The New York Times has named a new readers’ representative:

The New York Times yesterday named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war.

Mr. Hoyt, 64, was the Washington editor at Knight Ridder [...] Before that, he served as Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau chief, and then as vice president for news, with responsibility for hiring and promoting top editors at the company’s newspapers, which included The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Jose Mercury-News and The Detroit Free Press.

[...] Mr. Hoyt worked as a reporter for The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla.; The Detroit Free Press; The Miami Herald; and the entire Knight Ridder chain.

In 1973, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the history of mental health problems suffered by Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, who briefly was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1972, and the fact that Mr. Eagleton had undergone electric shock therapy.

Mr. Hoyt also held top editing jobs at The Free Press and The Wichita Eagle-Beacon. His wife, Linda Kauss, is a deputy managing editor at USA Today.

Mind you, this guy is supposed to be the readers’ representative. All I see here, though, is stuff to establish what a great newspaperman he is. He sounds more like the newspaper’s representative to the readers — a spokesman, if you will — than a representative of the audience to the paper. Time will tell.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if they chose someone with absolutely no news-media experience whatsoever to do this — just a person, intelligent and fair-minded, who’s interested in getting accurate information. That would be a real readers’ representative. If this person didn’t understand the restrictions under which the reporters and editors worked, and demanded things that the newspaper staff didn’t think were important or worth the trouble — too bad; it’s up to the papers to solve those problems.

The newspapers are, for one example, still using a lot of anonymous quotes. These are not too popular with readers, but the newspapers love them because it’s easier to get someone to say something newsworthy if they don’t have to stand behind their words.

This is insane, of course; the value and perceived reliability of a piece of information is very largely dependent on where it comes from, and on what axes that source might have to grind. If I say ‘George Bush is a fool’, that’s worth nothing because I don’t have access to any information that anyone else has. If Nancy Pelosi says ‘George Bush is a fool’, that’s also worth nothing because the Democrats have misinterpreted the idea of ’staying on message’ to mean nothing more than ’say the same thing over and over again’.

If Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, says ‘George Bush is a fool’, that’s front-page news because she has information about Bush that most people don’t have, and because saying this would seem to be contrary to her political interests. If she says this, but is quoted merely as a ’senior State Department official’, then it’s not news. There are lots of ’senior State Department officials’, and many of them might just not like the president.

In practice, the Secretary of State isn’t going to complain about the president to the New York Times just on the condition that they not print her name. There are a lot of other situations, though, where the identity of the person making a statement is pretty important to the readers’ understanding of it. If we hear that a ‘former U.S. Attorney General’ is complaining about Gitmo, the information that such complaints were being made by Ramsey Clark, as opposed to John Ashcroft, would be pretty important.

And, more plausibly — because Ramsey Clark doesn’t exactly speak off the record — when we hear that ’senior military commanders’ are complaining that the war in Iraq is ‘lost’, who these commanders are is a very important part of the story.

You can talk about the need to ‘protect sources’, but with very few exceptions perhaps we should all discount statements that people are not willing to attach their names to. If you are witness to a scandal, you might be fired after you’re quoted in the newspaper complaining about your boss; but if it’s not just a tempest in a teapot, and if the People are actually incensed by what you’ve witnessed, you might just be hired to replace your boss after he’s sent to jail.

Instead of insisting on this kind of credibility, though, the news media happily accommodate people who are shocked — shocked! — by what’s going on around them, but who nevertheless insist on remaining ensconced in the middle of the scandalous pit of vipers that they feel the need to Inform The Public about.

The only other situation I can think of where this happens on a large scale is in high school. We’re conducting public discourse via rumor, and as most of the news media have dropped all but the pretense of political neutrality, few if any of these things are ever widely debunked. The New York Times still covers Dan Rather as newsworthy, but they don’t mention the fact that he left CBS in disgrace. If you get your news exclusively from the New York Times, you could quite easily wind up believing some things that are provably not so.

