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Andrew Rosenthal explains why McCain wasn’t published in NYT

Photo: Andrew Rosenthal (by Katya Wachtel)

Andrew Rosenthal, the New York Times Editorial Page Editor, visited the student center at the Journalism School tonight and talked for 90 minutes about his job.

It would be an understatement to say he surprised people in the school with his pointed comments. He managed to make everyone laugh out loud at least once - and that after a long day in classes or on the reporting beat.

Talking about the controversy around Obamas published op-ed piece, followed by denying McCain the same opportunity - at least when you ask his campaign management - Rosenthal had the following words to say about a process that started with telling Senator Obama of what to write and what not.

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“We can’t accept this piece but if you take out all those quotes from last week’s speech and the ones from the commercial and you focus less on attacking John McCain and you focus more on your own policies. And they sent us two more drafts and we accepted the third one.

“And when we accepted it I said to David Shipley, our editor, ‘okay here’s how this is gonna go. We are going to run this thing and the McCain people will ask for equal time. And we are going to give it to them because it’s only fair. And they are going to send us a horrible, unprintable op-ed piece. And we’re going to ask them for the same exact changes we asked Barack Obama for and we are never going to hear from them and they’re going to leak it to Drudge and attack us for dissing McCain and that is exactly what happened.

“Our public editor has criticized us. They sent in the piece. They called on a Thursday and wanted it to go on Sunday. I said ‘fine.’ Our editor said to them ‘you understand the rules, it can’t be a press release, it can’t be a rehash speech and we really don’t want you to just criticize Obama, we need to hear about your opinions.’

“They said ‘yes, yes, yes.’ They sent us a rehash speech that criticized Obama and said nothing about what McCain wanted. We wrote them back - a slightly inartfully worded email but basically said them same thing: ‘We can’t accept this.’ And they just went straight to Fox News, Drudge.”

Click more to read my tweets during his talk (Start at the bottom) and take a look at the slideshow.

• Rosenthal: Bono will write 6-10 articles for us next year. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: editing Dowd in DC was one of the easiest edits I ever had to do. 2 hrs ago
• R: Dowds Latin column shows how much control I have over her. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: the publisher gets to read endorsements but only 2% of our editorials are discussed with him. 2 hrs ago
• R: don’t tell me something looks disgusting, describe it to me. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: if you don’t have every word in a quote it’s not a quote. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: what will set us apart online is our aggressive reporting which only a few papers do nowadays. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: it took David Brooks a few columns to get good at it. Be a reporter first. 2 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: I read the WSJ editorials every day because I know I’m not going to agree with a single word on it but it gets my brain going. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: our columnists are too similar. They are the same age, they are from the north east but it’s hard to get someone to stop writing. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: Obama is a pretty amazing guy but I don’t like him not voting to protest. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: Eisenhower was the last Republican we endorsed in a presidential race. 3 hrs ago
• R: when the NYT endorses in a republican primary they are saying he’s the least worst. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: I never understood endorsements when I was a reporter. 3 hrs ago
• R: I met a woman that had 17 letters printed in the Times. She was a Republican from Greenwhich. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: since we opened our website for comments our email traffic has increased not decreased. 3 hrs ago
• R: I would use the word gentle persuasion when dealing with our columnists. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: our columnists have the most known bylines which makes them easy to deal with and humble. We know have a Nobel price winner. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: we like suprises in our op-eds. It’s easy to find a Rep. trashing a Democrat. 3 hrs ago
• R: we don’t agree with our editorials we just think this is a position worth reading, especially if you don’t agree with it. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: we get 700 op-eds send to us each week and we print 0 to 0.5 of them. 3 hrs ago
• R: distinction between print and paper is decreasing. Buy if you only read us in print you miss a lot of stuff online. 3 hrs ago
• Rosenthal: Drudge always seems to be knowing what we are doing. 3 hrs ago

Photos by Katya Wachtel

Tags: andrew rosenthal, bono, election, nyt editorials, nytimes, Politics