This is the Answer?

The New York Times has released the report of an "internal committee":

In order to build readers' confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper's critics. [Italics added]

It sounds as though they're trying to learn something from the blogosphere by making "reporters and editors more easily available through e-mail," "Us[ing] the Web to provide readers with complete documents used in stories as well as transcripts of interviews," and possibly creating a "Times blog" to promote interaction with readers.

The recommendations also aim at avoiding erroneous reports and plagiarism correcting them faster. These are all good things, but some of them ("Increase coverage of middle America, rural areas and religion.") seem rather condescending and patronizing. It sounds a lot like the Democrats' postmortems to the election, "We have to reach out to the religious." The problem with that is that it's pretty tough to fake sincerity about such things.

These ideas are pretty good as far as they go, but that "responding more assertively to the paper's critics" sounds a little like a bunker mentality. They won't work unless the paper adopts an affirmative policy of building political diversity in the newsroom and the editorial boards. If they just tell their liberal writers and editors to act more "balanced," this effort will fall on its face; it'll be just another CYA project. I don't know how to completely eliminate spin, but one way to neutralize it is with counterspin, and I doubt that there are many conservative reporters being turned out by the J-schools. That's where it will have to start.