Howell Raines's Tenure: It Left a Nasty Mark
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Good summation by Howie. He would have been up for a Pultzer for his Times coverage in the old days. Nowadays, the Blogs beat him out.
Now, of course, it's easy for some New York Times staffers to unload on Howell Raines.
Jerelle Kraus, a Times art director, told reporters that Raines reminds her of "Caligula" and is "the nastiest editor I've ever worked with." One Times veteran says there is still "venom" in the air toward the departed executive editor.
But since when are newsrooms supposed to be democracies? Or editors supposed to be warm, hand-holding types? Running a huge newspaper is a rough business that sometimes requires knocking heads. Can Raines really have resigned under pressure because much of the staff found him an unpleasant son of a gun?
The answer is yes -- a more popular editor would have ridden out the storm -- but it's more complicated than that. Raines, whose considerable strengths as an editor have been overlooked during the media furor, played an inside game -- writing memos and holding meetings with disaffected staffers. He made little effort to defend the paper publicly, during either the Jayson Blair fallout or the newsroom anger at comments by reporter Rick Bragg, who resigned over his extensive use of stringers.
The Times hates to cover itself, and for a long time the paper's executives tried to ignore the controversies that swirled around it. In 1991, when the Times sparked a furor by naming the accuser in the William Kennedy Smith rape case, prompting an angry staff meeting, the paper waited nine days before publishing a word on the imbroglio. Last year, when conservatives were denouncing the Times for allegedly playing up antiwar views in its Iraq coverage, the paper assigned a story on the flap but Raines killed it, settling for a clarification of the paper's description of Henry Kissinger's position. Raines would not comment at the time.
It was all the more remarkable, then, that after the resignation the Times published a story in which reporter David Barstow -- who worked on the 7,000-word accounting of Blair's fabrications -- was quoted as saying he told Raines, " 'You don't listen, you intimidate, you play favorites,' that is what we were hearing.' " The bottom line: Top executives in a communications company that demands accountability from everyone else seemed to have forgotten how to communicate. Plenty of hard-bitten newspaper editors instill a bit of fear in their subordinates. But at the Times, most people didn't feel part of Raines's team and were more than willing to turn on him.
All this played out in a painfully public way in an era when the explosion of online commentators is helping to hold media big shots accountable. Jim Romenesko's media Web site, for example, was the repository for all kinds of impassioned e-mails and postings by Times reporters that showed the world just how little support Raines had in his own newsroom.
Blair, for his part, is now sounding more contrite after boasting of his deceptions and accusing the Times of racism in a May 21 interview with the New York Observer. He told the newspaper SoHo last week that he owes Raines and deposed managing editor Gerald Boyd "a million apologies in light of what I have done." And he told WCBS-TV that his Observer comments "were cruel and hurtful" and that he should have taken time to reflect before speaking out.
Still, the Blair debacle is hardly the only major media embarrassment of recent years. From fabrication to plagiarism, from horrendous mistakes to awful misjudgments, news organizations largely have themselves to blame for a public image about as positive as Martha Stewart's.
But the very blunders that have given journalists such a collective black eye also demonstrate that the system works -- that is, miscreants are eventually caught and punished, as Blair belatedly was.
The era of sweeping media mishaps under the proverbial rug is long gone, in part because there are so many media outlets now that falsehoods are more likely to be exposed. Consider some recent history:
The Los Angeles Times agreed to share advertising revenue from a Sunday magazine with the Staples Center arena, the subject of the special issue -- an unforgivable outrage that forced the resignations of CEO Mark Willes and Editor Michael Parks. The Chicago Tribune dismissed star columnist Bob Greene after learning that he had once seduced a high school student who had come to interview him. CNN was tarnished when chief news executive Eason Jordan acknowledged that the network had suppressed stories of terrible abuses by Saddam Hussein's regime, which Jordan justified as an attempt to protect its employees and sources. NBC and MSNBC dropped Peter Arnett after the Baghdad correspondent bizarrely bad-mouthed the U.S. war effort on Iraqi state television.
Salt Lake Tribune Editor James Shelledy had to resign for mishandling the case of two reporters who sold information about the Elizabeth Smart case to the National Enquirer for $20,000. The Miami Herald was left red-faced after falsely accusing the jockey who won the Kentucky Derby of wielding an illegal object -- the result of a misleading photograph and a botched interview. Slate magazine fell for a hoax about a practice dubbed "monkeyfishing." Plagiarists have been fired at publications from Business Week to the Hartford Courant. Associated Press reporter Christopher Newton was fired for making up quotes in 39 stories, while the New York Times Magazine disavowed what turned out to be a composite profile by Michael Finkel of a young Ivory Coast laborer.
Go back further in time and you find Janet Cooke's fictional heroin addict at The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal's R. Foster Winans convicted of selling advance stock tips from his column, and NBC's "Dateline" staging a fiery crash.
They all survived, and the New York Times will, too. The Times said in an editorial last week that it may have gotten "too cocky" and that the "forced introspection" triggered by Blair would prove healthy. In today's cluttered media universe, avoiding self-scrutiny and blowing off outside criticism are no longer options. The only question is how long it takes some news executives to realize that the rules have changed.
As for Raines, it's a shame that the editor who led his paper to six Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of 9/11 couldn't win over the journalists who made those prizes, and the superlative daily reporting of the Times, possible.
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