But then I can’t imagine that too many people read the New York Times any more for actual hard national and international news, and more than people read the Washington Times for the same thing. The New York Times has squandered much of the credibility it once had. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, if we shift our media lenses bit.

The Times‘ article announcing Clark Hoyt’s appointment says:

Over the last year, [Hoyt] has spoken publicly about his concerns for the future of the newspaper industry, arguing that weakening finances, a toxic partisan atmosphere and coziness with government officials threaten to undermine journalistic courage and integrity. He also spoke before a Congressional committee, arguing for a stronger Freedom of Information Act.

The newspaper business is indeed in trouble. Circulation is falling, and the old business model, which depended to a large part on classified ads, no longer works.

National newspapers have never been very practical in the United States, simply because of the size of the place. Even today, there are only three newspapers that you can buy everywhere in the country: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today. All the other major newspapers in the country have had to do their best to attract as many readers as possible from the fairly small area in which they distributed their papers. As a result, in the early-to-mid 20th century, the United States developed a journalistic culture that strongly endorsed the proposition that news media should be fair and neutral.

This is, in the end, ridiculous. Newspapers are run by people, and people have opinions. These opinions will tell in the things they choose to write about, and in how they decide to write about them. For instance, I do not see the United States’ lack of government-paid health insurance as a problem; if I were writing a story about some poor uninsured wretch, I’d start by asking why it is that in the United States just about everything is very affordable except for health care. The New York Times doesn’t think this way, and so their stories on the subject are all about how government health care would help these people.

This isn’t dishonest; it’s just a reflection of the genuine opinions of the Times‘ staff.

Perhaps the answer to the problems that Hoyt has spoken about — which, in aggregate, mean the collapse of the newspaper industry — involves dropping entirely the pretense of neutrality.

Neutral coverage, after all, will tend to be dull. On the one hand, X, but on the other hand, Y. A well-written story like this by a conscientious reporter can approach neutrality and can give a fairly accurate picture of a situation. But it’s unreasonable to expect reporters to do this. Reporters immerse themselves in the tiniest minutia of minor stories, and in most if not all cases, after talking to the principals involved, they’re going to wind up with an opinion of their own on, say, who should be elected as dog catcher.

Our current approach requires this intelligent and well-informed person to then suppress all his conclusions about the subject he’s been studying. This is ridiculous.

The New York Times seems to understand this. A lot of conservative commentators point gleefully to the Times‘ falling circulation and finances, and say that these are the result of the paper’s increasingly transparent left-wing bias, and the allegedly decreasing quality of its coverage. I’m not sure that this is true. I think that it’s the result of the Times shifting from being a traditionally aloof and neutral Newspaper of Record and toward being a more overtly partisan paper. Being the Newspaper of Record is nice and it does help sell papers; but technology has largely obviated the need for such a publication. Today, it’s more valuable to have a fiercely loyal readership who are told what they want to hear.

Fox News has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. You can’t get the same benefits by being nakedly partisan on the left wing in American media, because most of the allegedly neutral media outlets are in fact pretty left-wing.

The problem — the big problem — is that while everyone agrees that Fox News is more right-wing than most of the news media (if most of the media are left-wing, then ‘fair and balanced’ after all means ‘more right-wing than the rest of ‘em’), most of the news media and the left in general still clings to the notion that the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, CNN, etc. are all ‘neutral’.

More openly partisan news media would be less bitterly partisan news media, and in the aggregate it would offer more accurate news than we have now. As it is, even NPR and the New York Times stubbornly insist that their open advocacy of socialism is ‘neutral’, and that anything to the right of them is therefore obviously ‘right wing’ and therefore ‘biased’.

If publications like the Times would merely admit — if only to themselves — that they have a specific socio-political point of view, they’d find themselves liberated to cover ‘the truth’ as they see it without maintaining a farcical pretense of neutrality. One way or the other, this is the future of news: the original justification for neutrality — the high capital costs of newspapers, radio, and TV, necessitating as broad an audience as possible — is now obsolete. If the newspapers can admit this, they might be able to turn into something the survives.