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Times Watch for
July 14, 2003
Raines
Says He Was Pushed
Perhaps wanting to go on the record before his successor is announced (possibly current op-ed columnist Bill Keller), former Times executive editor Howell Raines went on Charlie Rose and discussed the 21-month melodrama that marked his stint as the paper’s executive editor.
In the course of a soft interview with his friend Rose, Raines reveals that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told him, “I'm having to ask you to step aside.” That account clashes with Sulzberger’s June 5 statement, where he said Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd had themselves “concluded that it was best for the Times that they step down. With great sadness, I agreed with their decision."
Though Raines takes responsibility for the Jayson Blair scandal, he remains in denial about just how his aggressive style of advocacy journalism hurt the paper’s reputation: “My 21 months were so filled with wonderful journalism produced by the most talented staff in the country that I am able to leave with some sense of completion, and Arthur sent me to the newsroom to be a change agent -- to lead a talented staff that was settled into a kind of lethargic culture of complacency, into being a performance culture.”
Journalist Mickey Kaus saw the Raines interview and notes: “This is not a contrite man. He wouldn't admit to a single mistake, except having excessively high standards and moving too fast.”
Raines apparently thinks that with time, he could have boosted New York Times circulation rather substantially: “According to the Times statistics there are 80 million people in the country who have the intellectual appetite for a paper like the New York Times….The New York Times sells 1.2 million papers a day. That tells me something. That tells me that you have got to change the paper, not in its standards, not in its principles, but in the breadth of its intellectual interests, and in its vitality, in its graphics, in the way it's written, and the way stories are selected so that you get the other 78 million.” (As Andrew Sullivan marvels, that would entail a 6,500% increase in circulation.)
Now that he has a little spare time, Raines says he’ll strive to become another Yeats: “When I began studying the life of William Butler Yeats, I realized that he had done something quite extraordinary, which is had this incredible burst of creativity after the age of 60 into his 70s up until a very old age….I think there's a model there that a person with aspirations of an artistic literary nature can be inspired by. And I'm inspired by it and I'm going to get on with it.” It’s clear that Raines’ Times troubles haven’t damaged his self-regard.
• Jayson Blair | Bill Keller | Howell Raines | Charlie Rose | Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
A
2,000 Word Correction? That’s Gotta Hurt
The Times on Monday features a 2,000-word correction to a week-old story by business reporter Lynette Holloway, about a loan dispute between Prudential Securities and the president of TVT Records, Steven Gottlieb.
The correction story, reported by Diana Henriques, admits: “In a profile of Mr. Gottlieb last Monday, The New York Times reported incorrectly that Mr. Gottlieb had defaulted on a $23.5 million loan and that as a result, in February he had lost control of his company, officially called TeeVee Toons Inc., to Prudential.”
The Times ran a dreaded “Editors’ Note” in its Corrections box addressing the matter, sourly stating: “The article's main premises -- that Mr. Gottlieb had lost control of his company and had a reputation for being litigious -- were based on fundamental misunderstandings of the subject, scope and status of the legal proceedings discussed.” (Roger Friedman of Fox News had the goods last Friday.)
For the rest of Henriques’ correction story, click here.
Truman and the Jews: Not
Top of the News
While the Washington Post led a front-page story with the Harry Truman words “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish,” the New York Times carried a story “By The New York Times” on Page A-13. The headline mentioned only “Truman Wrote of ’48 Offer to Eisenhower.” Truman’s remarks about the Jews arrived in the fifth paragraph.
Truman’s remarks were found in a diary kept while he was President in 1947 were recently found on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and the National Archives released the diary contents yesterday. The Times Web site also carries an AP dispatch from 10:43 p.m. Thursday, with the anti-Semitic writings postponed until the tenth paragraph. Its headline was vague: “Newly Found 1947 Truman Diary Unveiled.”
The Times Web story arrived at the remarks on Jews this way:
Though Jews generally regarded Truman as a friend for his support for the creation of Israel, one diary entry, dated July 28, reflects some anti-Semitism.After a 10-minute conversation on postwar immigration to Palestine with Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Treasury secretary under Franklin D. Roosevelt and then briefly under Truman before becoming chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947, the president wrote, ‘The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs.’
"The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish," he continued. "They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated" as displaced persons, "as long as the Jews get special treatment."
That dispatch left out the sentence after “world affairs” that the Post carried:
“Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.”
It also left out the passage right after the “special treatment” sentence, from the Post:
“Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.”
For the Times brief on Truman, click here.
The AP dispatch can be found by clicking here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org