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Times Watch for
April 2, 2004
Howell Raines: Ahead of His Times (So He Says)
Clocking in at a novella-length 21,000 words, Howell Raines' Atlantic Monthly attack on his old newspaper demonstrates that, in his own way, he's as self-infatuated as Jayson Blair.
Due out in the Atlantic's May issue, "My Times" is a literate litany of complaints, spared from utter dullness only by the undeniable color of Raines' pungent style. He hits at the "calcified front page our new leadership team had inherited on September 5, 2001" and even attacks the paper's union in describing the Newspaper Guild's "sometimes mindless job guarantees"--a crack sure to lose Raines whatever rank-and-file loyalty he had retained out on 43rd street.
The article's recurring theme is of Raines, truth-telling agent of change, constantly flummoxed by the balky bureaucracy and colleagues who lack his guts and vision.
Raines trashes his old paper enough to make even Times Watch blanch: "I thought the paper was becoming duller, slower, and more uneven in quality with every passing day….key sections, including Arts & Leisure, had gone from predictable to dull to stultifying….Our coverage of culture, entertainment, style, and travel was in fact a shambles--underfunded, unimaginative, and devoid of any unifying editorial sensibility….The Science section, the Book Review, and the Travel section were next on the priority list. All were edited by able people who had been in place too long….We had installed a new Sports editor and charged him with making us competitive with Sports Illustrated and USA Today, and with quietly searching for more provocative-columnists."
The very idea that Raines was looking for more provocative sports columnists is galling, given the way he and managing editor Gerald Boyd spiked columns by sports columnists Harvey Araton and Dave Anderson, who actually were "provocative" by rebelling against the paper's editorial-page line on Augusta National. (Details here.) Yet Raines doesn't breathe a word about Augusta or the spiked columns in his mega culpa.
Then he goes after (who knew?) Times' conservatives: "Another disturbing development, for which I was unprepared, was that a small enclave of neoconservative editors was making accusations of 'political correctness' in order to block stories or slant them against minorities and traditional social welfare programs." Such paranoid talk only confirms Raines' liberalism.
Of course, Jayson Blair wasn't his fault--even though Raines had praised Blair's hiring in front of the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001. Instead he chides Times metro editor Jon Landman for not copying him on the prescient memo in which Landman warned: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for The Times. Right now."
One of the very few times Raines faults himself is when he fails to fully appreciate the spinelessness of others: "Still, it pains me to think that I didn't do enough to buck [publisher Arthur Sulzberger] up. Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Arthur is his own man, and a different man from his father. Punch [Sulzberger] in his prime would never have thrown over one of his executive editors under the pressure of employees who didn't like the editor personally or who disagreed with a legitimate strategy for reinvigorating the Times' journalism….I didn't bother to check [Arthur Sulzberger's] emotional temperature often enough."
Raines' ego quickly recovers from being kicked off the Times. Suddenly, he's focused on higher things, and becomes dismissive of the importance of daily journalism in favor of the truth and beauty found in his true calling, literature: "I do not miss the daily grind of newspapering or the ephemeral nature of newspaper writing. Since I was twelve or so, my strongest interest has been in literature, and I'll be turning in that direction during the extra years I've secured by getting fired."
The world of literature may indeed be enriched by Raines, but the Times is likely better off without him.
• Atlantic Monthly | Memoir | Howell Raines
Sheryl Gay Stolberg's front-page story on Thursday, "9/11 Widows Skillfully Applied The Power of a Question: Why?" is on four WTC widows from New Jersey who have pushed for answers to 9-11.
Stolberg opens: "Kristen Breitweiser was at home in Middletown, N.J., cleaning out closets. Patty Casazza of Colts Neck was dashing to the dry cleaners. Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick was headed out to do grocery shopping. Her neighbor Mindy Kleinberg had just packed her children off to school. Then came word, Tuesday morning, that President Bush had agreed to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. All at once, the cellphones started ringing and the e-mail started flying and 'the Jersey girls,' as the four women are known in Washington, were getting credit for chalking up another victory in the nation's capital."
Later Stolberg suggests there's no political agenda involved: "Three of them were married to men who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, but the women were strangers until after the attacks. Ms. Breitweiser, 33, and Ms. Casazza, 43, voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Ms. Van Auken, 49, and Ms. Kleinberg, 42, voted for Al Gore. All insist they had no political agenda, then or now."
Yet Van Auken went on the far-left radio network Pacifica last July to express her frustration with the Bush administration's response to the 9-11 investigation, saying: "I hope that we can all work together in this whole country to plead with this government to understand that big business is not the main concern. I mean, you know, it's a capitalist society, but we have to be safe in this country."
