Gilbert Cranberg: WHAT DO EDITORS DO?

What do editors do? Primarily, they must be inquisitive, so they have to ask questions, lots of them – of community leaders and of their own staffers. If they fail to do that, they will produce papers with gaps in coverage. And when that happens, they have to admit they shortchanged readers.

One of the most generous admissions of that sort of error was in the New York Times a couple of years ago by Bill Keller, the paper’s former executive editor. Keller admitted that on his watch the Times published “some notoriously credulous stories about Iraqi weapons.” The Bush administration quoted Times coverage to show that the weapons the administration cited to justify its invasion of Iraq actually existed. So the Times not only misled readers, it helped validate the phony case for war made by the government.

That’s a heavy load for any editor to bear. But as Keller leaves the Times, as he recently announced he would do to head up a non-profit journalism venture, he can do so having set the record straight about his part in what he described as “a monumental blunder.”

That’s more than many editors can say. With few exceptions, the press supported going to war against Iraq but precious few have admitted they were in error. Colin Powell apologized for his influential pro-war speech to the United Nations, but almost none of those who editorially lauded Powell’s address followed Powell’s lead in expressing regrets.

I, for one, was unimpressed at the time by Powell’s case for war and criticized it. But given prevailing opinion, I was unable to get what I wrote before a large audience. An editor who rejected the piece did subsequently say privately that he should have run it. That falls short of an admission to readers that they were shortchanged, but, hey, it’s something.