1115.org

If Andrew Ross Sorkin had any intellectual honesty at all, he would already have walked back the absurd union-bashing he engaged in this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

Name a successful unionized company. Think. You’re going to go to [commercial] break before you come up with one. And that’s the problem.

(In case you think there’s any justification for thinking it’s particularly hard to come up with names, TPM has a list-in-progress here.)

Sorkin, 32, is one of the top business reporters at the NYT. He also edits their markets and finance blog, Dealbook, and writes a weekly column with the same name.

I figured the blog might be the logical place to park a graceful mea culpa. But there doesn’t seem to be one to be found, there or anywhere else.

If I were the editor of the NYT, I’m not sure how long I would wait to see if Sorkin manned up before I asked him to pack his bags. But six hours seems generous enough.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying Sorkin deserves to be fired for saying what he said. It’s live TV, after all, and anyone can find themselves saying something they deeply regret later. But if you don’t care enough about your journalistic integrity, and that of the newspaper you represent, to recognize that you totally blew it, and that you need to walk back your comments, then I do think you deserve to be fired.

Of course, the NYT may not care enough about its journalistic reputation to fire Sorkin. Or maybe they’re just so much in love with their wunderkind that they’re willing to overlook repeated instances of anti-union bias that call the objectivity of the NYT’s reporting into account?

Sorkin, after all, is also the person responsible for spreading this anti-union canard last year:

If Andrew Ross Sorkin’s name sounds familiar, that’s probably because he’s the reporter who started the myth about the average GM worker being paid $70 an hour. MSNBC’s commentator Keith Olbermann named him “Worst Person in the World” for that bit of blatantly false anti-union, anti-worker propaganda.

I suspect that Sorkin just put himself in line for a second “The Worst Person in the World” title today.

UPDATE by Matt 3:15pm PDT:

Brian Beutler at TPMDC got Sorkin on the phone for a comment:

I did not mean to suggest that there are literally no successful companies that employ union workers. Of course there are! Your readers have provided a good list (though I might quibble with some of the names.)

I made the unscripted comment with my financial columnist hat on in the context of the problems at GM. That’s what the discussion was about on the program. And when you look at some of the once great iconic American industries that have faltered — automobiles, airlines, steel, apparel, etc — there is a fair question worth asking about whether those industries were helped or hurt by their unions. But let’s leave that debate for another day.

First of all, this is a straight-up non-apology apology, exactly as I predicted in my comment below. Second, Sorkin has many megaphones available to him (including at least one that can be updated via text message – hell, I can post to this blog on my iPhone), so why did several hours go by without a word, and why did it take another journalist to drag even this weak shit out of him? Third, does Sorkin’s “financial columnist hat” look anything like a standard issue dunce cap?