Citizen Raines: Doorkeeper Of Liberalism’s ‘Xanadu’
By Doug Schmitz on 06/01/03
americandaily.com
Considering how New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines has clumsily handled the thunderclap of wrecking ball Jayson Blair over the past month, Raines would do Charles Foster Kane proud.
In the classic 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” (loosely based on real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst), Kane, who had an embittered childhood, grew up to reluctantly inherit a newspaper publishing empire. But while accumulating vast material possessions and financial wealth, Kane lost himself and left a path of destruction in his wake. Raines, too, had lost himself along the way in a feeble attempt to protect his own liberal “Xanadu,” The Times, from certain would-be intruders.
Like Kane, Raines couldn’t see the red flags, the shouts from the rooftop and the warning signs signaling the one thing that eventually brought The Times to this critical point in its 152-year history: The insidious liberalism that has ultimately turned the ‘Old Gray Lady’ into a media brothel.
Ironically, although The Times characteristically caters to the liberal echelon, it took just one shoddy, unethical “reporter” to finally compel Times’ brass to deal with how much their “newspaper of record” bleeds RED three different ways. That’s the real issue – and the real problem. Paradoxically, what the manipulative Blair actually did was force Raines to confront his own liberalism – only Raines is too arrogant to admit it.
THE TIMES BLEEDS RED #1: EMBARRASSMENT
First off, Raines and his cronies were not only oblivious to Blair pulling the same scam at the University of Maryland, they never even bothered to find out that the opprobrious con had never finished his bachelor’s degree.
In a prepared statement, Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, arrogantly said of his journalism program: “…It must be said that no program in the country stresses professional ethics more than we do or takes a harder line on integrity.”
(Really? If that were true, Kunkel and the journalism professors would have found out about Blair’s falsification and lying long before he ever made it to The Times.)
Consequently, The Times said in its 7,200-word mea culpa: “[Blair] concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.”
In fact, The Times’ brass had gone as far as to say – without taking any personal responsibility for their own culpability – that Blair was the one that committed this act of journalistic piracy. Although there is definitely no excuse for what Blair did, The Times’ incompetent management team chose to take the supposedly “moral high road,” pass the buck and make Blair the scapegoat, which is another by-product of liberalism.
(For example, Clinton did the same thing when he was caught lying under oath and cheating his way through his political career. Instead of doing the right thing by taking responsibility for his actions, he chose to blame others and send his equally corrupt wife on the talk show circuit to genuflect before the cameras, which the liberal media willingly sucked up without ever challenging the validity of the Clintons’ statements.)
What’s more, Newsweek reported that Blair confessed to being a cocaine addict and alleged child abuse victim, and blamed his messed-up life on Raines’ “racism” for the serial errors, phony stories and no-show interviews.
Incongruously, just six months ago, Blair was approached about several errors in his stories by The Times’ own account. But when Blair was informed that his job was in jeopardy, Raines still promoted him.
Now, although The Times reported that it was investigating Blair for “faked stories and quotes, plagiarized other publications and [filing] fake expense reports to make it appear he was traveling on assignment when he was actually at his home in Brooklyn,” it later called off any legal attempts to hold Blair personally accountable.
Even more telling, in an unusually desperate move, Raines – who honed his PR damage skills while using the front pages of the ‘Old Gray Lady’ as a contingency plan to gloss over the numerous scandals of the Clinton-Gore era – had turned an emergency staff meeting into a show trial. In typical condescending manner, The Times’ brass put on a puppet show, treated staff like children and excused away management’s own culpability.
In fact, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reported that Joe Sexton, The Times’ metro desk editor, used expletives to vent his frustration at how The Times’ brass let Blair move through its otherwise cut-throat system. Sexton’s main concern was with Raines allowing Blair to report on the sniper case, knowing full well Blair’s track record of serial mistakes and lying on other major stories.
According to Sexton, Maryland’s attorney general deeply questioned the veracity of Blair’s sniper article, saying that “said suspect John Muhammad’s interrogation was cut short just as he was about to confess, and a Fairfax County prosecutor called a news conference to denounce a second piece as “dead wrong.”
