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Times Watch for May 19, 2003
“Pinch” Flinches From
Owning Up to Blair Facts
The Jayson Blair story not only has legs; now it’s growing tentacles. Newsweek devotes this week’s cover story to Blair, the young black reporter who resigned from the Times May 1 after proof of his fabricated “reporting” came to light. Seth Mnookin’s report outlines Blair’s personal problems and details the paper’s fateful decision to include the unreliable Blair on the D.C.-sniper story:
“At last Wednesday’s staff wide meeting, [executive editor Howell] Raines and [managing editor Gerald] Boyd were asked directly who had first brought up Blair’s name. As Boyd was explaining how he had conducted a meeting in his office with several other top editors, Raines cut him off and said, according to staff members present at the meeting, “I’m the editor, it was my responsibility.” Blair, after all, knew the area, and the national desk was understaffed.”
And just why was that desk understaffed? This isn’t the Podunk Post—any self-respecting journalist would kill to work for the “paper of record.” (Times Watch itself, in a weak moment, once applied for a late-night copy editor position there.)
It’s become increasingly clear Raines’ autocratic management style since taking over in September 2001 has driven away talent. Mnookin notes: “Raines certainly shook things up; by the end of the year, national correspondents Gustav Niebuhr, Carey Goldberg, Evelyn Nieves, James Sterngold, Blaine Harden, Sam Howe Verhovek and Kevin Sack had all left the paper.”
But Howell Raines is only one member of the Times ruling troika. Allen Sloan, Newsweek’s Wall Street columnist, suggests Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. should take a hit as well, where it hurts: The pocketbook. “For the sake of internal morale, as well as external reputation, it’s important for a company’s higher-ups to pay for their mistakes, Sloan writes. “If you hold small fry accountable for errors, which is only fair, you can’t let the big fish swim away scot-free.” Such measures would include a compensation hit for Sulzberger. Last year, Sulzberger got $1 million in salary and a $1.5 million bonus as well as over $3.5 million in restricted stock.
Unfortunately, the Times is much better dishing out advice than taking it. Last Sunday’s mea maxima culpa in the Times (a 7,200 word story, plus a 7,000 word explication of Blair’s many story errors) did a good job of outlining the many fabrications of Jayson Blair. But it tiptoed around assigning blame to those responsible for Blair being in that position in the first place. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher,” Sulzberger said, conveniently.
The New York Sun captures the irony nicely in a recent editorial: “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.”
New York Post columnist
Eric Fettmann notes the Times diversity drive didn’t start with the 2001
appointment of executive editor Howell Raines. “That drive at the Times
originated with the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in 1994
(while still deputy publisher) decreed that ensuring greater racial, gender
and sexual-orientation diversity at the paper was "the single most important
issue" facing the Times….Sulzberger himself laid down the law in a 1994
interview: ‘Increasingly, any middle or senior manager's or any employee's
advancement is going to depend on how he or she deals with these fundamental
issues’ of managed diversity.”
Given those kinds of smoke signals from the mountaintop, is it any wonder that
a newsroom manager desiring a smooth career path would be reluctant to raise a
stink about “bad news” Blair?
The Times has given former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal (known as “Sid Vicious” among conservatives for his partisan and often vengeful defenses of Bill Clinton) what amounts to not one, not two, but three reviews of “The Clinton Wars,” Blumenthal’s 822-page defense of the Clinton presidency.
Media reporter David Carr’s May 12 book preview and interview with Blumenthal was followed by an ambivalent review from Times staff critic Janet Maslin May 15. Then came a quite favorable notice on the book in the May 18 Sunday Book Review, from JFK biographer Robert Dallek. That’s three reviews in 7 days, as first noticed by Michael Moynihan. (To give some perspective, it took the Times several months to review—snottily—Rush Limbaugh’s #1 New York Times best seller, “The Way Things Ought to Be.”)
Carr calls the book “deeply reported, deeply partisan.” Reviewer Maslin isn’t totally fond of the book, saying it “sends a clear message to his administration colleagues: Mom liked me best.” But she at least prefers him to independent counsel Ken Starr: “[Blumenthal’s] accounts of being subpoenaed and questioned about the president by Mr. Starr's staff are among his book's most persuasive and credible passages. ‘The grand-jury room was the setting not for a histrionic hearing but for a shabby police procedural,’ he writes, upon first being summoned." Maslin makes no mention of Blumenthal standing on the steps of a D.C. courthouse and misleading reporters about the questions prosecutors asked him.
Author Dallek takes a sober liberal line in his review “The book offers a powerful and generally persuasive defense of Bill, Hillary and Blumenthal….Clinton's egregious act of self-indulgence was outdone by an impeachment based not on constitutionally required high crimes and misdemeanors but on a vindictive determination to bring down a president who had offended self-righteous moralists eager to put a different political agenda in place.”
Taken together, the three reviews aren’t wholly favorable to Blumenthal or his book. But the fact three were commissioned in the first place suggests a Times tilt toward giving liberal authors as much exposure as possible. For example, left-wing writer Eric Alterman got two glowing notices for his recent book “What Liberal Media?”
As for William McGowan’s book “Coloring the News,” a 2001 release about the corrupting effects of the diversity quest on journalism in general and the Times in particular…it’s still stuck at zero reviews. Which makes sense. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s talking about that these days, right?
For more of Robert Dallek’s review of “The Clinton Wars,” click here.
For more of Janet Maslin’s review of “The Clinton Wars,” click here.
For more of David Carr’s review of “The Clinton Wars,” click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org