The Times’s editorial about President Obama’s surveillance state was scathing. Some called it a “vivisection.” But a few hours after “President Obama’s Dragnet” went online Thursday afternoon, one particularly notable sentence had been changed.

“The administration has now lost all credibility,” it read.

After the change was made, the sentence read, “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.”

That’s a far narrower construction. Was it, as Gawker said in a headline and many chimed in on Twitter and elsewhere, a secret softening of the Times’s opinion?

In a phone interview Friday morning, Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said no softening was intended.

“We thought it was obvious that we were talking about the administration’s credibility on this particular issue — secrecy and surveillance,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “But it soon became obvious that some well-meaning people were not understanding that, so we thought that we should clarify it.”

He elaborated: “We think issue by issue. We didn’t intend a blanket condemnation.”

He rejects the criticism of the change.

“We didn’t soften it one iota from its original intent,” Mr. Rosenthal said. Other modifications were made to the online version of the editorial to reflect news as it happened through the day on a fast-moving story; that’s not unusual.

Should the changed editorial have carried an editor’s note to explain the modification? Mr. Rosenthal says no.

“If we had changed the intent of the editorial, it would have been dishonest not to say so,” he said. “But that wasn’t the case. We don’t have to run a note every time we make an update.”

Has that ever happened — an editor’s note explaining a major reversal?

No, he said. “We tend to agree with our own opinions.”

My take: There’s no question that the sentence, as edited, has a significantly different meaning. But I don’t believe that the editorial board’s original intention was to say that the administration no longer has any credibility on any issue. Nor do I believe that the board was frightened out of its convictions by reaction from the outside.

It was fine to clarify, but there is a legitimate concern about transparency. While a full editor’s note — a pretty big deal, almost a mea culpa, in the newspaper world — was unnecessary, the editorial should have carried a tag that said “Updated,” as many online articles do. And a single sentence appended after the ending should have described the nature of the update. It’s worth noting, though, that the editorial, as edited (or softened, or clarified, as you wish), is still a brutal takedown of the administration on this crucially important issue. Nothing changed about that.

Is it ethical for a student to submit the same paper in two college classes? That was the question posed to the Ethicist in last Sunday’s Times Magazine. His answer, in brief, was yes. It may be lazy, he concluded, but it’s not unethical.

The Ethicist, also known as Chuck Klosterman, wrote: “I don’t think this is cheating. I wouldn’t say it qualifies as ‘genius,’ and it might get you expelled from some universities. Yet I can’t isolate anything about this practice that harms other people, provides you with an unfair advantage or engenders an unjustified reward.”

A number of readers were quick to object. Michael J. Murray, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, described himself as “deeply disappointed and somewhat offended.” He said that at his university, this would be seen as a form of plagiarism, and certainly as academic dishonesty.

Another reader, Sandra Wilde of the City University of New York, suggested that by any measure — university rules or the common-sense use of one’s conscience — Mr. Klosterman was off base.

“I often think he gets it wrong, but today’s column crosses a line,” she wrote. “Academic integrity is an explicit set of expectations that provide ground rules for those at universities. A good rule for judging the ethics of your own behavior is whether you’d admit to it upfront, not whether you can do it well enough to get away with it.” Read more…

After being away for much of the past week or so, I’m catching up with a few issues, along with some other items of interest.

1. A “Lives” piece in The Times Magazine on May 19, written by the contributor Noah Gallagher Shannon, describes the author’s thoughts as his flight to Denver developed mechanical problems and was diverted to Philadelphia. The article’s sub-headline reads, “The plane was about to crash. Now what?”

It’s a gripping read. You feel Mr. Shannon’s fear: “After they cut the electronics, the engines powered down to a hum. My body froze. In the quiet dark, the plane began to pitch and roll.” And you feel his relief, as the flight lands safely.

But after the article appeared, many of those who read it – particularly aviation experts — objected, saying that many of the details did not ring true, especially from a technical perspective. Some even suggested that it was made up of whole cloth. Read more…

When Anthony D. Weiner announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City recently — and rather oddly, in a video that surfaced online late at night and then disappeared — it was good to see the reporter David Halbfinger take a hard look at the video’s assertions, fact-checking them aggressively and in real time.

For example, Mr. Halbfinger wrote about the candidate’s claim of a health care overhaul, “Mr. Weiner’s go-it-alone style in Congress – and his razor-sharp verbal bite – earned him hours of television airtime and a national following among liberals, but little else to show for it.”

