Sept. 5,
2001—Howell Raines took over as executive editor of The New York
Times with superabundant self-confidence. In two stormy years atop the
“paper of record,” he exuded a grating self-righteousness. Several years later,
following revelations of widespread fabrication and fraud by reporter Jayson Blair on his watch, he reviewed his fall from the newspaper where he had
worked for 25 years with self-pity.
Less than
a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources
into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11
terrorist attacks.
At first,
it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of
“flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day
after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes,
including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.
But more
than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation
were not entirely warranted.
First, the
staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its
ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and
guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.
Second, as
noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended
Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented
an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors
and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”
Arthur
Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the
top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek
article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction.
He must have
sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for
a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson,
in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints
in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management
style.
According
to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,”
Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system
he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that
he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was
not convinced that he had changed.”
But you
might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines
thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier,
and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national
audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic
Monthly account of his tenure.
He also saw a conflict between “the
senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the
newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted
the paper to stay the way it was.”
The
members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every
reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former
journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his
departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.
In his
first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff
by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry,
the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.
But he
missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner
in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that
even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”
Terms
other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines
soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession”
would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some
instances:
* The
verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No
doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time
needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of
individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future
crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on
individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and
readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias.
(For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,”
it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A
Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a
correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.)
Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin
Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his
counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest
story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his
paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to
local stories about the scandal.
*The Bush
administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it
deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded
that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now,
was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior
management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.
* Campaigning
incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was
hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the
one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two
writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.
But the Blair
fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility
that could not be ignored.
What
Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were
not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their
reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of
Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited
even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and
other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.
An exhaustive,
nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded
that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted
by fraud.
Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill
Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop
Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
Five works
elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further
action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering
that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced
to resign.
The
disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he
would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different
fashion than he expected.
Largely because
of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or,
as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated
reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness.
Six journalists performed that
function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social
media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)
In Andy
Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review,
Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the
scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in
newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the
pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at
places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way
that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell
phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”
