The public editor of the Times has a blog post under the headline 'An Article About New Yorkers Who Go Hungry Signals a New Focus on Inequality."
Not a new focus on poverty, mind you, but on "inequality." There are those of us who might have been under the impression that the Times was quite vigorously focused on inequality already (to the point where a regular headline around here is "always the inequality"), but apparently the newspaper's editors feel the paper can obsess even more about the issue. From the public editor post:
Wendell Jamieson, the Metro editor, told me that Tuesday's article is not merely incidental.
"The conversation is changing," he said, in New York City with the election of a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, whose campaign focused on inequality in the city.
...The Times has other changes in mind. For example, the reporter Rachel Swarns on Monday will begin a weekly column, "The Working Life," exploring "the experience of working – or not working – in New York," Mr. Jamieson said. And Michael Powell's "Gotham" column will change to twice from once a week to help highlight some of the experiences of lower-income New Yorkers.
"Michael has a great ear for this subject," Mr. Jamieson said.
New York voters have indicated, he said, that "inequality in the city is of grave importance." As a result, for the Metro desk, "this is a moment to adjust our focus."
It's great to see The Times responding in this way and will be fascinating to see how it plays out.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of the Times adjusting its news coverage to advance the policy agenda of the newly elected mayor. If a conservative candidate had been elected on a platform of reducing excess taxes and regulation, would the Times all of a sudden double the frequency of its right-leaning columnists in the metro section and adjust the focus of the metro section to add coverage of excess taxes and regulation? Here I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that one of the functions of a newspaper was to challenge politicians, not merely to echo or reinforce the agenda of the politicians. If the news standards of the Times are to be so easily swayed by election results, perhaps the citizens of New York shouldn't merely elect a mayor, but they should also elect the Times editor every four years.
The public editor, both by cheering on additional inequality coverage and by her last column seeking Al Gore's advice on coverage of climate change, isn't exactly keeping readers guessing about her own political outlook.