Ethics and Errors

Fun with the New York Times.

JAMES TARANTO

"As an employee of The New York Times, I am biased, of course."

That's a sentence we never thought we'd read in the New York Times, but there it was in yesterday's "Ethicist" column in the Times Sunday magazine. "The Ethicist" is like Dear Abby only pretentious, and the new columnist, Ariel Kaminer, was addressing this pressing question, from Kevin Charles Redmon of Minneapolis:

I'm a 24-year-old freelance journalist who's still somewhat dependent on my parents. And I'm on nytimes.com dozens of times a day. My parents are print subscribers and thus have access beyond the pay wall. Need I buy my own subscription? Also, if I buy online access, can I share the password with my live-in girlfriend, even if I move to New York for the summer? What about our other housemates?

For that matter, what about the street vagrant who wants to read Thomas Friedman on his cellphone? Kaminer reframes the question more broadly: "If a company's payment plan includes obvious loopholes, as The New York Times's does, is it therefore ethical to step through them?"

No, she concludes, though her rationale is rather convoluted:

However you rationalize it, it's stealing, a little. If everyone opted to set his own pricing strategy, The Times would have to offer less free content. Then it would have to offer less content period. And after that?

For loyalists, then, setting your own price is unethical and unwise. Think of it as the tragedy of the commons, more or less: what happens to a shared resource when everyone uses it according to his individual needs. For what it's worth, Paul Smurl, the New York Times executive who oversees the pay model, suggests that sharing with your spouse or young child is one thing; sharing with friends or family who live elsewhere is another. But hey, he's biased as well.

Kaminer seems to see the Times as a charity rather than a business, and its online subscription charge as the equivalent of the "suggested donation" that New York museums ask for in lieu of a formal admission fee. Some people even begrudge the museums this, as the Times noted in a 2006 article reporting on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's rise in the suggested donation (which the headline called an "admission fee"):

Jane Kaplowitz, a Manhattan artist and teacher, said the increase was "outrageous and wrong."

"Working class people are so intimidated by the museum experience anyway, they don't feel they can just give a quarter," she said. "It's really unfair."

At the Met, the "suggested" fee is enforced by social pressure. You don't have to pay $20 to get in, but the alternative is to let the cashier know you're a cheapskate. In cyberspace, no one can hear you scrimp.

Also confusing is the distinction Smurl draws between letting a spouse or young child use your NYTimes.com account and letting someone who lives somewhere else do so. These are, respectively, "one thing" and "another"--not super-rigorous ethical categories if you ask us. In a comment on the article, the ironically named "Solipsist" of Amherst, Mass., offers a likely explanation:

I suggest that the ethical guide would be to think about what a reasonable person would do with a paper copy. The parents are probably not going to mail the Sunday Times from MN to NY over the summer, so the letter writer should buy his own subscription, but he should feel free to share it with his live-in girlfriend (as long as she lives in).

Evidently the Times hopes that its online readers impose upon themselves the constraints attendant to reading a physical newspaper, and pay up when they use the online edition to escape them. This does not seem a promising business plan.

Perhaps oddest of all is Kaminer's suggestion that dodging the paywall is "unethical and unwise" only for Times "loyalists." As commenter Caroline from Philadelphia notes, "those loopholes exist so that the paper can collect revenue from non-subscribers" by serving them advertisements. She adds; "I think paying subscribers are the ones being taken advantage of in this situation, not the New York Times, as we're purchasing a product that is available for free."

And if only "loyalists" are ethically obliged to pay, does that mean that people who are indifferent or hostile toward the Times are ethically in the clear if they use someone else's account? What about those of us who love to hate the Times? (Disclosure: This columnist currently has a free online subscription, courtesy of the Lincoln promotional offer.)

One attribute of Times loyalists, according to Kaminer, is the belief "that quality journalism is worth paying for." Our favorite part of the Times, though, is the corrections column. It's like an Easter egg hunt.

Here's a correction to an article in the same issue of the magazine in which Kaminer's column appeared: "An article on Page 30, about President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, misstates the title of the book from which the article is adapted. It is 'A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother,' not 'A Single Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.' "

The author of the article whose title the Times got so amusingly wrong is Janny Scott--a Times reporter. (She is biased, of course.)

The Onion

Another classic correction appeared yesterday: "A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with an article about how the original teen-girl tabloid has remained virtually unchanged since its inception in 1965, erroneously included a parody cover, produced by the satiric newspaper The Onion, that featured a picture of President Obama."

This correction appeared the same day as public editor Arthur Brisbane's column tweaking the Times for "needling peer news organizations." He mentions the Puffington Host along with newspapers owned by Gannett Co., News Corp. and the Tribune Co., but, oddly, not Tiger Beat.

You can see our point. How does one put a price on laughter?

One more bit of comedy gold comes from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman. You may remember Krugman as the Times columnist who demanded in January, that "G.O.P. leaders . . . take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric," which he falsely implied had something to do with the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Here's Krugman on the Times website Friday: "So, let's try another shot to the head."

