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Times Watch for 05/14/03

HARDBALL’S FOUL BALL?

By Liz Swasey

Some media critics are now suggesting that assigning a role to "affirmative action" in the Jayson Blair fiasco is outside the bounds of respectable opinion.

In his Web-exclusive column today, Newsweek media reporter Seth Mnookin wrote I "smeared" New York Times executive editor Howell Raines on the May 12 MSNBC Hardball in which Mnookin, Mort Zuckerman and I discussed the Jayson Blair fiasco. Mnookin said I mischaracterized NPR’s account of his comments on the Times’ diversity program. Judge for yourself.

On NPR’s All Things Considered, co-host Melissa Block interviewed Raines about his comments at a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists: "You said, 'This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.'"

My paraphrase on Hardball: "He [Raines] said that diversity was more important than journalism." Isn’t this what he was saying?

For this characterization, Mnookin wrote: "I suspect that she was simply being intellectually dishonest, twisting reality to make her point (that’s what rabid ideologues tend to do)."

But many others – including those outside the ranks of "rabid ideologues" – also wondered whether the demands of "diversity" played a role in the Blair fiasco:

* On May 13, liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen asked why did the Times allow Blair to do such damage? "The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race."

* On NBC’s Today the same morning, New Yorker magazine media reporter Ken Auletta thought one story angle needed more reporting: "Did their desire, their good desire, to have a more diverse staff, did it somehow contribute to relaxing of the standards they usually apply to reporters?"

* On CNN’s Reliable Sources May 4, host Howard Kurtz wondered: "This was a promising young black reporter. I wonder if a middle-aged hack would have gotten away with 50 mistakes and still be at that job."

Liz Swasey is the Communications Director for the Media Research Center.

Howell Raines’ Theatre of the Absurd

Times staffers will pack a Times Square theatre today to watch the latest installment of the Jayson horror story (also known as the “Blair Watch Project”). An internal company memo leaked to the Drudge Report reveals that top management (publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., managing editor Gerald Boyd and executive editor Howell Raines) will take questions from the Times seething newsroom staff.

Heather Mac Donald lays out in City Journal why Times staffers have reason to be angry: “[Reporter Jayson Blair] behaved unprofessionally—circulating confidential documents, talking back to supervisors, and running up a hefty bar tab on the company account. Management was on repeated notice of his severe shortcomings as a reporter yet chose to ignore and even suppress them.” That’s on top of Blair’s high error rate. Mac Donald adds: “It defies credulity to believe that if Blair had been white, the Times would have given him so many second chances and promotions in the face of ongoing, unchanging evidence of sub-par performance.”

Media reporter Ken Auletta is no Times-basher. In June he wrote a long profile of Times executive editor Howell Raines for the New Yorker and told ABC.com’s “The Note” that the Times is “generally acknowledged to be the best newspaper in the world.” What a difference a Blair makes. In a Today show interview with host Matt Lauer, Auletta asked rhetorically: "Did their desire, their good desire, to have a more diverse staff, did it somehow contribute to relaxing of the standards they usually apply to reporters?” Auletta also confesses shock: “The thing that's really shocking, and this was not gone into in the Times account on Sunday, the law enforcement officials in Maryland attacked the New York Times in a press conference saying that he had false facts in there, and no editor at the New York Times, according to that account, asked Jayson Blair who his sources were."

Indeed, there seems to be no one out there coming to the defense of the Times. Those critics who don’t want to blame the paper’s quest for diversity instead finger executive editor Howell Raines and his autocratic management style. It seems like Raines was more feared than respected around the newsroom. Now he may have lost the fear.

Another striking aspect of the Blair affair is the unusual willingness of journalists to raise the issue of the potential corrupting effect of the Times zealous quest for newsroom “diversity.” That’s usually an idea journalists steer clear of, for reasons of both ideology and careerism. Perhaps serious journalists, liberal or not, have come to realize the diversity quest may not be just a harmless social experiment but could actually damage the reputations of their news outlets—and by extension, their own reputations as journalists. As Times publisher Sulzberger said of the Blair matter, “It’s an abrogation of the trust between the newspapers and its readers.”

Sulzberger rightly called the Blair imbroglio “a black eye.” But these kind of hurts don’t fade so quickly. The Washington Post has won 40 Pulitzer Prizes, but that hasn’t erased the memory of the one it gave back. Reporter Janet Cooke won the prize in 1981 for a story about “Jimmy,” an 8-year-old heroin addict--a story later revealed to be completely false. The ramifications of the Blair fiasco have already been severe, and the story isn’t over yet.

What can the Times do to prevent future problems? It might want to emulate the Washington Post in at least one sense and hire an ombudsman--a reader advocate, a person to whom people who suspect bias or think they’ve been wronged by the Times can turn. The paper’s higher-ups could also start listening to their staff, like metro editor (and new newsroom hero) Jonathan Landman, who in April 2002 wrote an email to newsroom administrators: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Maureen Dowd’s Dishonest Deletion

Columnist Maureen Dowd dishonestly quotes President Bush to make him look wrong about the dangers posed by Al Qaeda terrorists, notes a sharp-eyed reader. In “Osama’s Offpsring,” Dowd uses the Al Qaeda bombings in Riyadh Monday night to accuse the Bush administration of carrying an attitude of “lulling triumphalism” over Al Qaeda.

“Busy chasing off Saddam,” Dowd writes, “the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. ‘Al Qaeda is on the run,’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated…They're not a problem anymore.’”

Bush said no such thing, and Dowd knows it. In fact, Dowd uses ellipses…to hide the truth. As reader Robert Cox brought to my attention, here’s what Bush actually said in Arkansas May 5:

“Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore. (Applause.) And we'll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the Al Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn't matter how long it's going to take, they will be brought to justice.”

Notice the third sentence of Bush’s speech: It’s clear Bush is only talking about the top Al Qaeda operatives that “are either jailed or dead” as being “not a problem anymore”--not the Al Qaeda organization itself. Dowd dishonestly deleted that sentence and the first three words of the next one to make Bush “ say” Al Qaeda was no longer a threat. Bush’s additional assertion “it doesn’t matter how long it’s going to take, they will be brought to justice” makes it clear Bush considers the war on Al Qaeda an ongoing one. Meanwhile, Dowd carries on a rear-guard action against the truth.

For Maureen Dowd’s Al Qaeda column in full, click here.

E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org

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