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As originally presented, Smith thoughts were placed in the “left” box. Until Smith found out, that is:

A parenthetical later appeared under Smith’s entry in the piece: “(We previously listed Mr. Smith in this article under the left section, but he took issue with that categorization.)”

Why put BuzzFeed’s Smith on the left? Maybe because many people place his publication there. In an August study, Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society lined up various news organizations by ideological tilt based on the media-sharing activities of Trump and Clinton supporters on social media. The data placed BuzzFeed squarely in the center-left region of top U.S. media outlets:

That layout pretty much squares with previous research on this topic.

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Of course, Smith has every right to object that his politics may not be consistent with those of BuzzFeed’s audience. In any case, Dubenko told the Erik Wemple Blog in a brief phone interview that she “occasionally” received re-categorization requests from people, “but everyone likes to think of themselves as centrist.”

Labels these days are a hot topic for critics of the New York Times. Twitter convulsed over the holiday weekend when a New York Times story on the bribery trial of Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.) initially failed to mention his party (Democratic). Nick Corasaniti, the story’s author, called it an “oversight.” The paper later inserted the critical detail.

Detractors of the newspaper saw much more. “The Times’ Menendez slip-up invited so much scrutiny precisely because the paper has a funny habit of picking and choosing when it stresses party affiliations and political leanings,” writes Becket Adams in the Washington Examiner. Adams cited instances in which the paper identifies conservative institutions as such but fails to apply the same policy to liberal ones. “Stop being oddly selective about identifying political affiliations and people will stop suspecting the worst of you,” writes Adams.

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Phil Corbett, the New York Times’s associate managing editor for standards, calls the Menendez thing “a dumb mistake and shouldn’t have happened, as Nick and his editors would be the first to acknowledge. I don’t know if the Dem reference got lost in revisions and moving stuff around, or whether the omission just slipped by folks because they were too close to the story, which can happen.”

Of the notion that the New York Times was doing something underhanded, Corbett notes that the paper published an Aug. 17 story with the following headline: “At Senator Menendez’s Trial, Stakes Are High for Democrats.”

Now onto political labeling in general, which Corbett assesses this way:

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The broader question of how to describe think tanks and other organizations involved in policy issues is trickier and much more complicated. We aren’t always consistent. Partly that’s because we try to avoid boilerplate, formulaic writing in general. Partly it’s because it’s not always easy or accurate to stick a single label (left-right, liberal-conservative) [on] groups that may have a range of positions or be at various points along a spectrum. Partly it may be because we assume (rightly or wrongly) that some institutions are already very familiar to readers while others call for more explanation. It’s easy to cherry-pick examples, but it’s not true that we only label “conservative” groups. Anyone who looks can find many, many references in The Times to “liberal” or “left-leaning” groups and think tanks (just as one of many examples, look at our recent stories about the New America Foundation).

The best way to resolve this particular issue is to spend days upon days plowing through Nexis. Any volunteers?

UPDATE Sept. 8: In an email to the Erik Wemple Blog, Henri Cauvin, the city editor at the New York Times took responsibility for the Menendez problem: “I was the editor of the story and the omission was my oversight. In our system, the editor of a story is ultimately responsible for ensuring that it comports with Times style and standards. The story should have identified Senator Menendez as a Democrat, and that the story did not is on me,” writes Cauvin. “As Nick and Phil have both already made clear, this was an oversight, and nothing more, and once it was brought to our attention, it was addressed promptly.”

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