NYT Apologies Depend on Whose Lives Are Distorted

The kind of reaction the New York Times‘ whatever-did-menfolk-do? story got on social media.

Sometimes the New York Times recognizes that it made a mistake and apologizes for it. For example, the day after the Women’s March, the Times (1/22/17) ran a story about how the men of Montclair, New Jersey, coped with housework and childcare with all the women away protesting—a premise right out of a 1950s sitcom. After getting a drubbing on social media, the editor responsible didn’t try to defend it:  “It was a bad idea from the get-go,” Metro editor Wendell Jamieson told Huffington Post (1/23/17). “We blew it.”

Freelance reporter Filip Bondy was equally abject: “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.

That was not the reaction that a Times editor had when the paper was criticized for misrepresenting the lives, not of couples in upper-middle-class Montclair, but of impoverished food-stamp recipients.  That story’s headline captured the tone: “In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda” (1/13/17)—along with the photograph of a shopping cart filled with almost nothing but Coca-Cola and orange pop.

Originally, the piece—based on a USDA report on food-buying habits of families that did or did not receive food stamps from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—claimed that SNAP recipients spent “about 10 percent” of their food budget on soft drinks; this was later corrected to the actual figure of 5 percent, with an explanation that 9.3 percent—not 10 percent—went to “sweetened beverages,” which includes juice.

The New York Times depicts the shopping cart of a bad soda person.

The biggest single food budget item for non-food stamp households, we were told, is milk. As University of Minnesota professor Joe Soss pointed out in Jacobin (1/16/17), the USDA report found that those non-food stamp families spent 4.03 percent of their food budget on milk—and 4.01 percent on soft drinks. That’s the basis on which the Times distinguished what Soss called “the bad soda people” from “the normal milk people.”

In fact, as Soss noted, the first point emphasized by the USDA report was that “there were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households, no matter how the data were categorized.” That’s right—the Times’ story about how much junk food the poor ate was based on a study that found that they eat about as much junk food as anybody else.

The Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, devoted much of a column (1/20/17) to the food-stamp piece, which she concluded “didn’t do much to advance the discussion.” But the editor of the Times’ “Well” section, where it appeared, stood by the article. Tara Parker-Pope claimed that the fact that non-SNAP families ate as much junk food as SNAP families was  “a central theme in the story”—which was headlined, again, “In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda.”

Which just goes to show—distorting the lives of the poor means never having to say you’re sorry.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

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