Last Sunday, Times columnist Frank Rich noted approvingly Kristen Breitweiser's anti-Bush criticism of the Showtime TV movie "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." Rich writes: Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show the president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids 'while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers,' she wrote, 'would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.'"
Breitweiser has also said: "Three thousand people were murdered on Bush's watch."
For the rest of Stolberg's profile of the WTC widows, click here.
• Kristen Breitweiser | Sheryl Gay Stolberg | Terrorism | Widows
Terror Reactions: "Upbeat" Bush, Somber Clinton
"Grisly Deaths Don't Dent An Upbeat Bush Messages Stressing Iraq Successes, "David Sanger's Friday story, attempts to paint a stark contrast between the cheery Bush campaign and grim reality: "Hours after the gruesome pictures of an Iraqi mob mauling the charred corpses of four American contract workers sped around the world, President Bush swept into a huge ballroom in one of Washington's most affluent neighborhoods."
Sanger notes how Bush opened his speech with a crack about John Kerry but didn't mention the events in Iraq: "In the Bush campaign, casualties are something to be alluded to obliquely, if at all. Mr. Bush's handlers, both in the White House and outside it, say they mourn every death….Still, it can be a bit jarring to move from the images of grisly American deaths to the invariably upbeat message of the Bush campaign--one that carefully picks its moments for mourning, and usually does so in private, not public. The contrast with some of his predecessors is notable."
Guess who Sanger apparently thinks had a more appropriate response to terror?
He writes: "On the grim day in 1993 when American soldiers were killed in Somalia in an incident that many recalled on seeing the Falluja photographs, President Clinton declared that he was sending reinforcements. He said he was 'not satisfied that we are doing everything we can to protect the young Americans that are putting their lives on the line so that hundreds of thousands of Somalis can stay alive.'"
Sanger's Clinton litany continues: "When Americans died in bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1996, Mr. Clinton flew to Florida from a summit meeting in France and participated in memorial services. He stepped into the Rose Garden to denounce the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole and to promise to hunt down those who carried out the attack, now attributed to Al Qaeda."
There are more "contrasts" Sanger fails to mention--the fact that Clinton never once visited the World Trade Center after the 1993 terror attack that killed six people, and warned Americans against "overreacting" to the bombing, according to journalist Byron York.
Sanger also fails to mention that, whatever Clinton said in the Rose Garden, the administration failed to retaliate against the attack itself, which killed 17 sailors.
Sanger does admit the U.S. wasn't actually conducting a hot war during those Clinton-era crises: "But Mr. Clinton was not presiding over a yearlong war and occupation on the scale of the Iraq operation, and Mr. Bush's aides say the trick is to balance compassion with getting on with the business of the nation."
For the rest of Sanger on Bush's response to war casualties, click here.
• George W. Bush | Bill Clinton | Funerals | Iraq War | David Sanger
Philip Shenon and David Sanger team up on Friday's lead story, "Bush Aides Kept Clinton's Papers From 9-11 Panel," which--surprise--bolsters Richard Clarke at the expense of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Describing a September 2001 presidential directive on Al Qaeda from the Bush administration, Shenon and Sanger conclude: "The actual language in the directive could be interpreted in two very different ways when Ms. Rice testifies. On the one hand, she will undoubtedly use it to build her case that the administration took the Qaeda threat seriously. But because the policy was supposed to unfold over three to five years, it suggests that the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan was not considered an urgent one by the White House, bolstering Mr. Clarke's accusations."
Yet Clarke himself conceded during his 9-11 testimony that any action taken by Bush would have been too late to prevent the Twin Tower attacks.
For the rest of Shenon and Sanger, click here.
• Richard Clarke | Condoleezza Rice | David Sanger | Philip Shenon | Terrorism
Movie critic A.O. Scott reviews "Control Room," a documentary on the controversial Arab network Al Jazeera. Scott writes of the network's coverage of the Iraq War, and likens its
anti-American propaganda to the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as if both are culpable in spreading propaganda.
Scott says: "In Mr. Rumsfeld's view, presented in several news clips, Al Jazeera, the most widely viewed source of television news in the Arab world, and one that operates independent of any government, is little more than an instrument of anti-American propaganda. 'We are dealing with people who are willing to lie to the world to make their case,' he declares, brandishing a rhetorical stone inside his glass house."
Yet Scott later admits those who criticize the network's bias have a strong case: "Most of those who appear in the film are skeptical, to say the least, of the Bush administration's policies, but they also cling to a journalistic ethic of objectivity and fairness, trying to navigate between their political allegiances and the code of their craft….More than that, many of them, forthright in their contempt for the American government, are equally candid in their embrace of the values of free expression and open debate that are in notably short supply in their countries of origin."
For the rest of Scott's review, click here.
• Al Jazeera | Iraq War | Movies | Donald Rumsfeld | A.O. Scott
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org