It’s not every day that a newspaper editor’s defense of one of the newspaper’s star columnists ends up fueling the cause to expose the vacuity of the columnist’s work.
As noted earlier here and here, Clear Thinkers favorite Larry Ribstein has written a series of posts over the past year or so in which he uses the weekly columns of NY Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson as examples of the mainstream media’s misrepresention and misinterpretion of business issues to further a generally anti-big wealth agenda. That anti-big wealth agenda was in full bloom during the Enron criminal trials, which I noted on several occasions, most recently here.
Well, along those same lines, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins recently wrote this column ($) (described here in length in an earlier Ribstein post) in which he exposes an interesting fact about this earlier Times story (Times Select-$) on a supposedly virtuous CEO who turned down stock options because his father told him “‘don’t ever feel that you are worth it.’ I don’t want him to say that to me again.”
Turns out that Jenkins had been offered the story before it ended up in the Times, but passed on it when he discovered facts the largely undermined the excessive compensation slant that the Times ultimately put on the story — the CEO owned a big stake in a privately held company and so didn’t need the options as an incentive and the CEO’s doting father was a former Tyco board member and mentor of Dennis Kozlowski who suffered as a result of Kozlowski’s excesses in that case. Neither of those salient facts made it into the Times story, which was written by Morgenson, a fact that Jenkins didn’t even mention in his column.
At any rate, it didn’t take long for the Times long to spring to Morgenson’s defense. In this WSJ letter to the editor ($) entitled “Misrepresented, Insulted and Belittled.” Times executive editor Bill Keller lashes out at Jenkins:

Mr. Jenkins misrepresented my paper’s reporting, casually insulted one of the best journalists in the business, denounced our editors for dereliction of duty, and, in conclusion, belittled the corporate structure that prevents the New York Times from being owned by a hedge fund.

The rest of Keller’s letter is long on similar bombast but short on substance, a point that Professor Ribstein makes in this post disassembling Keller’s letter. In a wonderful twist of fate, Professor Ribstein reveals at the end of his post that Keller’s letter has actually had the effect of facilitating the cause of exposing Morgenson’s agenda:

I confess that after seven months of Morgenson I was tempted to go onto other subjects. I’ve got articles and books to write, classes to teach, papers to grade. The blog basically comes out of my sleep time. So I have to make sure that what I write about has some sort of payoff (after all, I don’t even sell ads). I was starting to wonder whether I should continue to cast my stones into the darkness.
But the NYT’s editor’s odd and completely unjustified attack on Jenkins (who, by the way, didn’t even mention Morgenson by name in his column) convinced me that the problem here runs very deep. So I’m going to keep slogging.

Can someone please get Ms. Morgenson another stiff drink?
By the way, Keller’s piece also contains a curious defense of the Times’ anti-takeover mechanism that is contrary to Morgenson’s usual position regarding shareholder supremacy. Keller contends that the family trust that controls a majority of the voting shares (but not a majority of the equity) is committed to serious journalism, while the majority owners (you know, which could be those devious and profit-fixated hedge funds) would not be. In other words, shareholder power is good for those bad companies that allow their executives to make too much money, but it is bad for news media companies, which have no such problems.
Got that?