The New York Times' rejection of an op-ed piece by John McCain has gotten a lot of blogosphere attention.
And it brings up some of the issues that I deal with myself as the op-ed editor for Newsday's daily Opinion section. Whenever an election nears, I'm approached by candidates of all stripes with submissions. Sometimes the essays are little more than press releases about this or that accomplishment an incumbent wants to remind voters about. Or they're predictable complaints about the incumbents from challengers. Less frequently -- but it does happen! -- the submissions are thoughtful and nuanced essays about important issues facing the community and the electorate. I reject them all.
Why? Because even if I did run the thoughtful, nuanced, issue-driven essay, I would feel obligated to give equal time to the candidate's challenger. And the challenger's piece might not be well-written or relevant or even the slightest bit interesting. But if I'd accepted the first piece, out of fairness, I'd have to accept the second.
That's how the Times got into this situation.
Last week, it published an essay by Barack Obama about getting out of Iraq. McCain submitted his essay a few days later, looking for equal time.
The Times has defended its decision, noting that McCain was unwilling to engage in a vigorous editing process. That seems reasonable to a point, though some are arguing that the revisions requested were incompatible with McCain's position on Iraq.
Certainly, nothing gets into our pages without being edited, and many pieces take a lot of work, with several back-and-forth rounds. At Newsday, we have very little space for op-ed pieces -- we run only one non-columnist essay a day -- and we don't just turn that space over to others without working with them. While we don't try to change points of view, we do work on focus, clarity, strength of argument, and so on. We request total rewrites sometimes, minor tweaks and additional information others. It all depends.
And, of course, there are lots pieces that simply don't work for us for a variety of reasons, sometimes because they're just rehashes of old arguments. That seemed to have been part of the Times' problem with the McCain submission. But, again, I think they set themselves up when they ran Obama's piece to begin with. Didn't they see this coming?
By the way, the whole brouhaha broke on the Drudge Report with this statement:
An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES -- less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
That highlights another issue, a misperception that opinion editors have to deal with all the time: Sen. McCain wrote an op-ed piece, not an editorial. Editorials are written by members of a newspaper's editorial board, and they run as unsigned position essays on the paper's editorial page. Op-ed pieces are written by non-staff members, are signed, and generally run on the page that appears opposite the editorial page. Hence the name. If nothing else, maybe all the fuss will help folks get the distinction straight.