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Times Watch for May 15, 2003
Raines
Comes Clean—But Soils Times Reputation
After days of evasion, Times executive
editor Howell Raines finally answered the big question yesterday, admitting he
gave Jayson Blair, a black reporter, “one chance too many.”
Here’s the Raines quote in full, courtesy of the Times media writer Jacques Steinberg: “Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities….Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
(As might be expected, Steinberg’s account of the unprecedented staff meeting is rather hard to find—buried on page A31 of the Times. An ironic story side-note is printed alongside the article: “The Times meeting was closed to news coverage. As a result, Mr. Steinberg, the Times media writer, did not attend it.”)
More from Steinberg on the Times testy town-hall type meeting, held at a movie theatre near headquarters: “‘You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,’ Mr. Raines said, ticking off a list he had compiled from his own newsroom interviews in recent days. ‘You believe the newsroom is too hierarchical, that my ideas get acted on and others get ignored. I heard that you were convinced there's a star system that singles out my favorites for elevation.’”
In the second half of the story, Steinberg finally addresses the central question: Did Blair’s race play a role in his treatment?
“Before opening the session to questions,” Steinberg writes, “Mr. Raines made a pre-emptive attempt to address whether Mr. Blair's race — he is black — had played a role in his being added last fall to the team covering the hunt for the snipers in the Washington area. Only six months earlier, Mr. Blair, 27, had been found to be making so many serious errors as a reporter on the metropolitan staff that he had been informed that his job was in jeopardy.”
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz gets a little more graphic: “Joe Sexton, a metropolitan desk editor, used a profanity in demanding to know how the paper could have sent Blair, a 27-year-old reporter with a checkered record, to cover the Washington sniper case. ‘You guys have lost the confidence of much of the newsroom,’ Sexton said. Raines told Sexton sharply not to ‘demagogue me’ or use curse words, saying the discussion should be more civil. But he also said: ‘I'm sorry I don't have your trust. I hope I can win it back.’”
For the Steinberg story on the emotional Times staff meeting in full, click here.
A
Tale of Two Plagiarists: Raines Scraped Mike Barnicle, But Sheltered Blair
Howell Raines was the Times editorial page editor in August 1998, at the time of the flap over the Boston Globe’s plagiarizing columnist Mike Barnicle. Now that Raines has his own “Barnicle” to scrape off his paper’s reputation in the form of Jayson Blair, it might be helpful to look back and see how Raines reacted to the plagiarizing Globe columnist.
As it turns out, Raines dealt with the Globe’s woes by huffing and puffing about the importance of “strict enforcement of rules” and the evil of double standards. That’s ironic, considering Raines just admitted giving Blair too many breaks because he was a black reporter.
In 1998, editorial page editor Raines wrote a signed editorial accusing the Globe, which is owned by the Times, of giving Barnicle a break because he’s white while quickly dismissing plagiarizing black columnist Patricia Smith. (Barnicle was suspended and eventually resigned from the Globe after additional evidence of fabrication and plagiarism came to light.)
Parts of Raines’ written lecture are newly relevant, given his leading role in the Blair affair. “Trust is the glue that holds newsrooms together and ultimately binds readers to a specific newspaper and to newspapers in general,” Raines wrote. “The Boston Globe's decision not to dismiss its star columnist Mike Barnicle is understandable as a matter of loyalty, public relations and readership, but when it comes to the keeping of consistent professional standards, it does not pass the trust test.”
Of course, Raines by his own admission failed to keep “consistent professional standards” regarding Blair--and the Times is now considered even less trustworthy.
On the firing of Patricia Smith, he wrote: “The Globe dropped Ms. Smith like a hot rock, and rightly so. But upon her dismissal there were immediate rumblings that the newspaper had, for years, looked the other way when confronted with reports that Mr. Barnicle was writing what Mark Twain called ‘stretchers’ in his colorful but apparently well-reported columns.”
As has been well documented, Raines and management repeatedly looked the other way when it came to Blair’s plagiarism and erratic behavior—even promoting Blair to lead coverage on an important national story, the DC-sniper case.
Raines continued to hector the Globe: “Editors have to be able to trust what reporters and columnists write and say. Journalists do not make things up or present others' writing and thought as their own.”
No comment.
“Public respect for newspapering is wounded when rules that would be enforced with doctrinal ferocity among the mass of journalists are lightened for a star who has great value to the paper.”
Of course, Raines considered Jayson Blair a star—of diversity, as he told the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001. Raines himself admits that the Times rules were lightened where Blair was concerned. The paper gave him chance after chance in the face of clear evidence of his personal and journalistic unreliability.
Raines concluded his Barnicle-bashing: “You'll buy my position, of course, only if you believe in strict enforcement of rules about borrowing, lifting and leveling with colleagues, and if you believe, as I do, that if you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper.”
Unfortunately, it seems Raines’ quest for “diversity” led him to choose Jayson Blair, an erring colleague that turned out to be not so worthy after all.
For the rest of Howell Raines’ Barnicle-bashing editorial, click here ($ required).
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org