The spring of 2003 was a season of crisis for The New York Times, as revelations of the fraud perpetrated by reporter Jayson Blair brought a dramatic end to the stormy tenure of Executive Editor Howell Raines. Former Newsweek media writer Seth Mnookin has produced a definitive account of the period in his new book Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media. TAP's Sam Rosenfeld talked to Mnookin about the scandals, the Times of today, and the media landscape of tomorrow.
The book is more about Howell Raines's tenure as executive editor of the Times than it is about Jayson Blair. How did Raines's approach to running the paper set the conditions for a scandal like Blair's to happen?
Howell was brought in to the Times in the end of 2001, as executive editor, with a vision of what he wanted to do. I think that he correctly identified the newspaper industry as facing some really serious challenges: the main one being the reality that newspapers are losing readership, and younger people are not looking to newspapers as their primary news source in the way that a generation ago people did. And so he set about trying to, in his mind, revitalize and reinvigorate the paper. He convinced himself and tried to convince the publisher that the Times was losing a step on breaking news stories, was out of touch with popular culture, etc.
But what you saw after a year, year-and-a-half of his tenure was: First, editors started leaving because they no longer felt comfortable with the way that the news hole was being produced. Secondly, you had editors and reporters alike learning that their dissent was not going to be taken in the spirit that it was offered. Hopefully, at any organization, you're going to have editors and reporters who view a story or idea one way -- and others view it another way -- and you can have a healthy debate. But under Raines, people started feeling that there wasn't room for that.
So fast-forward to the fall of 2002. You have a staff that's stretched really thin, and this one reporter [Blair] who has a really, really sorry track record. When he's suggested to go to the national staff, no one went back and talked to the people who were most close to him on the metro desk. Every single shred of evidence points to that being because, by that point, Howell Raines had decided that [metro desk editor] Jon Landman's occasional dissent from some of his story views, in fact, was a nefarious plot to overthrow him, and was no longer interested in including [Landman] in the conversation. Then, during the six months that Jayson was on the national staff, you had at one point the Washington bureau and [Washington editor] Jill Abramson herself raising red flags over his reporting; this was somewhat ignored. And so the culture of the paper had shifted to the point that, by the time Jayson started on his journalistic suicide campaign, it was already really clear that dissent was no longer to be welcomed, and that Howell Raines was going to decide who he was favoring and who he wasn't favoring and which people would succeed.
You devote a large chunk of the book to the internal investigation into the Blair scandal carried out by a team of Times reporters. What's the significance of that part of the story to you?
I was very conscious when I was working on the book of wanting it to be something that was read and discussed and enjoyed by people who weren't in the media. I didn't find a lot of books about the media or about journalism that I really thought had been good reads. I realized that the thing that had drawn me to journalism initially was its sense of excitement, of its similarity to being a detective -- the chance to uncover mysteries. I also realized that I still, to this day, get excited and jazzed up when I go into newsrooms. I thought if I could convey those two feelings, then I'd have a decent chance of making this something that people outside of the media world might be interested in.
I also just found that particular group of reporters and editors to be so amazingly compelling and so powerful and inspiring. I thought this was a way to show what I thought was best about The New York Times and to show it during a period when the institution obviously was not put in its best light.
A lot of liberals, like those of us here at the Prospect, felt that Judith Miller's journalistic antics were more significant in terms of actual, pernicious real-world impact than anything Jayson Blair wrote.
Whenever Judith Miller's name comes up, too often the nuance is lost that there was never any point at which Judith thought she was doing anything but bringing good reporting to the paper. She wasn't, obviously. But that was not because she was trying to perpetrate a fraud or advance some agenda or because she was hoping to get a position in the [Ahmed] Chalabi cabinet or whatever. In discussing her reporting, and obviously there's a lot to discuss, I just think it's so crucial to remember that distinction.
How did Raines's management contribute to the problems with Miller's reporting?
It's this same notion of a newspaper existing to report the truth versus a newspaper existing to milk a big story or make a splash or create buzz. I quote a couple of people in the book who said point-blank that Raines had told Judy Miller to “go win a Pulitzer” [for her articles on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and alleged Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda]. She was one of the reporters that he favored, and one of the things he communicated to his staff was that he did not appreciate his favorite reporters being unduly edited or questioned. He also basically chased out [investigative editor] Steve Engelberg, who left rather than have to work with Howell. Engelberg was really the one editor at the paper who had the institutional knowledge and expertise and core competency in that area to ask Judy the questions that needed to be asked. So if you think, as I do, that Howell did not fully recognize the importance of surrounding himself with willful, smart editors who were experts in areas that he was not an expert in, then you realize how dangerous it is to push people like Steve out. You see what happens.
The last piece of the Judy Miller puzzle was that, in his first year on the job, Raines had gotten so much criticism, especially on the Augusta National Golf Club and the Kissinger on Iraq stories, for injecting a liberal activist agenda into the news pages. There is a feeling among a lot of people at the paper that one of the things Raines was doing during this period was overcompensating -- trying to prove that he was not going to run the paper as his liberal fiefdom. And that's also very dangerous, obviously.
How has Bill Keller's tenure affected the daily product that the Times puts out? What do you say to those who argue that there remains a certain sleepiness to the paper's coverage of this White House and its policies, compared with, say, The Washington Post?
In general, I find that -- for the most part -- when people talk about spoken or unspoken media conspiracies, it's almost never true. You're usually talking about something totally different. In the case of the Times, immediately after Raines left, you had a newspaper that was really in a state of crisis and was struggling to overcome what had probably been the most traumatic event that had ever occurred at the paper. You had a leadership team that did not have the normal amount of time to prepare, you had a managing editor and the new executive editor who had not mapped out a vision, who had not planned on working together at all, in fact. So I think it took a while to get the kind of momentum going that they needed, for everyone to feel comfortable working with each other and to figure out -- coming off a period during which pushing back had not been encouraged -- when to push back and when to trust what your editors are telling you, etc. And I think you saw as the year went on that the Times was catching up to speed. If you think that their political coverage or their Washington coverage was not as aggressive as The Washington Post's, I don't think anything should be read into that -- other than that they were coming from a different place, and it took them some time to regain their footing.
Despite Raines's botched execution of his vision, you said he correctly identified some real challenges facing the newspaper industry in the coming decades. How do you think the Times can face up to those challenges?
My own reading of that was: In making his argument and in convincing himself that he was the only person to do the job, he vastly overstated the case that the Times needed to be reinvigorated. They've done a great, great job over the last decade in positioning themselves to be a national paper, not just a local one. If you look at it, virtually every paper in the country is losing circulation. You also look at The New York Times in the New York metro area, and they're losing circulation. But overall, the Times is gaining circulation. That's because of their effective campaign to transform themselves into a more national product.
I think also what they're doing right now is successfully finding ways that they can draw in new readers without changing the core identity of who they are. This is far from my area of expertise, but one interesting parallel is CNN. Look at how they've responded to some of the same pressures, and particularly how they've responded to the rise of FOX News. There's a school of thought -- and maybe it's an optimistic one, but it's one that I hope is true and that I happen to believe in -- that holds that, if CNN had stayed a little bit truer to the identity that Ted Turner had carved out for that company, they would be doing better. Right now they appear to be floundering a little bit, and I think you could make the argument that they would have been better served if in the face of these pressures and FOX News they had said, “We know who we are, and we're going to continue to cater to the audience that has come to depend on us and likes what we do.” I think you're seeing some of those same tensions and questions occurring with the Times.
Sam Rosenfeld is a Prospect web writer.
