Hooray! The useless Byron Calame is being replaced as public editor of the New York Times by someone who may have something important to say:
The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former 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.
This is an important step in the journalistic community coming to terms with the way it covered the war in Iraq. Even selecting Hoyt is an implicit admission that the Times failed -- check out how it reported the story on his appointment:
In the prelude to the Iraq war and the early days of the war, Knight-Ridder stood apart from most of the mainstream news media in raising doubts at times about the Bush administration's claims, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that record contributed to his selection of Mr. Hoyt.
"There was a lot of work Knight-Ridder did that was prescient, that wasn't easy to do," Mr. Keller said. "It's always hard to go against conventional wisdom. I think it probably brings him a measure of credibility that helps in getting started on a job like that — that he's been associated with a brave and aggressive reporting exercise like that."
Mr. Hoyt said that in 2002 and 2003 he had fielded a great deal of criticism "from angry readers who believed that we weren't being patriotic, from government officials who said that what we were doing was wrong."
Most importantly, the appointment establishes Hoyt as a potentially important advocate for fact-checking political spin. Let's hope he puts the position to better use than Calame.
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