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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A month after Jayson Blair, the nation's greatest newspaper remains mired in controversy.
Jun 5, 2003 | May Day this year brought revelations about two newsroom scandals involving gross ethical lapses by young reporters. Each meltdown badly injured a newspaper's reputation, but how the top editors responded has marked the difference between one daily recovering its credibility and the other remaining mired in controversy.
On May 1, readers of the New York Times were informed that a young reporter by the name of Jayson Blair had resigned the previous day, after being confronted with proof that he'd blatantly plagiarized material from another newspaper. With more digging, the newspaper uncovered a tomb full of Blair deceptions and lies, as well as an appalling work record, which were soon chronicled in detail inside the Times' pages.
Executive editor Howell Raines took responsibility for the fiasco and vowed to fix what had gone wrong at the Times, but he did not offer to resign. In fact the Times' publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who hand-picked Raines for the job two years ago and who has been Raines' patron for the past decade, told newspaper staffers gathered at a contentious town hall-style meeting three weeks ago that he wouldn't have accepted Raines' resignation even if it had been offered.
By comparison, readers of the Salt Lake City Tribune opened their paper the same May day to discover the Tribune editor had resigned, the victim of a newsroom scandal involving two young reporters who secretly sold to the National Enquirer salacious, unconfirmed law enforcement rumors about the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in 2002. When the editor, James Shelledy, first heard of the charges, he suspended the reporters for two weeks and announced the action in his Sunday column, rather than have the Tribune write a straight news story. (It turned out Shelledy did not have all the facts of the case at the time.)
The mild rebuke caused a newsroom uproar. Days later, with his publisher standing at his side, Shelledy announced his resignation. In a separate letter to the staff, he wrote: "The Tribune hit an iceberg and I was at the helm. For 12 gratifying, exciting years, I have been at the helm of the newsroom. Collisions and damage control were my responsibility. Solely. The buck knew where to stop. And did."
More and more observers, both inside and outside the Times, are wondering if the Times would be better off if Raines offered -- and Sulzberger accepted -- a similar buck-stops-here farewell. While Shelledy's departure effectively marked the end to the Tribune's mini-scandal, more than a month later the Times is still reeling. Rival journalists, perhaps anxious to dent the Times' national standing as the most important daily newspaper in the country, continue to circle the paper looking for fresh evidence of Raines' mismanagement, while an army of angry staffers who feel misused under Raines are grousing openly (if anonymously) about their editor. [Editor's note: On Thursday, Raines and his deputy, Gerald Boyd, resigned.]
Even Raines' supporters concede that the controversy has spread far beyond one discredited reporter. "Jayson Blair was Mrs. O'Leary's cow," says Jim Dwyer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Times, referring to the firestorm that's swept the newsroom in the last month. "His misbehavior, his betrayal, opened up a lot of score settling, not only inside the newspaper but outside as well."
"People outside the paper feel it's a miracle Howell's still editor," says one senior Times staffer. What's the tipping point for the Times? The only person who can answer that is Sulzberger, and he's not talking.
The story began a month ago as an account of Blair's misadventure, and whether Raines, as an avowed Southern liberal, gave the young black reporter too many second chances. The problem now, however, is that the story has been transformed into one about Raines' domineering, often arrogant leadership style and whether he has the ability to remain in the job. "Jayson Blair is forgotten at this point by everybody," notes one staffer.
The bridge that took the narrative from Blair to Raines was constructed last week with the revelation that Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter Rick Bragg, a close friend of Raines', had been suspended for not crediting the work that an unpaid intern had done on an article under Bragg's byline. As the story mushroomed, Bragg's response was, essentially, that everyone at the Times does it; when that provoked open revolt among some of his colleagues, Bragg called his good friend Raines and resigned. There's no evidence Raines knew about the corners his friend had cut, but the suspicion inside the newsroom lingered that some members of Raines' star system have been allowed to play by a different, more lenient set of rules.
Under the guidance of Sulzberger -- a fourth-generation Times leader who in 1992 became its publisher at the age of 40, one who emphasized teamwork and a new, Outward Bound brand of cooperation -- the Times has handled the current crisis in an unusually public way. The paper published an exhaustive, 14,000-word package on Blair, held the now infamous town hall meeting in a Broadway theater, and formed committees to sift through the wreckage and make recommendations. Meanwhile, young reporters at the Times have suddenly felt free to band together, air their grievances and demand changes in newsroom policy.
But the new brand of transparent management -- which would have been completely foreign to Sulzberger's father and longtime Times publisher, Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger -- has some inside the paper scratching their heads and wondering if it hasn't done the Times, and especially Raines, extraordinary damage over the last four weeks. "I'm devastated over how this has all been handled," complains one Times veteran. "The Times is saying, in effect, 'I'll bend over and kick me in the ass. And then kick me hard and kick me harder.' It's the Times that's keeping the story alive, and it's done Howell in. He's getting pummeled."
So is the newspaper, and its political rivals are basking in its misery. "You know who's getting the greatest satisfaction of this?" asked one longtime Times newsroom employee. "It's the Christian right. They've been trying to cut the Times' throat for a long time for being a liberal paper."
