NYT Ombudsman Says the Paper Shouldn't Have Ignored the Toledo Blade Series on Alleged Vietnam War Crimes

Daniel Okrent, ombudsman for the NYT (Feb. 1, 2004):

THIS week, it's time for some journalism heresy. I'd like to suggest that newspapers with aspirations to greatness - like the one you're holding in your hands - learn to be generous to their rivals, and in the process provide value for their readers.

It has long been Times policy to credit other news organizations for their scoops: "Such and so was first reported Monday in 'The Daily Bugle.' '' It has even longer been part of the paper's genetic code never to let someone else's scoop lie unmassaged by Timesian hands. "What can we add?'' goes the editors' refrain. Sometimes - often - that works. Sometimes, though, the effort at addition becomes, for the reader, an act of subtraction....

Last October, The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, published a series of articles revealing that "members of a platoon of American soldiers known as Tiger Force slaughtered an untold number of Vietnamese civilians over a seven-month period in 1967.'' The series was the product of 10 months of research conducted on two continents and in seven states.

When the Blade series broke, The Associated Press sent out a story summarizing its findings. Many newspapers picked up the A.P. report; some, including the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, put it on the front page. In the Times newsroom, Roger Cohen, who was foreign editor at the time, thought it an important story, but, he recalls, he was "focused on Iraq'' and "did not give it the attention it deserved.'' National editor Jim Roberts tried to get something rolling that the paper could call its own, but reporters who knew their way around the Pentagon were otherwise engaged. Editors felt that running 10 inches of A.P. copy would not represent the story fairly.

In The New Yorker of Nov. 10, Seymour Hersh, who as a young reporter broke the story about the massacre at My Lai, praised the Blade series, noting along the way that the four major networks and most major newspapers had all but ignored it. Hersh's article provoked The Times's executive editor, Bill Keller, to order up a lengthy piece on The Blade's discoveries. John Kifner's "Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories,'' which sought to place the Blade series in historical perspective, finally ran on Dec. 28 - a report on a two-month-old story about events that took place 37 years ago. The Blade's publisher and editor in chief, John Robinson Block, felt that The Times's late weigh-in, which included a sizable helping of the skepticism that re-examination will almost inevitably provoke, was an insult to his paper and its reporters.

Keller told me that if his own staff had developed the Blade series, he would have put it on the front page. Yet at least partly because it was someone else's, it ended up diminished, delayed and, in some eyes, devalued...

There's no question that the competitive electricity powering a news organization produces a great deal of benefit, just as it would in a soap company fighting for market share or in a research team trying to beat the other guys to a medical breakthrough. I understand why competition is necessary to inspire the troops. I also understand that Macy's never carried anything with a Gimbel's label sewn into it. But maybe The Times's insistence on stamping its own brand on everything it touches ends up diminishing what it delivers. If the goal of newspapering is to inform the readers and create a historical record, shouldn't the editors be telling us about everything they think is important, no matter where they find it?