To be sure, Krugman does not mean that literally (he's making some sort of zombie analogy). But then neither did Michele Bachmann when she said she wanted her constituents to be "armed and dangerous"--Krugman's only example of "eliminationist rhetoric."

Maybe Krugman should write to Ariel Kaminer and inquire about the ethics of quoting someone out of context as part of a smear campaign. As an employee of The New York Times, he is biased, of course.

'We All Have Multiple Personalities'
If your confidence in President Obama has been flagging, maybe David Brooks can restore it. The Daily Caller quotes Brooks from a recent appearance on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS":

"He's multiple animals," Brooks said. "You know, I would say we're all--we all have multiple personalities. My psychobabble description of him is he's a very complicated person who has many different selves, all of them authentic, but they come out in different contexts. And he is--has always has the ability to look at other parts of himself from a distance, and so it means he has great power to self-correct and I think it gives him power to see himself. It means that he rarely is all in."

Brooks said this is where Obama has an edge on former President George W. Bush.

"You know, President Bush didn't have as much--many multiple selves, so when he made a decision he was all in, he was just going to be there," Brooks continued. "But as I think President Obama is much more cautious, because he's a man of many pieces and many parts and not all of which I understand or I think anybody understands. But it may--it leads to that caution that we see time and time again and almost a self-distancing I see."

First of all, where in the world does Brooks get the idea that "we all have multiple personalities"? We certainly don't.

More important, amid the fog of psychobabble, isn't Brooks just saying that Obama is indecisive and irresolute? Consider this anecdote from Ryan Lizza's piece in The New Yorker on the administration's foreign policy:

During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department . . ., contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama's rule of non-interference.

White House officials "were so mad that somebody had actually 'interfered' in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere," the former Administration official said. "Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn't the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary's [Hillary Clinton's] credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line." The official said that Cohen "almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him."

This isn't cautious, it's aggressively passive. The only saving grace is that Obama was too weak to stick to his guns when challenged by Mrs. Clinton.

Lizza's piece concludes by reporting that "one of his advisers described the President's actions in Libya as 'leading from behind.' " The United States of America, back-seat driver to the world.

Birther, Truthers and Other Frothers
Are 9/11 "truthers" as bad as Obama "birthers"? In response to a Friday item, reader Brian Gates makes an excellent argument that they're worse:

You noted that Politico's Ben Smith went looking for an analogy to the set of beliefs that Barack Obama had either been born in Kenya, or Vancouver, or could not be a natural-born citizen because his father was not an American citizen, or at least that Obama has not done all he could to disprove those beliefs. He found what he called a "good analogue": the belief among Democrats that George W. Bush was either complicit in or directly responsible for the murder of thousands of human beings.

And we're supposed to be the xenophobes. Sure, like any normal person, I would take umbrage at the suggestion that I was from Canada. But being called Canadian is a pretty mild slur compared to being called mass murderer.

And reader Roger Membreno offers a better analogy:

I'm more interested in the number of Democrats who believe George W. Bush was not the rightful winner of the 2000 election. For a good portion of his presidency, we were subjected to complaints that he was "not my President!" out of some belief that he halted the recount before Al Gore could find the boxes of "missing" votes and claim victory. To me, birtherism is on par with the belief that Bush stole the Florida election--detractors are looking for a quick and easy way to declare the election results null and void (maybe out of fear that if he did legitimately win, then he could win a second term too).

PollingReport.com has the partisan breakdown of the recent New York Times/CBS poll results on the question of where President Obama was born, which we'd been unable to find Friday. The question was worded as follows:

"According to the Constitution, American presidents must be 'natural born citizens.' Some people say Barack Obama was NOT born in the United States, but was born in another country. Do YOU think Barack Obama was born in the United States, or do you think he was born in another country?"

Results: Republicans 33% U.S., 45% another country, 22% unsure; Democrats 81% U.S., 10% another country, 9% unsure; independents 52% U.S., 25% another country, 23% unsure.

We're particularly interested in the independents, because they more than anyone will decide whether Obama gets a second term. A majority of independents do not believe the false claim that Obama was born elsewhere. On the other hand, it's a small majority, and independents are even more likely than Republicans to say they're unsure.

Overall, the proportion of respondents who believe Obama was born outside the U.S. is up, to 25% from 20% a year earlier. Perhaps this is just a proxy for general unhappiness with the president. But it may be that birtherism is catching on in part because it is getting so much media attention.

Toby Harnden of London's Daily Telegraph suggests that "the inane chatter about [Donald] Trump fuels the prevailing narrative that Obama is coasting to re-election and a risky complacency among Democrats." If he's right, it's another example of the Taranto Principle in action.

Out on a Limb

• "Cold Spring Hurts, Helps Local Crop Farmers"--headline, Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle, April 23
• "Drafting QBs in First Round Can Boost a Franchise or Handicap It"--headline, Bend (Ore.) Bulletin, April 24