UPDATED: The New York Times Should Respond to Michael Oren (Can We Use That Word?)

Note June 19, 2015: This post has been updated. See the update after the jump.

Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, has leveled a serious charge at Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times. Oren, who is now a member of the Israeli Knesset, reports that Rosenthal exhibited a troubling indifference to factual misstatements made by Mahmound Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority in 2011 and in the words of Jamie Weinstein at the D.C. Caller “is unable to distinquish between fact and opinion.”

Oren lays the story out in his soon-to-be published book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (Random House, 2015).

When The Times published Abbas’ factually challenged piece in The New York Times in May 2011, Oren called Rosenthal to complain. Weinstein reports that Oren recreates the conversation went as follows:

“When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backwards?”

“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.

“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”

“In your view.”

“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach.”

Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”

Oren’s allegation against Rosenthal is pretty serious given The Times’ stated commitment to getting it right. In 2004, David Shipley, who was then serving as editor of the Op-Ed pages for the paper wrote a piece titled, “And Now a Word from Op-Ed.” The piece describes how an opinion piece ends up in The Times. It states explicitly that if a submission is accepted for publication, “we’ll edit and fact-check your work.”

Really?

The following year, Shipley wrote a follow up titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Editing.” In the piece, Shipley reported that editors at the paper will “fact check” before publishing them. “While it’s the authors responsibility to ensure that everything written for us is accurate, we still check facts – names, dates, places quotations,” Shipley wrote. “We also check assertions,” he added. “If news articles – from The Times and other publications – are at odds with a point or an example in an essay, we need to resolve whatever discrepancy exists.”

If there is a discrepancy, Shipley wrote, the paper will “try to find a solution that preserves the writer’s argument while also adhering to the facts.”

What Shipley wrote in 2004 and 2005 should not be all that revelatory. The American Society of News Editors declares in its statement of principles that “Editorials, analytical articles and commentary should be held to the same standards of accuracy with respect to facts as news reports. Significant errors of fact, as well as errors of omission, should be corrected promptly and prominently.”

The story in Oren’s book indicates that these policies are no longer in force. It’s a serious issue that so far has not been addressed America’s paper of record.

Weinstein reports that efforts to elicit a response from Rosenthal have been unsuccessful, which is no surprise in light of a story about his tenure as Editorial Page Editor that appeared in The Observer in February, 2014.

In the piece, written by Ken Kurson, Rosenthal does not come off too well. He is depicted as a lazy and petty tyrant obsessed with maintaining a monopoly on the word “should.”

Apparently, Rosenthal does not like it when the word appears in articles outside of the New York Times’ editorial pages. One reporter told The Observer that “The world ‘should’ belongs to him and his people.” Another reporter told The Observer, “You know, I think he literally had a Google alert for the word ‘should’ and, like, goes reading through the entire newspaper for it, and that’s what he does all day instead of improving his section.”

It is unfortunate that Rosenthal does not police his editorial pages for errors with the same vigor with which he reportedly scours the Times for errant uses of “should.”

At the risk of eliciting the ire of Andrew Rosenthal, former Ambassador Oren has raised an issue about Rosenthal’s commitment to factual journalism that the New York Times really should address: Does its editorial page editor care about the facts?

Or is fact-checking a thing of the past under Rosenthal’s leadership?

Update, June 19, 2015:

Larry Cohler-Esses has weighed in on behalf of Andrew Rosenthal in a piece at The Forward. It asserts in part that former Ambassador Oren mischaracterized the article by Mahmoud Abbas. Kohler-Esses writes that “that nowhere in his piece of May 17, 2011 does Abbas assert that ‘the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.'”

Cohler-Esses, however, is refuting something Oren did not assert. What he has done is mischaracterize what Oren wrote to establish a straw-man argument and then knock it down. Oren did not state that Abbas “asserted” that Arabs had rejected partition and that Israel had accepted it. Oren said Abbas “suggested” it.

This point was made effectively by Elder of Ziyon, who writes:

Michael Oren didn’t say that Abbas wrote those words; he says that Abbas suggested it.

The Forward is doing what they accuse Oren of doing – fabricating the facts.

Did Cohler-Esses honestly think people would not see how he transformed Oren’s use of the word “suggested” into “assert”?

So to borrow a phrase from a commenter below, “It turns out there are some objective factual problems” with the piece in The Forward.