Watchdogging the Watchdogs Watchdogging the Watchdogs

The New York Times has a "public editor" who functions as "the readers' representative."  His job, ostensibly, is to keep the paper honest by being a watchdog with inside knowledge and access.  He responds to reader inquiries and writes a sort of investigative column that appears in the Sunday paper.

 This is generically interesting to us as an organizational form of social control.  His column today brings up interesting issues of the social control of journalism, the social control of organizations, norms and policies around journalism and research, and relationship between politics, reputation, professional standards, etc.

Most of the column concerns the question of whether the times was too slow to cover the story about how two young conservative activists surreptitiously recorded staff at ACORN and then went public with their findings with the result that conservative talk radio and TV went bananas and different parts of the federal government severed ties with the organization.

A list of some of the issues here:

• under what conditions is it OK to do secret filming/recording and deceive interviewees?
• is it OK to keep doing research until you find an example of what you want and fail to report how many tries it took you?
• what standards determine when something "is a story" for a paper like the Times?
• what happens when your editorial standards too conveniently align with your politics?  how can you tell which you are following?
• are certain research techniques OK when used for one purpose but not when used for another?

There are others -- which ones can you spot?

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