Even when the Times undertakes to review its own performance, it does so in a lamo-NYTimesy way. Check out Daniel Okrent’s “The Report, the Review and a Grandstand Play.” Okrent is what the Times calls its “public editor” — i.e., its “readers’ representative” who comments bi-monthly in the Week-in-Review section regarding the paper’s coverage. As for “The Report,” Okrent, to his credit, gives his paper a mild rebuke for its misleading and huge 4-column wide June 17 headline that the 9/11 Commission had found “No Qaeda/Iraq Tie[.]” But he then proceeds to suggest that the paper’s reporting was fair and that the only trouble was that the issue was too complex for a succinct headline to capture it accurately. Right.

That gives you a hint about where Okrent is coming from, but if you need something more certain, just read on to his defense of “the Review,” which relates to last Sunday’s front-page publication of critic Michiklo Kakutani’s scathing review of former President Clinton’s My Life. Okrent defends the Times’s decision to run this critique, correctly arguing that a review is an opinion piece (and, naturally, assuring his rebelious Upper West Siders that the favorable McMurtry review is on the way). He has trouble, however, with the editorial placement decision: namesly, putting the review on Page One rather than in a normal book review slot. Why? Because he’s sees this as having breached “the sanctity of the front page as an opinion-free zone.” Anyone who thinksthe NYTimes’s front page is “an opinion-free zone” is not qualified to be reviewing the paper’s performance. Okrent should have re-read what he wrote about “the Report” before opining on “the Review.”