The editorial writer Lawrence Downes also offered an incisive view in the “Taking Note” blog. “The half-life of disgrace seems to be getting shorter,” he wrote. “The new Anthony Weiner looks a lot like the old: full of bluster, full of ideas, full of himself.”

And the reporter Michael Barbaro wrote an analytical piece soon after, raising questions and describing the strange quality of the campaign thus far. With poll numbers showing “a deep distaste for his candidacy,” Mr. Weiner “remained holed up in his apartment” after his announcement. Mr. Barbaro wrote, “His campaign seemed determined that the warm images from the video be the ones that dominated the day.”

This kind of hard-nosed skepticism has sometimes been in short supply in recent weeks when it comes to the former congressman, who resigned in June 2011 after an online sex scandal, and in his run for New York City’s top office. Read more…

With press rights very much in the news this week, here are some of the most noteworthy pieces I’ve come across on the subject.

1. Molly Redden of The New Republic writes that there really is a chilling effect on journalism from the Justice Department’s leak investigations, quoting the investigative journalist Jane Mayer: “It’s a huge impediment to reporting, and so ‘chilling’ isn’t quite strong enough. It’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.”

2. David A. Kaplan of Fortune magazine, who teaches First Amendment law at New York University, says the press should stop whining: “From the government’s perspective, lawlessness is a bad thing, and disclosure of secrets can endanger security. When the Justice Department, legally (so far as we know), wants to obtain evidence to prove law-breaking, it seems to me the press is entitled to no special protection.”

3. The former New York Times counsel James Goodale, writing in The Daily Beast, compares President Obama’s record on press rights to that of President Richard Nixon and recalls that Mr. Obama “deep-sixed” the press shield law he is now proposing.

4. Frank Rich of New York Magazine, formerly a Times columnist, calls the seizure of Associated Press phone records “the scandal with legs” for the president.

5. Thomas Stackpole of Mother Jones, with information from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, details the six indictments of government leakers during the Obama administration.

6. The New Yorker’s general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, analyzes the A.P. phone records case from a legal perspective: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.”

7. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, writing for National Review Online, summarizes the recent troubles in the Obama administration: “ ‘Hope and change’ is fast becoming the 1973 Nixon White House.”

8. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian writes about the media’s sudden interest in civil liberties, coming rather late in the troubled game, as he notes. In short, he writes, the issue is catching fire now because media organizations are now in the crosshairs: “It is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are.”

A note to readers: My Sunday print column in the Review section examines and explains The Times’s policy on photographic integrity. After that, I’ll be off the grid for a few days.

This was supposed to be the administration of unprecedented transparency. President Obama promised that when he took office, and the White House’s Web site says so on this very day. It reads:

My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.

Instead, it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press. I wrote about the chilling effect of the Obama administration’s leak investigations – including the ramped-up criminal prosecution of those who provide information to the press — in a Sunday column in March.

Now that situation, already bad, has taken a major turn for the worse with revelations that the Obama Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records of a large number of journalists for The Associated Press, as part of a leak investigation.

While it may not be immediately apparent, readers have a big stake in this development. Read more…

Here’s the Monday roundup:

Many readers were critical of how The Times covered misdeeds by the Internal Revenue Service, which admitted targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status with special scrutiny.

In essence, these readers believed The Times gave too little prominence to the story initially in Saturday’s paper and placed emphasis on the wrong aspect of the situation – the apology and the politics rather than the problem itself.

Separately, some readers were also perturbed by the Book Review’s decision to interview Amanda Knox in its “By the Book” feature. Ms. Knox is accused of killing her roommate in Italy and is the author of a new book, “Waiting to Be Heard.” And still others objected to the photograph of a young woman in a black swimsuit and a leather jacket on the cover of Sunday’s T Magazine. Read more…

When Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, resigned from his post, protesting the torture of prisoners there and political interference that deterred his work, he says he was subjected to a gag order by the Bush administration.

When Gregory Hicks, a veteran diplomat, asked too many questions about what happened behind the scenes in Benghazi, Libya, last fall, he says he was demoted by the Obama administration.

Whistle-blowers come in all shapes and with all political affiliations. What they share, often, is integrity so strong and consciences so unrelenting that they act against their own best interests. Rarely do things turn out particularly well for them, as a recent film by Robert Greenwald made clear.

The failures of government transparency, too, cross party lines. Rooted in political expediency, those failures of transparency know no color, neither red nor blue. And they need to be pointed out and resisted. As author Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.”

