one in there, too.
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