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This Just In: Media

Mush from the wimps

By Dan Kennedy

Last Friday's New York Times "Editor's Note" was among the odder examples of the journalistic confession.

Referring to a March 15 article about a series of private tutorials being arranged for Texas governor George W. Bush to get him up to speed on presidential issues, the note stated: "As published, the article included an opinionated sentence casting doubt on his mastery of those issues." The Times went on to blame the snafu on an editor's computer error: the sentence "was typed in a nonprinting computer script, but converted into print through a command error."

Intrigued, I went back and reread the original story, by Richard Berke and Rick Lyman. It seems that Bush, described as not exactly a cerebral sort, has been sitting down with policy wonks to discuss foreign affairs, health care, and other topics he'll need to know about when he hits the campaign trail.

Nowhere, though, could I find a sentence that warranted anything so grave as an "Editor's Note." I was about to call the Times and ask when I saw Howard Kurtz's column in the Monday Washington Post. Kurtz reported that the offending passage was this sentence on the heavy tutorial schedule Bush has been keeping: "There may never have been a 'serious' candidate who needed it more."

Strange, given that the rest of the article made it clear that Bush does, in fact, need the sessions at least as badly as his rival Dan Quayle needs a spelling coach. In that context, it would appear that the Times' editors should be congratulating each other for their serendipitous enhancement of Berke and Lyman's story, not rending their garments in public.

Then again, when a news organization accidentally blurts out a bluntly worded truth, the first impulse is to apologize. Think back to Election Night 1996, when a bone-weary David Brinkley, who apparently thought his microphone was off, referred to Bill Clinton as "a bore," to Clinton's victory statement as "one of the worst things I've ever heard," and to the prospect of his second term as "more goddamn nonsense." The only unfortunate aspect to Brinkley's candid outburst was that he abjectly apologized for it.

Perhaps the most famous example of inadvertent media truth-telling occurred in 1980, when the late Kirk Scharfenberg wrote an editorial for the Boston Globe about some miserable speech then-president Jimmy Carter had delivered the night before on the topic of inflation. MUSH FROM THE WIMP was the exuberantly accurate fake headline Scharfenberg wrote for the amusement of his newsroom pals. The head actually made it into 160,000 papers before the press run was halted and it was changed to (yawn) ALL MUST SHARE THE BURDEN.

Of course, the Times' inconsequential Bush-whacking hardly ranks with Brinkley's and Scharfenberg's entertaining outbursts. Neither, though, was it anything the paper should have apologized for. Quite the contrary.