For me, those issues are the fascinating back story of the coverage of the terrorist attack in Benghazi last fall and its aftermath. Government obfuscation, in all its forms, and the drive for honesty and openness, is what’s captivating not only on this subject, but also about coverage of America’s growing drone program and all of its highly secretive military activity of the last decade. (The Times’s Mark Mazzetti’s recent book, “The Way of the Knife,” is important reading on this subject.)

I wrote about The Times’s Benghazi coverage on Tuesday, rejecting the idea that it has ignored the subject, as some claim,  but also calling for coverage that is less oriented toward political polarization and more toward digging out what is new here and what really happened last September. Read more…

If there’s a story – or even a word – that’s more fraught with divisive American politics than “Benghazi,” I’m unaware of it.

The attacks last fall on an American diplomatic mission and C.I.A. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four American government employees, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, have become a flash point for critics of the Obama administration who see what happened as proof of the president’s incompetence, or worse. They see the aftermath as a cover-up.

So it wasn’t a particular surprise that perturbed readers have been writing to me this week about The Times’s silence, as they see it, in advance of hearings this week on Capitol Hill. (Last fall, I criticized The Times for keeping a Libya hearing story off the front page when it was treated as major news elsewhere; I also wrote that it had failed to “connect the dots” for readers about what had happened.)

Those comments gained heat after The Washington Post led its print edition Tuesday with an article, quoting the United States diplomat Gregory Hicks, laying out a situation that he said might have averted a second attack.

“His remarks are the first public account from a U.S. official who was in Libya at the time of the attacks about the options that were weighed as militants mobbed the American diplomatic outpost and C.I.A. station in Benghazi,” The Post reported.

The Times has not picked up on that story line and, so far, has not written about the hearings, although other news organizations have done so.

Editors here generally don’t like to broadcast what they are working on, but I have reason to believe that readers can expect to see a story, in advance of the hearings, in Wednesday’s print edition. A version of that article is quite likely to appear sometime on Tuesday, online, as well. (Please note: That coverage is not in any way in response to my questions or to reader commentary; the coverage has been planned for some time.)
Read more…

Here’s a look at what readers of The Times had to say over the weekend, based on what came across my desk.

1. Many readers are reasonably criticizing the way an anonymous quote was presented in the compelling front-page article about Katherine Russell, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspected Boston bombers:

Stephen Dougherty of Santa Barbara, Calif., phrased it gently:

The article is well written and I appreciate the obvious effort the reporters went to get such a well-researched story.

But I am curious about this sentence: “She seemed to embrace her new religion willingly and enthusiastically,” said someone who occasionally attended Russell family gatherings, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to betray the family’s confidence.”

How does remaining anonymous prevent the person from betraying the family’s confidence. To prevent that, the person should not have spoken.

To be clear, I have no problem with The Times reporting what the person said, but I don’t think the family’s confidence was maintained. Perhaps it would have been better to simply say “a person who wished to remain anonymous.”

I love the New York Times reporting, excellent writing and editing. But this phrase just does not seem to ring true.

Read more…

About three weeks after 9/11, Clyde Haberman and his editors took a chance. He wrote and they published an “NYC” column in The Times that employed a light and humorous touch on the subject of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Mr. Haberman recalled in an e-mail on Tuesday:

Neither I nor the night Metro editor back then was sure if the timing was right for such a column. But it ran, and it clicked. A colleague told me later that she was at a dinner party one night, seated next to the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Somehow, that column came up in conversation, and Franzen said to her, “You know, I read that column and I knew we were going to be O.K.”

How soon after a deadly event is any kind of humorous approach appropriate or even helpful?

The Sunday Review section tested that question last weekend with a piece by the gifted comedy writer, actor and producer Larry David, related to the Boston Marathon bombings. It was a satirical Q. and A. that portrayed how his mother would have reacted to news that he was a suspected terrorist, inspired by Zubeidat Tsarnaeva’s  impassioned defense of her sons.  Many readers found it offensive, and wrote to me about it. Read more…

Journalism has a long and much debated history of articles reported either undercover or without complete representation — one came to light this month involving some BBC reporters and a trip to North Korea.

Often, there is a balance between revealing that one is a reporter and being able to get the full story. It’s not black and white, and many factors are at play. Is the story important? Are there other ways to get the same information? Is the privacy of average citizens invaded?

Here’s a minor case study. Eric Lipton, who writes about ethics and lobbyists as an enterprise reporter in the Washington bureau, was working on an article about former aides to Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, who became lobbyists, when he learned about a gathering at a Capitol Hill town house owned by Federal Express. It would include lobbyists, some of them former aides to Mr. Baucus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.   Read more…