On a Long Afghanistan Editorial, Bill Keller\'s Column and the Use of Famous Images

With about 200 e-mails rolling in each day to the public editor's e-mail basket, I find that it's sometimes useful to group them into subject categories and ask a ranking editor to address the questions. The three below have to do with editorials and opinion pieces. The questions, which are paraphrased, have been answered by Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor.

Q.

Sunday's Afghanistan editorial was unusually lengthy at over 1,800 words. Clearly, the subject is important, but what else went into the decision to write and publish it at such length?

A.

When we change positions on something important, as we did on Afghanistan, we owe our readers an explanation, and I think that a war where American men and women are dying is a classic example. I thought that we should go into some detail about the various reasons we had for changing our mind on the withdrawal, and to discuss a t some length the situation there, since that is what led to the change. It's actually not all that out of line to write a full-page editorial on a big subject. We do it sort of regularly.

Q.

Why does Bill Keller's column run only sometimes in print? Is that done on a regular schedule or on a case-by-case (or space available) basis?

A.

Bill Keller's column runs one week in print and the next week online, then in print, and then online. That's the arrangement. He started out writing every other week, in print. But we both thought it would be good for him to appear every week, and we agreed that the extra column would be online. He also added a blog.

Q.

The illustration that appeared with Nicholas D. Kristof's health care cover story in last Sunday's Review section was a clear reference to the renowned graphic from Hitchcock's “Vertigo” poster. When is it acceptable, from your p oint of view, to use such an image without mention of the original work?

A.

I think when something is embedded in our culture and immediately apparent to everyone, then it's acceptable. You can run an image that plays off the Statue of Liberty, or the Golden Gate Bridge without identifying it as such, or in cinema, I guess I could think of an image from “Psycho,” or “Gone With the Wind,” or so many other films.