(Photo: John Barrett/Globe Photos)

The Grumpiest Ombudsman
Retract this, Krugman!
Dan Okrent admits that his final column wasn’t meant to make the people at the Times miss him. In it, the public editor accused Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd of letting their ideology warp their accuracy, before going on to assert that Alessandra Stanley’s Katie Couric piece got “gratuitously nasty”—which is pretty much what the people at the Times thought about his column, too, especially since he didn’t give any of them a chance to respond. “It was mystifying why he abandoned his practice of giving the journalists critiqued a chance to rebut,” says Dowd, who, like the others Okrent singled out, let him know. “Krugman’s been writing to me two, three times a day demanding a retraction or apology, and I’m not going to give him either,” says Okrent. At his going-away party (where “there was no hostility present at all”), he did tell Times editor Bill Keller and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., “I didn’t mean to go out making everyone mad at me.” Or maybe he did. “I have a theory. Over the last few weeks, people were taking me out to lunch, being so gracious to me, I was beginning to worry I would miss this job,” he says. “So on some subconscious level—and I do mean subconscious—maybe I thought I’d write something so that they’ll be glad I’m leaving.”