Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Telling It Like It Is - John F. Burns - NY Times
Some insights of the New York Times are shared here...
Here's some verbatim from an interview Hugh Hewitt had with John F. Burns, the foreign correspondent of the New York Times:
"JB: Let me talk about the New York Times. It’s a very difficult concept for people who are critical of the East Coast, supposedly liberal media to understand, that you don’t judge the New York Times by our editorial page, and its opposition to the war, because there is a firewall, and it’s real, it’s real, between the editorial page and the news pages. And I can tell you that not only is there a lot of attention paid, and this is real, I know this. I run our operation in Baghdad, I talk to our editors, including our top editors all the time, to try and find a way in covering this war that is not partisan, that is neither liberal nor conservative, but simply tells the reader how we find it. And you’d be surprised how little criticism we get, judging by the e-mail traffic that flows on that score. But there is a confusion, that people read the editorial page, they read the strongly critical views that are expressed on the editorial page, and they assume that we all share that view, and I can tell you that amongst American reporters who cover this war, and including American reporters for the New York Times, there are a range of views from what we’d broadly be speaking, described as liberals and conservatives, but we try to keep those out of the paper, and our editors work hard to see that those views do stay out of the paper."
