Archive for the 'New York Times' Category

Stupidiest idea ever

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on January 17, 2007
in Barry Bonds, Murray Chass, New York Times and Steroids
. 10 Comments

Now, it’s very possible that I simply don’t get Murray Chass’s sense of humor…but no matter how many times I read this, I couldn’t find any indication that there was anything in here that was supposed to be a joke. But you decide:

“Six weeks after they agreed to terms on new contracts, Barry Bonds and J. D. Drew remain unsigned. Bonds hasn’t signed with the Giants; Drew hasn’t signed with the Red Sox. That prompts a thought. If both contracts were to fall through, the Red Sox could sign Bonds to play left field and move Manny Ramírez back to his original position in right.”

If Chass is being serious, you need to give him credit for coming up with perhaps the all-time most idiotic idea ever. The Sox have been consistent in their desire to rid the team of distractions; they’re also trying to limit overpaying senior citizen superstars that aren’t named Roger Clemens. Putting Bonds — with his demands for special treatment and the media-circus that follows him — into the Sox’s clubhouse at Fenway is like forcing Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton to share a dressing room. And considering the media frenzy that occurs whenever Manny sneezes, can you imagine what it’d be like to have federal investigators and investigative reporters trying to see what they can dig up about Barry’s past? Good god.

(You do need to give Murray credit for finding new sources: Brian Sabean’s secretary. To wit: “Brian Sabean, the Giants’ general manager, did not return a telephone call yesterday seeking comment on the contract circumstances. His secretary, told what the call was about, said she did not think Sabean would comment.”)

What we talk about when we don’t talk about race

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on January 15, 2007
in New York Times and Race in america
. 3 Comments

Eliot Spitzer — and for those of you not in the New York region who also have had your heads buring in the sand, he’s the Empire State’s new governor — made his first judicial appointment yesterday, nominating Theodore T. Jones to the Court of Appeals. The Times’s headline on the story reads, “Spitzer Selects a Black Jurist for the Top Court.” Jones is also ID’d in the first sentence as a “black judge,” and the story notes that “Spitzer’s predecessor, George E. Pataki” left office with the Court of Appeals absent a black member for the first time in more than two decades.

It would seem safe to assume that when considering his options, Spitzer gave some thought to Jones’s race…right? Not according to the governor, who said — with a straight face — that “race, gender did not play a role in my selection process” and that he only considered “who would be the best jurist.” He also said he was glad the state’s government reflected “the diversity of our society,” which it most definitely does not, unless whites are counted differently from everyone else…but that’s a whole other story.

Twenty-nine** years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr…and we still can’t talk openly and honestly about race.

(The most unintentionally humorous comment on Jones’s appointment came via the Times, who characterized embattled Republican State Senate Joseph Bruno’s comments about Jones as being “very affirmative.” Indeed.*)

*No, I am not saying Jones is not fully worthy. I know absolutely nothing about the state’s judges.

** Actually, 39. I ain’t so good at math.

An update on those unseemly obsessions

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on January 10, 2007
in Media ethics, Murray Chass and New York Times
. 0 Comments

Some interesting comments in response to yesterday’s Chass column that are worth highlighting.

For instance, when one reader (PatsFanDK) wrote in to Chass questioning his Drew columns, Chass (purportedly) responded (after all, I can’t confirm the existence or genuineness of this email exchange), “You might want to reread what I wrote. You obviously think I wrote that the Red Sox tampered with Drew. I did not, though I suspect they did. I wrote that baseball officials and executives of other clubs were talking about their suspicions that the Red Sox tampered. If you know that is a lie, you must be a terrific reporter.”

I’d suggest once again that Chass check out the Times’s ethic guidelines, in which agendas — especially when sources are granted anonymity — are expected to be highlighted. In Chass’s pieces, they clearly weren’t: there was no explanation of why other GMs might have a vested interest in making the Red Sox look bad, and no indication as to whether any of these GMs or executives had any previous beef with Theo or the Sox. (There also still has not been any explanation of why, if these “suspicions” were so widely discussed, virtually all of the principals have since said, on the record, that they hadn’t heard anything about it until Chass’s piece.)

