The worst of Times

As Mnookin's chronicle captures in high page-turner style, l'affaire Blair had the media world (and, for a week or so, the whole country) enthralled during a slow news cycle in the spring of 2003. And no wonder: It was a gripping tale of a breathtaking con job and unbelievable mismanagement, leavened with schadenfreude and seasoned with those inescapably American ingredients, racial guilt and hostility.

A young and inexperienced African-American reporter is fast-tracked to the front page, despite repeated warnings from his editors and supervisors that he can't be trusted. Suffering from who knows what combination of mental instability, anger, drug addiction and exhaustion, he perpetrates the most massive and ambitious series of frauds in the recent history of journalism, "reporting" dozens of stories from places he never visited about people he never met.

The scale of the Times' response was every bit as impressive as the scale of Blair's deceptions. After an editor at the San Antonio Express-News informed the Times that Blair had apparently plagiarized an article from his paper about a Texas woman whose son was missing in action in Iraq -- and after Times editors realized that Blair had never traveled to Texas and that his story was entirely bogus -- a team of five Times reporters, three editors and several researchers spent a week, working almost 24/7, digging into Blair's reporting career. Acting as in-house independent investigators, they interviewed Blair's editors and colleagues, sought access to his personnel records and expense reports, and had a series of tense encounters with the paper's upper management, including Raines, managing editor Gerald Boyd and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

A former Newsweek reporter who covered the Blair scandal at the time, Mnookin provides an admirably full account of this ultimate crash-reporting assignment and the foxhole mentality it bred among the investigative team. (Full disclosure: Mnookin was a frequent contributor to Salon from 1998 to 2002, and I've met him two or three times.) It's compulsive bedside reading for journalism junkies. As reporters Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan Glater, Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg began to excavate Blair's trail of deceit, they realized, first, that the scope of his deception was massive and, second, that part of the story was about the dysfunctional management style and poor communication of the Raines-Boyd regime.

They were unearthing the biggest scoop of their careers -- and it was a scoop that was going to fling mud all over their bosses and the exalted reputation of their newspaper. Barstow cracks: "We were all half waiting for the time when we'd be told, 'We really need a seasoned journalist to lead the resurrection in the Westchester Weekly section ... And by the way, you start on Monday.'"

In the end, the team's 7,100-word report was published, without management interference, on May 11, 2003. Mnookin rightly observes that it was a document that would change American journalism. The article didn't merely catalog Blair's career of plagiarism and fabrication in gruesome detail; it described them as a "profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper." No major journalistic institution had ever undertaken such a public self-scouring, and anyone who buys into the newsroom bromide that the only cure for bad reporting is good reporting had to feel heartened. Some within the paper, according to Mnookin, felt that Barry, Barstow, et al., didn't go far enough in crucifying Raines and Boyd; others found the whole thing an exercise in overwrought navel gazing.

But for most readers, I suspect, and most journalists outside the Times, the article was impressive evidence that the paper's management wouldn't try to sweep the Blair scandal under the rug and was committed to repairing the damage as best it could. As Mnookin further documents, a near-rebellion of Times staffers against Raines and Boyd cost the editors their jobs and led to the reign of current executive editor Bill Keller, a more conventional Timesman who, it seems, is trying to shape the paper more gradually and subtly, and who lacks Raines' good-ol'-boy charisma, far-reaching vision or fatal hubris.

Before we get to Judith Miller, and the question of why she still has a job despite disseminating lies and propaganda whose effects put Jayson Blair's fictions to shame, let's consider the fascinating case of Howell Raines. Mnookin honestly tries to do Raines justice, but I don't think he succeeds, partly because Raines refused to talk to him (most of Mnookin's many sources come from the anti-Raines faction within the Times) and partly because Raines is so difficult to figure out. How did a man who had demonstrated such extraordinary political savvy in his climb up the Times' masthead become (at least in the view of many, perhaps most, of his subordinates) an isolated autocrat, widely disliked and hopelessly out of touch with his own newsroom?

Mnookin believes that Raines was essentially too fat-headed and ham-fisted for the job, and was more interested in his own legacy -- and even in his status as a superstar editor and New York gossip-column character -- than in the greater good of the newspaper. There's probably something to this; I've worked for these kinds of slave-driving, door-slamming, editorial visionaries before, and I've never liked it. (I was involved in a staff coup against a talented, difficult editor at a San Francisco weekly about a dozen years ago.)

Raines sounds like an impossible boss, in Mnookin's account, and his attempt to reshape the Times in his own image was foolhardy. But I pretty much agree with Raines' central critique, which, as I read it, was that under previous editor Joe Lelyveld the paper had grown staid and complacent. The Times was too often a follower on big stories rather than a leader, the cultural coverage was insipid to the point of irrelevance, and the overall feeling was that of a vast operation of dusty, dull competence rather than daring or ambition.

As Friel and Falk point out in "The Record of the Paper," the Times, before Raines, had always conspicuously avoided crusades. Raines' efforts to change that by pursuing many of his favorite issues, via both news coverage and the editorial page, struck many observers as especially embarrassing. (In the case of his extended and exaggerated campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club for its discrimination against women, it also backfired in spectacular fashion.) By the same token, for progressive readers it was heartening to see the Times vigorously covering abortion rights, gun control and affirmative action, top items on Raines' avowedly liberal agenda. Raines was right, at least personally, about the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war (although the paper editorially waffled on both). My personal, heretical view is that Raines was also right in his low opinion of Bill Clinton, but let's leave that argument for another time.

Clearly, Raines was a dismal manager with terrible communication skills, but as a reader, I found the Raines-era Times more engaging, more packed with must-reads and more alive to the issues of the day than it had been for several years previously. On the other hand, it also published both Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, and that happened, according to Mnookin, because of the increasingly autocratic management climate fostered by Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd. So, much as I want to admire and sympathize with the eccentric, big-dreaming Alabamian, Raines' lasting legacy at the Times is a sad and shameful one.

Next Page: How Judith Miller's WMD stories followed an insidious, sinister pattern

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