I'm not sure what Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at the Times, thinks he's doing. He seems to be operating under the bizarre assumption that if the paper is going to smear a presidential candidate, claim he could be assassinated for dubious reasons, and do it all based on an interpretation of Islamic law, then maybe someone should pick up the phone and actually see whether real Islamic scholars agree with any of the claptrap. Strangely enough, Hoyt learns, contra Edward Luttwak, that Barack Obama will probably not get killed if he travels to a Muslim country. Oops.
It's an embarrassment for the Times, to be sure, but allow me a couple more substantive observations.
First, this is an extreme example of a problem that runs throughout the traditional news media -- namely, the unwavering and unquestioned reliance on pundit-generalists. In this particular case, no one had any reason to believe that Luttwak knew anywhere close to enough to opine on Islamic theology, but he's a well-known writer and works at a major think tank, so if he could write it well, he could get it published. Now, I happen to think the generalist model is problematic. All else equal, I would prefer to read experts or quasi-experts write about complicated subjects. (I would count a journalist who focuses heavily in a specific area as a "quasi-expert" of sorts.) One defense of the system you occasionally hear is, essentially, that it's more democratic -- in theory, anyone can write about anything -- but in practice, I find it to be terribly anti-democratic. We see the same relatively small group of pundits and journalists writing frequently and all over the place on topics about which they know little (or nothing).
But even if you like the generalist model (or want to make it better), the problem becomes a very basic one: good fact-checking. The Times has always been pretty opaque about the extent of the fact-checking that occurs on its op-ed page, but at a minimum, I would say that if you have someone writing outside of their area of expertise, you need to check with some actual experts to make sure the argument is sound. In this case, Hoyt writes, "Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because 'we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,' he said." But of course, the Times' editors probably know as much about Islamic theology as Luttwak does, so having them "check" Luttwak's work was a useless exercise. How do you even know how to fact-check a piece like Luttwak's without the benefit of some expertise?
All that said, I think it's a bit much to suggest, as Matthew Yglesias does, that "[a]s means of acquiring information, [papers like the Times are] useless -- the editors are indifferent to whether the author's purpose is to inform or to mislead." Of course, if this were completely true, Clark Hoyt's position wouldn't exist, and he certainly wouldn't be getting prime, Sunday op-ed real estate every other week to write whatever he wants no matter how bad it makes the paper look.
As a general matter, the most compelling critiques of the media tend to be the ones that focus on structural and institutional factors. I don't believe that David Shipley is uninterested in the factual claims of his op-ed contributors, but I do believe that the system in which he operates is a flawed one, which leads to embarrassing episodes like this one as well as more modest breaches of the readers' trust that occur far too frequently. It would be ridiculous to rule out bad faith when doing media criticism, but I find that to be an unfruitful starting point.
After all, why does the logic of bad faith stop at newspapers? For instance, do I believe that James Bennet, the editor of The Atlantic, doesn't give a damn about his readers, or else he would immediately fire Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg for their demonstrable history of outright hackery? (They have, after all, kept up the silliness under Bennet's watch.) Do I think that Bennet is out to actively make us all stupider when he runs insipid cover packages on the "100 Most Influential Americans"? Sometimes, yes! But after you think about these sorts of questions for a while, you usually settle on more unexciting explanations -- like, for instance, that Sullivan and Goldberg are known quantities in Washington journalism; that they operate in an elite print journalism club where real competition on the merits of your work is lacking; and that they're skillful enough writers that they can attract readers even if what they're writing is, in fact, junk. To be sure, these sorts of explanations can still be highly problematic, but they're problematic in a different way -- and require different responses -- than explanations that assume editors are out to screw you.