A little further down, branatical points out something I had missed. Yesterday, Chass wrote that “no one is saying” if Drew had had a second physical since the Sox-administered one that apparently raised some concerns. (Chass dismissingly attributes this to “privacy laws that give general managers and agents an excuse not to talk about a player’s medical condition when they don’t want to talk about it”. Damn privacy laws!) But that “no one” doesn’t include Drew himself — whom Chass has been unable to reach. Way back on December 30, Nick Cafardo was able to get this info. He wroter: “Drew sought and received a second opinion from Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham, Ala. while Red Sox team physician Dr. Thomas Gill did his own battery of tests when Drew came for a physical in mid-December.” Which seems to indicate that Chass not only is a bad reporter…he doesn’t even bother to read what else has been written about a subject he’s been jawing on about for weeks on end. Or, as branatical says, “If I am Murray Chass and I am a writer for the NY Times, I do Lexis searches and find out (A.) Other reporters in my business have actually spoken to Drew at home and (B.) other reporters have found out the name of the doctor who allegedly did a second examination. Then, I give up on my nonsensical columns about the Red Sox and write more about how Jeter and ARod are planning a trip to Holland in the spring to pick tulips, all in an effort to become close friends again.”

Who’s obsession is more unseemly?

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on January 9, 2007
in J.D. Drew, Murray Chass and New York Times
. 9 Comments

It’s a good question. On the one hand, you have my obsession with Murray Chass; on the other hand, there’s Murray’s infant-like fascination with the Red Sox. Whatever the answer to that question is, it’s fairly clear (to me, anyway), that my obsession doesn’t result in my putting bad info in a national newspaper week after week, while Murray’s does.

Like, for instance, today, when apropos of absolutely nothing, Murray revisits the J.D. Drew non-controversy. There’s no new info here — heck, there’s really not even any new reporting here, unless you count a phone call to Drew’s mom as reporting — but there is another chance for Chass to trot out his contention/implication that there was tampering going on between the Red Sox and Drew’s agent, Scott Boras. Murray’s had a hard-on for this issue for more than a month, and the fact that multiple outlets (like The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, the hometown papers of the two teams most intimately involved in this issue) have pretty much shown that Chass’s story had tenuously little connection to reality doesn’t seem to sway him one bit.

In a weird way, that’s understandable — after all, he recently told a reader that “my reporting is always correct.” But what’s up with the Times’s editors — you know, the gatekeepers? At least one national sportswriter has written in to them, asking why Chass is allowed to print information that’s demonstrably false (like the claim that Dodgers GM Ned Colletti was refusing to talk to Theo when, Colletti readily confirmed that the two were speaking almost daily), or, for that matter, why Chass’s stories seem completely exempt from corrections.

Somehow, I doubt we’ll ever get an answer to that question. Sigh.

Wow.

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on December 19, 2006
in Murray Chass and New York Times
. 1 Comment

One of Feeding the Monster’s faithful readers actually beat me to the punch, as noted in the comment (#8) he made on yesterday’s post.

To wit: this past weekend, Brian M. emailed Murray Chass and asked about the whole Drew/Dodgers tampering story. Brian says he got this reply in return:

“I will base my reputation of nearly 40 years at the Times against anything the LA Times reported. Ask anybody in the business, and he will tell you my reporting is always correct, whether I’m quoting people by name or not. You don’t have to believe what I have reported, but that’s your problem, not mine.”

Wow. “My reporting is always correct”? We’re dealing with a deity here, folks. Apparently, Chass is so omniscient that his reporting is correct even when the subjects themselves say it’s not, as was the case when Chass said people were whispering in his ear that “Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s telephone calls.” That was so correct that a Dodgers spokesman felt compelled to clarify that “they probably talked about 20 times last week,” just one of several “clarifications” that article prompted.

Well sure, Ned Colletti might say that…but has he checked with Murray and his 40 years in the business?

