Not-So-Gray Lady - The New York Times' Evolution
Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan gets a chance to take a huge blast at the Times.
The colloquial name for the New York Times in American culture is the "Old Gray Lady." If you go to 43d Street in midtown Manhattan (just off "Times Square'), you'll see why. The building is a vast, grey hulk, inelegant but sturdy, its corridors and offices poky, musty and traditional - much more like the old newspapers on Fleet Street than any of today's London newspaper headquarters. Little round light-sconces punctuate its ground floor exterior, with the Gothic "Times" written on them. And like many great papers, the company is still effectively owned and run by a single family.
As a newspaper, it's still a marvel: fantastically expansive foreign coverage, reporting depth unrivalled in any other paper, a superb magazine, and a place in every elite American's Sunday morning bedroom. If you write a major piece for the Times - in the magazine or book review or review section - the response is always immediate and overwhelming. This cultural and political power is immense. And for many years, its editors wielded it with knowing restraint, using the Times for their own personal effect, as the legendary curmudgeon, Abe Rosenthal, did, or for a subtler display of clout worn lightly, as in the now-halcyon days of the last executive editor, Joe Lelyveld. At its best, the old New York Times was informative, occasionally indispensable, if a little stodgy. At its worst, it was self-important and dull. But stodginess had a certain value. At least you knew where you were with the Times. It had painstaking standards with regard to accuracy, grammar, style and ethics. It was, in some respects, a flagship for the principle of "objective" journalism, and with all the baggage that comes with it.
Into this elegant but slightly musty china shop barged Howell Raines. A guilty white liberal Times-man from Alabama, Raines had won a Pulitzer for a profile he once wrote about his black nanny. A baby-boomer, his moral values were deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. He hadn't, like other editors, come from the newsroom; his previous job had been on the editorial page, where he'd written thundering jeremiads against conservatives, and laced them with a contemptuous streak with regard to Bill Clinton. He was very friendly with Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the latest scion of his family to run the business. Sulzberger's crunchy-liberal politics fit beautifully with Raines'. And when it came for Sulzberger to appoint a new executive editor two years ago, the job went to Howell.
Raines' first huge challenge was September 11, and the event showed his considerable strengths as an editor. He threw the Times' vast reporting resources at the story of a lifetime, and came away with six Pulitzer prizes. But from the very beginning, he also began to use the Times in ways that troubled its readers and staff. Reading the paper over the next year produced a kind of vertigo. Suddenly, what had previously been dull if slightly left-liberal biases veered sharply to the left. The paper crusaded against the Bush White House, spinning every story against the Washington line. It hyped the Enron story as a scandal that would bring Bush down; it predicted quagmire in Afghanistan; it spent last summer fomenting opposition to the Iraq war; and it spent the war itself predicting doom at every turn. Crusading stories were covered exhaustively in what became known as a Rainesian "flood-the-zone" trademark. Its newest columnists engaged in increasingly reckless left-wing screeds; its op-ed pages saw conservative voices purged; and dozens of staffers started to leave for other papers. Those who criticized the new direction were punished or pushed out. (Full disclosure: after I started criticizing the paper's slanted coverage of polls and the Enron scandal, my six-year contract with the Times magazine was ended at Raines' behest.) Errors mounted; and the corrections pages grew. Instead of the staid hierarchy of the past, Raines picked out loyalists for promotion and demoted others. Young new stars shot ahead, while long-standing reporters and editors steamed.
In one particularly bizarre period, Raines decided to make a cause out of shaming the Augusta National Golf Club to admit women. This somewhat minor story was pursued on the front pages with a passion that bordered on crankdowm. And when two columnists dared to write pieces defending Augusta, they found their columns spiked by Raines. He was later forced to reinstate them. But fear and loathing of Raines grew in the newsroom; while his own favorites took more and more liberties with the truth.
It was a recipe for disaster - not simply because moving such a vast and august ocean liner like the Times into a 90 degree turn at high speed is bound to be hazardous. Criticism of the new regime spread across the media world and the internet in ways that in the past would never have been possible. A daily website, Smartertimes.com, chronicled day after day of error, spin and propaganda. Conservatives even set up a new paper, the New York Sun, to counteract the new bias of the Times. My own website, andrewsullivan.com, hammered at the Times on almost a daily basis.
And then the deluge. A young reporter, favored and protected by Raines, was vaulted into huge stories at the age of 26 and 27. The young man, one Jayson Blair, was charming, energetic, smart and, just as important in the p.c. atmosphere of the Times, black. He had problems; there were many errors discovered in his stories; he had to take periodic leave; but Raines kept pushing him. At one point, one of the senior editors, Jonathan Landman, wrote a memo to his bosses about Blair. "We have to stop Jayson Blair writing for the Times. Right now." His bosses responded by putting Blair on leave and then, on his return, moving him to yet another department, where his new editors had no knowledge of his troubled past. The Washington sniper story then broke, and Blair was assigned by Raines to join the team covering it. "This guy's hungry," Raines growled, in almost a parody of macho newsroom slang.
The result was a major Blair scoop, about alleged FBI bungling of the interrogation of the sniper suspects. Rival papers, including the Washington Post, claimed the story was untrue. So did all the relevant sources. No one at the Times even asked Blair to provide the names of his critical anonymous sources, and because he was a protege of Raines, no one dared question the assignment.
They should have. Months later, it was discovered that Blair had invented the story. In fact, he had invented, plagiarized or fabricated dozens and dozens of stories, quotes, locations, and details. It took the new York Times over 7,000 words - five times the length of this column - to catalog the full extent of the fraud over the previous two years. It amounted, in the words of the paper's owner, Sulzberger, to a "huge black eye," for the paper, and the low-point in its 152 year history. Last week, the American media world could talk of almost nothing else.
What had gone wrong? Many immediately pointed to affirmative action, the program whereby members of racial and other minorities were aggressively recruited and favored at the Times. But plenty of other minority reporters avoided Blair's errors, and many of the recent journalism scandals in America were the fault of whites. More persuasive was the argument that it was the combination of Raines' impulsive and dictatorial management and his general favoritism toward minorities that created the crisis. After first denying that race had anything to do with this affair, Raines all but admitted the truth at the tense workplace meeting that took place last Wednesday. "Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts [Blair] appeared to be a promising young minority reporter," Raines said. Then he added: "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."
More generally, however, the errors came from a simple conviction. Raines and Sulzberger believe that journalism is about helping people and building a better society. Merely reporting the news, and offering an array of comment on it, is too prosaic a task for those with such a mission. If that means spinning polls against the wicked Bush administration, or hyping the Enron story, or waging a front-page disinformation campaign against the Iraq war, so be it. If it means getting a diverse workplace whatever the cost to standards, then so be it. If it means controlling rivals or conservatives or simply fuddy-duddies on your staff by mercurial, impulsive and vindictive management, then that's simply the price to pay for social progress.
But it turns out that the consequence is also journalistic calamity. By aiming for too much, you can fail at the basics; by mistaking the honorable but basic craft of journalism for the noble cause of social justice, you end up by serving neither. The New York Times was many things: infuriating, inspiring, intimidating, imposing. But whatever your view of it, it was still the rock upon which much of the rest of American journalism rested. The rock has now crumbled. There are rumors now of more false stories or invented quotes that the Times is unearthing, though nothing on the scale of the Blair disaster. But the aura is gone. The Times has lost what the American Catholic Church recently lost: its authority. And it will take a generation before it regains it.
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