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Times Watch for 05/12/03
The Times Jayson Blair Apology: Is It Enough?
“Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception” blares the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, introducing a 7,200 word examination of the paper’s chain of failures in the case of reporter Jayson Blair, who resigned from the paper after his plagiarism came to light two weeks ago. The tone of the sprawling mea culpa is appropriately self-critical of Times management and editorial staff, but it hasn’t quieted all the paper’s critics.
Slate journalist Mickey Kaus considers the Times big mea culpa “a prima facie case of editorial negligence against [executive editor Howell] Raines,” adding: “Twice in the past year, Raines has led their paper to disgrace--first, with the comically overdone crusade against the Augusta National golf club, in which dissenting opinions by veteran columnists were spiked, and now with the huge and preventable Blair scandal.”
Andrew Sullivan opines: “It’s clear that many people not only connected the dots but put their concerns in writing—at almost every step of the way in Blair's swift and short career.” Regarding Howell Raines, Sullivan states: “His imperial meddling, diversity obsessions, and mercurial management style all made Blair possible.”
Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin writes of the Times big Blair project: “There’s plenty that the Times report, which ran under the rubric CORRECTING THE RECORD, didn’t fully explore, namely how a troubled young reporter whose short career was rife with problems was able to advance so quickly. Internally, reporters had wondered for years whether Blair was given so many chances—and whether he was hired in the first place—because he was a promising, if unpolished, black reporter on a staff that continues to be, like most newsrooms in the country, mostly white.” Mnookin quotes an unnamed Times staffer: “We have, generally, a horribly undiverse staff, and so we hold up and promote the few black staffers we have.”
Evan Thomas, Newsweek’s assistant managing editor, also weighed in. On the talk show Inside Washington, Thomas said: “Here's the question everyone's dancing around: This is a young black reporter. And the question is, do they give them too much rope. Sometimes this happens. You so much want a young black reporter like that, who’s got gifts and he had gifts, to succeed, you give him too much rope and he hangs himself. And I don't know enough to know what the Times did internally, but you have to wonder that this guy was out there making that many mistakes and they let it go on.”
Last, a New York Sun editorial manages a nice bit of turnabout, quoting two Times editorials that suggest the paper has one standard for its own corporate bosses and a tougher standard for all the rest:
“[T]he move to hold top managers personally liable for any misrepresentations made to investors — which the new corporate oversight legislation also does — is a watershed worth celebrating…C.E.O’s will no longer be able to feign ignorance about the details of the companies’ accounting, as Jeffrey Skilling haughtily did early this year at a Congressional hearing on Enron’s implosion."—The New York Times, editorial, "Downsizing the Imperial C.E.O.," August 9, 2002
"But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats. ‘The person who did this is Jayson Blair,’ he said. ‘Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.’"—The New York Times, news article, "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception," May 11, 2003
The Sun adds: “Far be it from us to suggest how the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., ought to run his business, even if his editorial columns have spent much of the past year telling others how to run theirs.”
To read the 7,200-word Times story on Jayson Blair’s plagiarism, click here.
Karl Rove’s “October Surprise”?
In a signed editorial Saturday, “Karl Rove’s Campaign Strategy Seems Evident: It’s the Terror, Stupid,” Francis X. Clines issues a rather paranoid profile of Bush’s chief political advisor Karl Rove, the man Democrats are setting up as the evil genius behind Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.
Clines darkly hinted the Bush administration would use its war on terrorism as a political playing card, saying Rove described “a far larger and longer war against terrorism that he sees clearly, perchance fortuitously, stretching well toward Election Day 2004. If there were any doubt, Mr. Rove served notice to any and all Democratic challengers that feeding the aura of a wartime president, which has been bolstering Mr. Bush's standing in opinion polls by 15 points and more, would remain his campaigners' first priority across the next 18 months.”
Clines chucks in a dig at Bush’s tax cut plan: “[Rove] made the Bush strategy clear: It's the terror, not the economy, stupid, even if the nation is suffering rolling deficits and relentless unemployment, and despite Mr. Bush's serial tax cuts for the captains of industry.”
Then Clines, who recently took a “grassy knoll” conspiracy angle on Bush’s tax cuts, does the same with the war on terror, even dredging up the ultimate piece of liberal paranoia, the “October Surprise.”
Clines writes, “Democrats may want to talk health care and other economic issues, but they will have to grapple their way through a patriotic blitz of a campaign, if Mr. Rove has his red-white-and-blue way. Democrats can rightly fear an ‘October surprise’ coming color-coded by Tom Ridge next time around.”
For the full Times story on Karl Rove, click here
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org