Murray Chass and the shaky ethics of the sports section

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on December 18, 2006
in Media ethics, Murray Chass and New York Times
. 10 Comments

Yesterday, the Times’s Murray Chass wrote about the internal debate supposedly taking place within the front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time since he “broke” the story on December 8 that the Dodgers were considering filing tampering charges against the Red Sox for their “signing” of J.D. Drew. “Maybe it’s the environment — laid-back Los Angeles,” Chass wrote. “Maybe he would have been tougher in a tougher environment — Boston. But Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers, not the Red Sox, and he is what he is. What he is not is a fighter. McCourt, who has been described as not being a troublemaker, chose not to pursue a tampering charge against the Red Sox over the recent signing of J. D. Drew despite the urging of officials from other clubs.”

It was an astounding item at the tail ends of an astounding week, even by Chass’s flimsy standards. (It’s also likely the first time ever that Frank McCourt has been described as a big softy.) In his original piece, Chass wrote that “many people” had “urged the Dodgers to file a tampering charge.” Chass went on to say that “[o]thers described Colletti as angry about the Drew development and said that relations between Colletti and Theo Epstein, Boston’s general manager, had become strained to the point where Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s telephone calls” and that “[a]n executive of one club said the Dodgers’ owner, Frank McCourt, was certain tampering had occurred.”

Within 24 hours, other news outlets began reporting on just how off-base Chass’s story was. On the 9th, the Globe quoted MLB CEO Bob DuPuy saying he “had not heard anything” about the topic. That on-the-record quote immediately put Chass’s the central premise of Chass’s anonymously sourced story — that the Red Sox “were a hot topic of conversation at the general managers’ meeting last month and at the winter meetings last week” — into doubt. (In the clubby world of Major League Baseball, DuPuy would have been among the first people to hear if tampering charges were seriously being discussed.) The Globe story also knocked down the patently ridiculous notion that Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s calls: “Through a Dodgers spokesman, Colletti also refuted Chass’s allegation that there was a rift between Colletti and Epstein, and that he refused to take Epstein’s phone calls in Orlando. ‘They probably talked about 20 times last week,’ said spokesman Josh Rawitch. Indeed, when Colletti arrived at the meetings late last Sunday night from the Dominican Republic, one of his first orders of business was to conduct an hourlong face-to-face meeting with Epstein on a possible deal for Manny Ramírez.” (A hot conversation at both meetings most definitely was the potential of a Dodgers-Sox trade involving Manny.)

Three days later, the Los Angeles Times went one step further, writing that “[t]he Dodgers hadn’t seriously considered asking Major League Baseball to investigate until a column last week in the New York Times suggested tampering had occurred.” (What’s more, Drew is still not signed, although in the scheme of things that’s a minor point.)

Chass’s creation of a story and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge his mistakes is nothing new for the Times’s irascible sports columnist. (It’s also worth noting the likelihood that Chass is as agenda-driven as anyone on the paper; only a month ago, Chass asked — in all seriousness — if the Sox’s posting fee bid for Daisuke Matsuzaka was “evil.” He decided it was “[m]ind boggling perhaps, but not evil. Stunning perhaps, but not evil. Incredulous maybe, but not evil. Obscene, as an executive of another club said, but not evil.”) On September 19, he wrote that the likelihood that the Mets would clinch their division at home meant the team “sold more than 10,000 extra tickets for last night’s game.” The attendance for the game Chass was referring to was 46,729. As I pointed out at the time, in the entire second half of the season, the Mets’ home attendance had dipped below 45,000 only nine times, had been under 40,000 only three times, and under 35,000 only once.

A little more than a month before that, Chass wrote that the Red Sox should be embarrassed by the Yankees lead in the AL East because “the Yankees have played much of the season without a third of their starting lineup. … Bruised and bloodied, the Yankees have been winning with players named Melky and Bubba. With only a third of the season to go, they have won more than the Red Sox, who until catcher Jason Varitek had knee surgery last week, had not dealt with the extended absence of an everyday player.” That’s perilously close to an out-and-out lie: the Sox’s starting center fielder (Coco Crisp) and their starting right fielder (Trot Nixon) had both been on the DL; at the time Chass’s article ran, Nixon had already been out of commission for several weeks. What’s more, six members of the Sox’s pitching staff had been on the DL; David Wells had already been out on three separate occasions.

