The New York Times has been engaged in a good deal of public back-and-forth lately. N.Y. Times blasted from all sides

Talk about a no-win week.

In the span of 48 hours, the New York Times was blasted for a story a White House official deemed to be “100% inaccurate,” and then embarrassed by a dishy new book by former car czar Steven Rattner that describes how the White House orchestrated an exclusive background interview with him and a Times reporter, and was rewarded with an article showing President Barack Obama “just as the White House had hoped.”


Such extreme and contradictory views of the Times – that it is both poorly-sourced and wrongly-informed as well as a spun lapdog tamed by special access – are one consequence of the complex relationship the nation‘s most important newspaper has with a White House famous for running a ruthlessly tight media ship.

Dick Stevenson, the Times’s deputy Washington bureau chief, has no apologies for covering the White House “very fairly and aggressively,” and says constant feedback from Obama aides comes with the territory.

“There’s a lot of back and forth with people there all the time, as you would expect,” he says. “They are at times accessible and cooperative with us, and at other times, much less so. And at times, they are extremely aggressive to push back on things they don’t like and things they think are wrong.

“Much of that happens out of public view, and there are other times when it breaks into public. That’s the way journalism is conducted these days.”

The Times story that so exercised the White House picked up on a theme that had been percolating, in POLITICO and elsewhere, for a while: The White House was trying to figure out how to deal with the tea party as Democrats headed into the midterms. But Jackie Calmes and Michael D. Shear led with something new: the White House was considering running national advertisements casting the GOP as taken over by tea party extremists.

This detail, which originally appeared in the headline and prominently in the lede when the story went online Sunday night, received immediate and forceful pushback from the White House. By Monday morning, The Times had walked back its headline and lede, but that wasn’t enough to keep a White House source from telling Mike Allen the article was completely wrong.

“Clearly this seems to have struck a nerve with them,” Stevenson said. “This kind of back and forth is not that unusual, particularly in a political season.”

Indeed there has been a good deal of public back-and-forth lately, and not just with the White House.

When the Times ran a story on Sept. 11 about House Minority Leader John Boehner’s ties to lobbyists that the White House liked so much that Gibbs tweeted a link to it, Boehner’s office shot back immediately, charging the story “ignores basic facts, contains numerous factual inaccuracies and distortions" and didn't include quotes "which would have provided some much-needed perspective."

The Times added some of these quotes to the story after it first appeared on the web, after being contacted by the leader’s staff, The Hill reported.

That came a few days after the NYTPicker blog noticed that a front-page story by Charlie Savage about a court ruling on CIA torture had been rewritten, with the online version including less inflammatory language and a more sympathetic tone toward the Obama administration’s policies.

The blog post prompted a debate about whether it was fair to insinuate that the Obama administration was at all involved in the editing of the story.

Stevenson said he could not comment on this story in particular, but said it was not at all uncommon for sources in a story to call up, once they had seen it posted online, and try to influence the editing of a story.

“Because of the web and because so much of what all of us do is more transparent nowadays, every change that we make in stories -- between editions, between platforms -- seems to take on a greater degree of significance to some readers than is probably warranted,” he said.

“We almost routinely are buffing and polishing stories, throughout the news cycle, from blog posts to web stories, to the first edition of the print paper to the later edition of the print paper. Most of the time it’s just routine editing, new reporting, somebody seeing what something looks like in print.”

“Are there instances where, in that process now, much more than in the past, a player in the story – the administration, someone else that we are talking to – contacts us because they can see it online, and says, you don’t have it quite right and here’s why, or here is some more information that leads us to change something? Yes.

“Do we, in some routine way, get calls from the administration, telling us that we have to change stories because they don’t like them? No. It just doesn’t work that way.”

But Tuesday’s revelations of excerpts from Rattner’s book suggests a certain coziness between the Times and the White House. Rattner, who once worked as a Times reporter, describes the elaborate steps the White House took to make him available to Jim Rutenberg (whom he called Rotenberg) for a story on Obama’s first hundred days.

“The resulting article, ‘Early Resolve: Obama Stand in Auto Crisis,’ framed the President’s intervention as ‘a case study in the education, management, and decision-making of a fledgling president.’ Without getting a single fact out of place, the piece showed him just as the White House had hoped: studying the issues in depth, delegating effectively, being decisive when necessary and frank about his beliefs…” Rattner wrote.

This episode fit the pattern for the kind of access to the White House and administration officials the New York Times Magazine has enjoyed since 2009.

“It’s been clear for some time, reading the accounts in the Times and in the New York Times Magazine, especially these ‘tick-tock’ stories about Obama’s decision-making, that they had high-level access to these players who were very deliberately going about planting a story about how the White House has made certain decisions,” said Mark Feldstein, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and author of the recent book, “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”

“It’s not just the Times. Bob Woodward in many ways sort of pioneered this style of background reporting from the key players,” he said. “There’s a good side and bad side to all of this. The good side is you are getting real time, or close to real time, access, and a fly on the wall perspective, but the downside is, it’s very easy to be spun, and reporters are very much depending on the handful of sources who talk to them, who often have an agenda.”

These days, he added, journalism is not just the first draft of history – it’s more like a partial draft. He pointed to the historic example of Ben Bradlee reporting that President Lyndon Johnson was going to fire FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, which prompted Johnson to keep Hoover.

“It’s not like his story was wrong,” he said. “It reflected what was an embryonic decision at the time that hasn’t been solidified.”

A case in point was another Times story this month, also by Calmes, that predicted Obama would “make it clear” he opposes any compromise to extend the Bush tax cuts in his upcoming speech in Cleveland.

Obama went on to give a speech that did not explicitly say that.

Stevenson said the coziness claim, coming from Rattner, was a bit rich.

“I would think that Steve Rattner, as a former Timesman himself, would know better than to believe that simply because a story turned out the way he or somebody else at the White House would have hoped, it was because they had spun us,” he said.

He added: “We know spin when we see it, and we know facts when we see them. If it’s a positive story, it’s a positive story. We’re not setting out to write positive stories.”