Criticism of ‘Unvarnished’ Brings a Strong Times Defense

In a week in which The Times has garnered some valid criticism, it also came under heavy attack from the august New York Review of Books. It published a blog post by a former Times reporter, Richard Bernstein, criticizing last spring’s reporting project, “Unvarnished,” which vividly laid out the poor working conditions and illegally low pay of nail salon workers in New York.

Mr. Bernstein owns some day spas in the city, with his wife and sister-in-law, and his essential point is that The Times’s project doesn’t correspond with the reality he knows as a businessman who follows the rules and knows the industry.

On Tuesday, Times editors responded to Mr. Bernstein’s piece, rebutting many of its points. Here are the elements:

Mr. Bernstein’s piece
The Times’s response

In my view, Mr. Bernstein makes some points worth considering, but they are minor ones that do not mar the overall quality of the project.  The Times’s response (which acknowledges some of those points) was persuasive. As James Warren, a former Chicago Tribune managing editor, wrote on Poynter.org about the complaint-and-response, “this may not be a very close call.”

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger, thought so, too. (Mr. Berg has been known to fault The Times for aspects of its poverty coverage and is a critical reader on matters of hunger and wealth inequality, a topic I’ve written about often, and have quoted him about.)

He wrote:

I think the Times rebuttal on the nail salons series was pitch-perfect: fact-based, utterly convincing, and personally classy to a former colleague. Beyond that, anyone who won’t accept the reality that low-income, immigrant workers are being routinely shafted is in an advanced state of denial.

Mr. Bernstein wrote to me about his concerns numerous times last spring, and I looked into them, talking to several editors, reviewing his complaints and corresponding with him several times.

As I saw it, while the project may have been a bit overwrought in places, it seemed solid.  Its intense focus on one salon worker, whose lot in life was indeed deplorable, was a very effective story-telling technique but by its nature a narrow one.  Other personal stories, told in some depth, would have brought more nuance. And, more fully acknowledging that some salon owners do it right would have been a way to deepen the series. In addition, stating that newspapers were “rife” with the employment ads that featured extraordinarily low wages may have been an overstatement. But these points don’t negate the larger picture.

I told Mr. Bernstein in an email months ago that I considered Sarah Maslin Nir’s series  impressive and admirable, because it effectively and movingly does some of the core work of journalism: It gives voice to the voiceless, and, by illuminating wrongdoing and suffering, it advocates for those who cannot do so for themselves. It also quickly brought about governmental reform.

I was glad to see Times editors rebut the complaints so strongly. And I think they’re essentially right.