SALON

Thursday, Dec 6, 2012 10:36 PM UTC

NYT public editor calls out paper over Manning

"The Times should be there" at the pretrial hearings, argues Margaret Sullivan

By

Topics: The New York Times, Media Criticism, Bradley Manning, Fort Meade, pretrial hearing,

NYT public editor calls out paper over Manning Army Pfc. Bradley Manning steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan Wednesday joined a chorus of voices criticizing her paper for failing to send reporters to Pfc. Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearings.

While the Times’ Washington Bureau chief David Leonhardt defended the decision to simply republish an AP wire on the proceedings, Sullivan took the Grey Lady to task. “The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important,” she wrote.

Leonhardt told the public editor via email:

As with any other legal case, we won’t cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter’s time, for a relatively straightforward story. The A.P. article recounting the main points of Mr. Manning’s testimony about his conditions of confinement that ran on page A3 of The Times conveyed fundamentally the same material as a staff story would have.

However, as Times reader David Morf noted in a reprinted letter, using AP wire copy “let the story bury itself.” Following Sullivan’s piece, a number of commentators have taken issue with Leonhardt’s reference to “any other legal case,” since for many Manning’s treatment by the U.S. military and his role as a whistle-blower make  his case exceptional.

Until last week, when Manning himself testified about his harsh detainment in Quantico and Kuwait, very few media institutions sent reporters to follow the Fort Meade proceedings. Indeed, Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola, one of only a few writers to have followed Manning’s case closely and consistently throughout, decried the dearth of reporters in the courtroom. “Fifteen thousand journalists went to Charlotte, North Carolina, to cover the Democratic National Convention. How many journalists are in and around DC?… In the whole of the United States, there should be more than two to five journalists showing up regularly to cover the proceedings,” he wrote. Gosztola was pleased when more journalists turn up at Fort Meade last week, but The Times, as their public editor noted, “missed the boat.”

 

Continue Reading Close

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 5 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations