Dr. Stephen Morris’s letter in the issue of Nov. 16, “New York Times failing in its duty to inform,” fails to convince because it errs.
After a maundering, irrelevant start about Brooklyn and his grandmother, he argues that the Times has lost readers because it has allowed its “political beliefs to permeate into the actual news stories.” No. All newspapers, whatever their beliefs, are dying from the competition from electronic media — the internet, television, Twitter, cell phones.
As a former newspaper reporter and editor (Newsday, International Herald Tribune in Paris), I find the Times’s coverage to be generally accurate and unbiased. And Dr. Morris‘s argument would be better if it were grounded in fact. As one striking example, he implies that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergate story, worked for the Times. They didn’t. They wrote for the Washington Post.
David Kahn, Ph.D. (Oxford)
ex-Great Neck, now New York
