This Times editor's note (pasted below), which seemed to suggest some very heavy handed and biased editing, has now been explained by the paper's public editor, Byron Calame.
The Op-Ed page in some copies of Wednesday's newspaper carried an incorrect version of the below article about military recruitment. The article also briefly appeared on NYTimes.com before it was removed. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, "Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday," nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a "surprise tour of Iraq." That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error. A corrected version of the article appears below.
Calame's column from yesterday lays out the story behind this "bizarre" note. As he explains, the Times editor who was working with Capt. Phillip Carter, the author, suggested new language to incorporate the fact that Carter had recently been called to active duty. As David Shipley, the editor, explains:
"We try to clarify and improve copy. We do this for the benefit of our contributors, many of whom are not professional writers. We do not impose language on them - if they want something out or something in, we accede to their wishes. They have final sign-off."
Carter rejected the suggested language and even threatened to pull the piece if it was included. They came to a compromise. And then the language made it into the story any way. "Unfortunately, we blew it," says Shipley, who was on vacation when the mistake happened.
In San Francisco, Captain Carter checked nytimes.com at about 10 p.m. his time to look at his article, headlined "Quiet Man," a reference to the president. Spotting the "surprise" phrases in the article, he immediately called The Times's news desk in New York. "I told them to kill it," he told me in an interview last week.
So the Carter article was yanked out of the paper and an ad for The Times itself was hastily dropped in its place. The article was also removed from nytimes.com until a corrected version could be prepared.
Shipley admits that the editor's note could have offered more detail, and Calame sums up his column by making an excellent point: in the end, it is the Times that will suffer most from this incident. The ambiguous editor's note enabled people to draw their own conclusions as to what had happened. Calame quotes a couple of readers who assumed that this was an example of bias. (In fact, it seems as though the abundance of reader complaints caused Calame to address this issue.)
This just underscores the importance of a) getting things right in the first place and b) offering up a clear and equitable correction when you don't. In this case, the Times failed on both counts.
"It did not occur to me to get into a more detailed explanation of the editorial process," Mr. Shipley said. "In hindsight, maybe I should have added a line or two. It was already pretty long and complicated, though."
Even with this sorting out of the mistakes actually made and the mistaken perceptions of some readers, the doubts about the paper's credibility stirred up by this incident won't be easily erased.
Calame concludes with a correction to a column from two weeks ago. Since this appeared in the paper, another correction has been appended to address an error in yesterday's column. Let's hope it's the last error Carter will have to endure.
The July 17 public editor column incorrectly reported where Phillip Carter lived and the location of the law firm where he worked before he was called to active Army duty. He lived in Santa Monica, Calif., and the law firm was in Los Angeles.
The public editor column on July 3 incorrectly described an Andres Serrano photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. There was no blood mixed with the urine, and the photograph was taken in 1987, not 1989.
