The New York Times reports on its “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust” report. We can quibble about whether the “preserving” in the title of the report should be replaced with “regaining,” but if the Times implements some of these suggestions, then it will have taken an important first step towards regaining some credibility.

The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye writes:

In order to build readers’ confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper’s critics.

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The committee, which was charged last fall by Bill Keller, the executive editor, with examining how the paper could increase readers’ trust, said there was “an immense amount that we can do to improve our journalism.”

As examples, the report cited limiting anonymous sources, reducing factual errors and making a clearer distinction between news and opinion. It also said The Times should make the paper’s operations and decisions more transparent to readers through methods like making transcripts of interviews available on its Web site.

The report also said The Times should make it easier for readers to send e-mail to reporters and editors. “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,” the report said.

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One area of particular concern to Mr. Keller at the outset was the relentless public criticism of the paper, amplified by both the left and right on the Internet, that peaked during last year’s presidential campaign. The paper was largely silent during those attacks, and Mr. Keller asked the committee to consider whether it was “any longer possible to stand silent and stoic under fire.”

The committee asserted that The Times must respond to its critics. The report said it was hard for the paper to resist being in a “defensive crouch” during the election but now urged The Times to explain itself “actively and earnestly” to critics and to readers who are often left confused when charges go unanswered.

This would be good. One of the problems with media bias is that its very existence magnifies the perception of itself. Sometimes errors are the result of incompetence, not bias, but when the slant of the incompetence matches the prevailing slant of the media’s bias, people tend to assume it’s all bias. If the media cleansed itself of actual bias—assuming it is even possible for humans to do that—it would find itself under much less assault for the honest reporting and honest mistakes that are often perceived as bias.

Speaking of mistakes, the report highlighted the paper’s astonishingly high error ratio. (Alex Rodriguez, eat your heart out!) On any given day, the paper corrected an average of nearly nine errors:

As for errors, the report noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year and proposed a system to track errors to detect patterns to try to prevent them from recurring.

Of course, this error rate would be even higher if the paper issued corrections for minor infractions like doctoring quotes.

The committee said the system would not be used to compile error rates of individual reporters, noting that using raw numeric counts as part of a reporter’s evaluation “would breed resentment.”

Resentment on whose part? The people screwing up? What kind of politically correct management worries that keeping metrics of your employees’ performance might upset them? Sounds a bit like the schools that prevent teachers from using red pens over worries that the color might hurt kids’ feelings. Maybe a lax management philosophy is what led to such a high level of mistakes in the first place.

Other perspectives: Media insider Jeff Jarvis likes what he sees in the Seelye article, while blogger Ace of Spaces dug through the report and detects an admission of bias:

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.”

We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. We particularly slip into these traps in feature stories when reporters and editors think they are merely presenting an interesting slice of life, with little awareness of the power of labels. We need to be more vigilant about the choice of language not only in the text but also in headlines, captions and display type.

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In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

This isn’t the first time the paper has admitted its bias, but still, the Times should be commended for its honesty. There’s nothing wrong with a liberal paper that owns up to its perspective, as long as opinion is not presented as news. It may take a while for the culture within the newsroom to embrace the suggestions of this report, though; the evidence is, they haven’t yet.