The New York Times yesterday named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war.
Mr. Hoyt, 64, was the Washington editor at Knight Ridder from 1999 until the company was sold last year. His responsibilities included overseeing the Washington news bureau, the chain’s foreign bureaus and the news service that the company ran jointly with the Tribune Company.
Before that, he served as Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau chief, and then as vice president for news, with responsibility for hiring and promoting top editors at the company’s newspapers, which included The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Jose Mercury-News and The Detroit Free Press.
In the prelude to the Iraq war and the early days of the war, Knight Ridder stood apart from most of the mainstream news media in raising some doubts about the Bush administration’s claims, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that record contributed to his selection of Mr. Hoyt.
“There was a lot of work Knight Ridder did that was prescient, that wasn’t easy to do,” Mr. Keller said. “It’s always hard to go against conventional wisdom. I think it probably brings him a measure of credibility that helps in getting started on a job like that — that he’s been associated with a brave and aggressive reporting exercise like that.”
The one odd thing about the story is how little it says about current public editor Byron Calame. I think he did an excellent job (as did the first public editor, Daniel Okrent).