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New York Times "public editor" Byron Calame comes close to admitting that his paper's online coverage of this month's payroll jobs report got it completely wrong in its knee-jerk negativism about any economic development under the Bush administration. But it wasn't bias (it never is, according to Calame). It was failure to "consult" with other reporters on the Times staff.

One recent consultation came too late to keep the top of the Nov. 3 online story on government job growth statistics from contradicting the next day’s article in the print paper. Tom Redburn, the deputy business editor, typically confers with Mr. Peters on such stories sometime during the morning, but he was tied up in meetings until nearly noon.

By then, Mr. Peters had already emphasized slowing job growth at the top of all three versions of his Web story that morning. He based that on the weakness in job growth in the most recent month, October, as is the paper’s normal practice. There were also substantial upward revisions in the employment gains for September and August, however, and Mr. Redburn felt that meant the print paper story had to “look at the underlying trend.” And the first paragraph of Mr. Peters’s article the next morning had “job growth advancing in recent months.”

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