NYT Ombudsman Finds Editors Who Don’t Mind Joe Nocera Comparing Tea Party to Terrorists
New York Times’s Public Editor (or ombudsman) Arthur Brisbane weighed in on columnist Joe Nocera, who apologized in print last week for having compared Tea Party members to terrorists in a column August 2. Just four months into his new job as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, Joe Nocera banged out a blistering screed against Tea Party Republicans who “have waged jihad on the American people.” These “terrorists” were willing to sacrifice the nation’s creditworthiness to achieve deep spending cuts — a goal they believed was “worth blowing up the country for,” he wrote in his Aug. 2 column. He concluded the piece by saying that, for now, “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough.” There was a backlash in “a wave of angry reader e-mails.” And then something really unusual happened: He apologized. “I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics,” he wrote in his column four days later. “In the cool light of day, I agree with them. I apologize.” Brisbane posed the question: Did Nocera really go too far? He found a Times opinion editor and a former L.A. Times editor-in-chief to say no. Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, didn’t think so. Neither did quite a few others with whom I spoke. John Carroll, former editor of The Los Angeles Times, said he enjoyed the first column because “I frankly think the Tea Party people have much to answer for in this case. I wasn’t offended by the rhetoric. I rather liked the concluding line about the suicide vest.” This part was revealing: He decided “you can’t call for civility and then call people terrorists,” and so he drew the line there. Perhaps not surprisingly, 90 percent of the response to his apology column, he said, was: “Why did you apologize? They are terrorists.” Brisbane found the whole experience “elevating” for the newspaper;
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on August 16, 2011. Filed under