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The Rosenthal Rule

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The New York Times is rightly regarded as a newspaper with a liberal political bias, which is just fine provided it restricts that liberal bias to its editorial pages (the same applies to newspapers with conservative political biases). Today, however, at least in the view of this writer, the Times and many other newspapers with a liberal bias have increasingly blurred the distinction between straight reporting and editorial opinionating. Much of this can be attributed to the Trump presidency, which has outraged liberal newspapers, but to be fair, this blurring has also creeped into conservative media outlets as a way, in their opinion, to justifiably counterbalance this liberal line-crossing between reporting and opinion.

Ironically, one of the most dedicated practitioners of separating factual reporting from editorializing – of ensuring the stories reporters wrote contained only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – was the former executive editor of The New York Times, Abe Rosenthal.

Rosenthal joined the paper in 1943 as a reporter – in1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Eastern Europe under the Soviet Iron Curtain – and spent the next half century rising through the ranks to executive editor and regular columnist.

As managing editor in 1969, he oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, and he successfully fought for publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the government’s clandestine and illegal conduct of the war despite those papers being classified, and despite the Times facing multiple lawsuits and threats of treason.

As executive editor, Rosenthal had “zero tolerance” for reporters who included their opinions in their stories, once saying he knew most reporters leaned left, so his editorial stance was to lean slightly right “so the paper ended up in the middle.”

Also, any reporter with a potential conflict of interest regarding an assigned story was immediately taken off that story. At one point a young female reporter joined the paper after working for The Philadelphia Inquirer, after which it was revealed she had been romantically involved with a politician she had covered in Philadelphia and had accepted gifts from him. When she admitted to Rosenthal that the story was true, he fired her immediately, prompting protests by several newsroom staffers who thought he had been too harsh. Rosenthal replied, “I don’t care if you (fornicate with) an elephant on your own time, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus for this paper.” It became known as “the Rosenthal Rule.”

Rosenthal died this week (May 10) in 2006 and is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. At his insistence, the epitaph on his tombstone reads, “He kept the paper straight.”

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.

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