New York Times Public Editor Byron "Barney" Calame, a recent target of unflattering stories and columns, weighed in on the recent erroneous NYT page one story about standing-room only airline seats. It resulted in a (delayed) correction and an Editor’s Note. Here are the first three paragraphs from the April 25 story:
The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?
A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only "seats."
Airbus
has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian
carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing
section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with
a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.
After the story ran, it was (according to a Nexis search) picked up by at least over 50 other media outlets. It spawned editorial cartoons and editorials. It was, as Calame writes in his column, "a story that’s likely to make readers go ‘Wow!’" Yet just hours after it hit the streets, the story was vigorously denied by the company. The truth was that Airbus had abandoned the idea a couple of years ago. Writes Calame:
…Airbus had abandoned the idea no later than 2004. There was no proof
that the idea had been pitched to any Asian airlines. And the 853
passengers the stand-up concept supposedly would fit into an Airbus
A380 was the same number that could be carried using regular coach
seats. (The bulk of the article, it should be noted, was a solid
assessment of seat technology.)
The problems didn’t stop there.
Despite an immediate public denial by Airbus, the stand-up seat idea
stood uncorrected for a week. And so, as often happens with nearly
unbelievable stories, this one took on a life of its own. The concept
grabbed headlines in scores of publications around the world and was
even incorporated into illustrations on the cover of The New Yorker and
on The Times’s Op-Ed page.
What caused this mess? My questioning
of most of the key players suggests that numerous factors converged to
create an almost perfect storm. But I think a major gaffe was that
editors at various levels got caught with their skepticism down,
fascinated by the story’s Wow! factor. The seat was an idea that they
apparently found bizarre yet believable in light of the airlines’
continual efforts to jam more passengers into planes.
Calame gets the back story on how the erroneous material made it into the story, how editors failed to do proper checks, why it made it onto page one, and why the Times took so long to correct the mistakes. Simply put, the story was a tragedy of errors at every level, a study in how best intentions and best practices can go awry. One would expect the public editor to come down hard on the paper, yet Calame’s attempt at being "blunt" comes off as rather toothless:
That this mess could splatter across the newsroom of such a fine
newspaper moves me to be blunt. Times editors at all levels —
especially on the news desk, where front-page and other important
articles get a final review — need to pick up each story with the
assumption that the most fascinating anecdote, or even the central
premise, could be wrong. Readers deserve no less.
Calame is proving his critics right by doing the legwork on a serious failure by the paper but then failing to offer any meaningful condemnation or — more importantly — recommendations to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The back story is an interesting read, but an ombudsman is supposed to be more than a chronicler/explainer of the newsroom. Calame’s concluding graph should have been more blunt, and it should have offered some concrete suggestions to ensure this incident isn’t repeated. Unfortunately, he continues to prove his critics right.