Chass’s stories seem to skirt many of the Times’s codified ethics regulations. The paper’s failure to correct Chass’s errors also directly contradicts its stated policy on corrections: “As journalists we treat our readers, viewers, listeners and online users as fairly and openly as possible. Whatever the medium, we tell our audiences the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it. We correct our errors explicitly as soon as we become aware of them. We do not wait for someone to request a correction. We publish corrections in a prominent and consistent location or broadcast time slot.” Let’s see: complete, unvarnished truth? Nope. None of the examples I’ve cited above have received corrections, and several of these have been pointed out to an editor or editors in the paper’s sports department (and not by me). Responding to a query about Chass’s piece about the MASH-unit Yankees, one editor explained in an email that since Coco was not still on the disabled list, he didn’t count. And Trot? Well, he’d only “recently been injured.” Finally, since “pitchers are not considered everyday players,” they didn’t count either. So not only did the Times fail to publish a correction on its own, it actively refused to run a correction after an error had been brought to an editors attention. I still haven’t heard any explanation of why there hasn’t been a correction on the contention that Ned Colletti wasn’t returning Theo’s calls, or why the fuzzy math used for the Mets attendance boost was never clarified, or why…well, there are lots and lots of examples, including such easily verifiable information as, say, a player’s age.

***

I don’t mean to pick on Murray. OK, fine, that’s not true; I most definitely mean to pick on Murray. (Before someone points out the irony of my having an axe to grind with the fact that Chass has an act to grind, let me point out — and not for the first time — that this is a blog. It’s entire reason for being is so I can put forth my take on things. I have no codified ethics policy, etc etc.) But I also want to raise a larger point: why is it that the ethical guidelines so scrupulously enforced in virtually every other part of daily newspapers are ignored when it comes to the sports section? In Feeding the Monster, I wrote how an article by Dan Shaughnessy that described the mood in the Red Sox’s baseball operations department on the day that Theo Epstein’s officially returned to the team was flat-out wrong; I knew that because I (unlike Shaughnessy) was physically there. There sure as hell hasn’t been a correction on that item. Reporters carry water for sources with some regularity. Information that’s known to be false is printed. There’s been lots of talk about how the media fell down on the job during the steroids era; that seems to be the least of the problems. There are, of course, daily examples of excellent journalism being committed by sportswriters. There’s also lots and lots of crap.

I understand that the sports section is not of the same import as national or international news. But arts sections and styles sections and food sections are all held to some standards. What makes sports so different?

Yet more proof that Murray Chass just pulls this crap out of his ass

Published
by
Seth Mnookin
on December 12, 2006
in Media ethics, Murray Chass and New York Times
. 0 Comments

Remember last week, when the Times’s Murray Chass wrote an anonymously sourced article that claimed Dodgers officials were considering filing tampering charges against the Red Sox because of the J.D. Drew signing? (I sure do.) Here was Chass’s proof: an “executive of one club” said the “Dodgers’ owner, Frank McCourt, was certain tampering had occured.”

Now, Chass got a truly shocking number of things wrong in the piece, including whether or not Theo and Dodgers GM Ned Colletti were talking (they were). Now it seems as if the entire premise of the piece was, in fact, made up out of whole cloth.

No joke. Check out this story in today’s Los Angeles Times:

“The Dodgers hadn’t seriously considered asking Major League Baseball to investigate until a column last week in the New York Times suggested tampering had occurred, leading General Manager Ned Colletti to say Friday, ‘We’ve looked into’ filing charges.’” (Emphasis added to stress just how insane this whole thing is.)

To review: Murray Chass writes one in a series of his bizarre, vitriolic rants directed at the Red Sox in which he quotes anonymous “executives” as saying the Dodgers are considering filing tampering charges…while, in reality, the Dodgers weren’t considering any such thing until Chass wrote his column!

We direct Chass to the relevant sections of the Times’s guideline on ethics:

p. 9, paragraph 23: “[I]t is essential that we preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias.”

As well as the paper’s policy on anonymous sourcing:

“In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading. … Confidential sources must have direct knowledge of the information they are giving us — or they must be the authorized representatives of an authority, known to us, who has such knowledge.”

Not only did the source not have direct knowledge of the information, the article actually created the exact situation it purported to report — that there was “talk of misconduct” swirling around the Sox.

It’s kind of impressive, if you think about it.