This Day in Journalism History (Raines Begins Trying ‘Times’ Running the Gray Lady)

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.”