A few humble suggestions for Dan Okrent

When the New York Times hired Dan Okrent to shine a light into its dark corners, it refused to admit that, like lesser journals, it might need an independent second-guesser, or ombudsman. It dubbed him instead "public editor," and gave him a trial term of 18 months. That reminded me of my own reluctant agreement 30 years ago to serve a hitch half that long, as Times food editor. Okrent was then at Viking, where he bought a book by my wife Karen and me, after the Times welshed on its contract to publish it because we made fun of its own food phonies. So in a note I saluted Okrent for his courage, and wished him and his beloved Red Sox good luck.

The newspaper of record finds it harder than most to admit that it erred. It took years of anguished protest by reporters to get a correction to read, "Because of an editing error." Now it prints scads of them, but they never identify the perpetrator and they hardly ever concern anything of real importance. The foofaraw that resulted in Okrent's hiring is a spectacular illustration.

Lesser media had exposed lies and plagiarism planted in the Times by Jayson Blair, a pathological fantasist. These falsehoods hurt nobody but the Times. A task force produced an interminable post-mortem that began on page one, with Blair's imaginary visit to the farm where Private Jessica Lynch grew up. It ignored the real damage caused by the saga of Lynch's heroic combat, her torture and rescue, which had excited the nation during a critical week of the war: lies upon lies, day after day. The Times had only tagged along with the media pack, but it expressed outrage when the BBC took it all apart and suggested that it was a put-up job. No doubt it was just a case of a series of reporters tapping their unidentified sources for unconfirmable scoops, each topping the last one. But there in the same front section as the mea culpa about Blair was another installment of Judith Miller's long series of scoops about WMDs.

Miller first gained attention as an authority when she received by mail a harmless powder meant to resemble the deadly anthrax sent to Tom Brokaw, et al. She surmised that the genuine germs came from the satanic arsenal of Saddam Hussein. She'd kept an eye on him, it appears, ever since she met the literally incredible Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi in the early 1990s. Osama bin Laden was directing a campaign of terror against the U.S. from his base in Afghanistan, but month after month, and then week after week, she and her anonymous sources located sites in Iraq, which always turned up empty. (For farcical details, click fair.org). The Times' executive editor, Howell Raines, and his deputy, Gerald Boyd, were forced to walk the plank because of Jayson Blair, but Miller stands uncorrected, and Chalabi is now one of nine rotating acting presidents of Iraq.

Inevitably, Blair's color darkened the discussion of his sins. It came up in a muffled fashion in the paper, where Raines felt obliged to concede that it might have encouraged Blair's minor promotion. Critics of affirmative action hailed it as one more vindication, but it's worth noting that a long series of successful American historians and journalists had recently been caught making up material or stealing it, and nobody ever linked their misdeeds to their white complexions?or, indeed, made a very big deal about it. The Times suspended Rick Bragg for describing interviews he'd never made and scenes he hadn't visited; he quit, and here he was on the Times bestseller list with an "autobiography" he wrote for Jessica Lynch. Mike Barnacle was banned in Boston, but hired by the New York Daily News. You can catch other perps on the news channels?in fact, you can't miss them.

Meanwhile, after pledging loyalty to his old friend, Howell Raines, the Times' publisher felt obliged to dump him, and then to choose the pro-war Bill Keller over the anti-war Frank Rich to replace him. There was something of a clamor for him to name an ombudsman. Very much on the spot, he chose to meet it partway.

Allowed only two public columns a month, the public editor has his work cut out for him. How, I wonder, will he handle such common examples of conflict of interest, or naivete, as the Times' role in the annual crackdown by police and trade associations upon street vendors around Times Square and along 5th Ave.? (Conflict: They don't buy ads; the department stores and makers of trademarked goods do. Naivete: Falling for the handouts of interested parties.) The Times is all for free enterprise, but not in its front yard?soon to become its backyard, since it has decided to turn its back on Times Square and build on property over on 8th Ave. that it seized from its reluctant owners, all while exacting fat subsidies from our impoverished municipality.

I could write a book about small and large, funny and tragic ethical conflicts at the Times?and, in fact, I have. My Times is a memoir about how the paper helped Robert Moses ravish the Bronx and Pat Moynihan libel the poor, how we blew the stories of My Lai and Watergate and the banking scandals and played along with the looting that nearly bankrupted our city. How it played along with the CIA abroad and Con Ed and Lilco at home, how it promoted "the big white lie" about Social Security and Medicare bankrupting the nation, and how it helped to wreck the campaign for national health insurance.

Today, Okrent will be forced to confront such matters as why the Times counted only one-third as many peace marchers in Washington as Newsday did; why its report of a debate among nine Democratic candidates mentioned the three on the left in only a single phrase (not a whole sentence), well down in the story, though reviewers thought one of them (Sharpton) stole the show; why the Times keeps mucking up its reporting on the Medicare bill (which the editors found a worthy advance) and keeps calling AARP a huge association of seniors, rather than a mail-order business with a shady history; why the Times suspended its embargo on the Nobel laureate Noam Chomsky to print an interview by a Sunday magazine reporter who worked herself into a frenzy, asking him whether he criticized Israel in order to get back at his father, a Hebraic scholar, whether he'd had psychotherapy and shouldn't he leave the United States. (He replied patiently that he loved his father, holds shrinks in disdain and would stay here because this was the best country in the world.)

I don't know what Okrent will make of the Style and Food sections. A big spread for Thanksgiving recommended a set of dishes at $420 a setting, not counting silverware and crystal glasses, and William Grimes was gushing about the six restaurants charging up to $500 a plate set to open on Columbus Circle in February. I recall the last line of the last food column I wrote for the Times: "As long as we let fashion editors say how we should eat, we shall eat badly." The line was killed by the fashion editor.

One last question that the public editor might look into, privately: The Times got quite a few review copies of my book, and ordered more. It sure was timely. Why has it not, so far, mentioned it publicly? Just asking.