Earlier today, Vanity Fair’s Bruce Feirstein pointed out a humorous and somewhat bizarre reader survey conducted by the New York Times last week. The survey, a pop-up on the Times website, solicited feedback from readers on their opinions on the Times,
which isn't that unusual. But the poll's references to recent newsroom
controversies including Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, MoveOn's "General
Betray-Us" ad, and the NSA wiretapping exposé, were downright shocking
for Times Kremlinologists, for whom the survey seemed to offer
an unlikely window onto the paper’s Id. The list of topics on which
readers were polled potentially indicated which incidents insiders
considered the most
damaging to the paper's reputation. And there are other oddities. The
paper's infamous, artfully-worded 2004 Editor's Note-cum-mea culpa
explaining the flawed W.M.D coverage didn’t name names. But the online
survey bluntly states that Judith Miller’s Iraq stories “turned out to
be wrong.” The survey also misspelled Jayson Blair’s name, referring to the Times fabulist as “Jason Blair.”
Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis declined to discuss the provenance of the survey. “We do reader polls
on a regular basis,” she told me. “We have done polls on circulation,
on advertising, polls that have been on the content. We’ve conducted
surveys on people's viewing habits, and on what publications they
read.” And she dismissed the Blair misspelling. “It's not uncommon to misspell Jayson Blair's name. Vanity Fair misspelled it on their website.” (They've since corrected it.)
Times deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who oversees the Times’s
web operations, said the newsroom had nothing to do with the survey.
“These are done by the marketing department. It’s got nothing to do
with the editorial side," he told me. Landman, who famously wrote
an April 2002 e-mail saying ''We have to stop Jayson from writing for
the Times. Right now,” laughed when I asked him about Blair
misspelling. “That proves they didn't run it by me! I know how to spell
it,” he said.
One Times newsroom staffer sniffed at the survey: “Some knucklehead in the business department must have done it.”
--Gabriel Sherman