Kurtz added that Sexton said “Raines and his team “did nothing” to verify “the authenticity or quality of his reporting,” Sexton said. Why, he asked, did no senior editor demand to know the identities of Blair’s unnamed sources?”
What top three stooges and mega-millionaire barons Raines, Publisher and Chairman Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr., and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd did, however, was miss a golden opportunity to finally come clean with their staff. Rather than finally owning up to Clintonized lying and covering up over 70 known errors, they hid behind the cloak of “diversity,” which only added insult to injury.
Now, as part of its ongoing damage control, The Times’ four-page mea culpa (which looked more like a rap sheet of the interloper’s crimes against them) became a damning piece of evidence of what editors knew all along:
“…Various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair’s reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on the errors in his articles.”
In addition, The Times admitted that Blair’s mistakes “became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
So, while Raines, Sulzberger and Boyd wiped the egg off their beet-red faces and had eaten a little crow, they still tried to excuse away how they covered for Blair.
(Is it any wonder their own staff turned on them in anger, many of whom are, again, honest, legitimate, hard-working news reporters who don’t deserve to be associated with the likes of Jayson Blair?)
In fact, the Washington Post reported that The Times’ brass allowed Blair’s phony reporting to continue – even with such emotionally charged stories as the previously mentioned sniper case and rescued Iraqi POW Jessica Lynch. What’s worse, although Landman warned Raines, Sulzberger and Boyd, they still did nothing to stop Blair.
The Post concluded that even after five Times reporters, two researchers and three editors conducted more than 150 interviews in producing the four-page mea culpa, “filling several pages that attempted to set the record straight and apologize to readers.”
Coincidentally, TheSmokinggun.com obtained a May 12 letter from Raines, which the Web site said didn’t go far enough in explaining these executives’ own role in the events that led to Blair’s departure. (To read the letter in its entirety, go to: thesmokinggun.com
THE TIMES NEEDS TO MAKE RESTITUTION TO ITS SUBSCRIBERS
Unequivocally, a lot of The Times’ managerial misdeeds could be further exposed, columnist Jack Wheeler suggested, if Raines’ e-mails to Blair were examined by a conservative law firm that won’t let Raines or any of his liberal cronies get away with asininely negligent mismanagement and knowingly enabling a phony reporter.
According to Wheeler, since The Times’ 1.2 million subscribers pay an average of 50 cents per issue, “refunding $30 per subscriber for the fraudulent and willfully negligent 60 issues would thus total $36 million.”
Wheeler added that the suit should also demand “quite reasonable treble punitive damages,” which would bring an additional $108 million, giving Times subscribers a total paid refund of $144 million.
(In an interesting side note, Timeswatch.org, MRC’s other media watchdog Web site, commented that last year, Sulzberger had received a compensation package of $1 million in salary and a $1.5 million bonus, as well as over $3.5 million in restricted stock.)
Imagine: If that $144 million came out of Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd’s cushy salaries, that would really hit these ultra-liberals where they really live. And maybe it would provide some restitution to subscribers accosted by The Times’ longstanding record of misleading “reporting” by other Times reporters (i.e., Dowd, Krugman, Clymer, etc.).
Lastly, Blair should be forced to pay back salary received and other amenities enjoyed while willfully deceiving his readers, since he really didn’t do any honest reporting.
THE TIMES BLEEDS RED #2: BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALISM
Just as liberalism has dumbed down our public schools, as in the recent case of the state of Florida’s failure to adequately prepare high students to pass standardized tests, liberalism has dumbed down the truth in our nation’s newsrooms so much that most readers can’t even discern between what is truth and what is tweaked.
CBS veteran news reporter Bernard Goldberg once said “the liberal media establishment will collapse much like the Berlin Wall.” With the recent shaking of such complicit media empires as The Times (Blair) and CNN (for hiding Iraqi atrocities for 12 years and making excuses for them), Goldberg’s prophetic words have already come to pass.
Case in point: The despicable coddling of an underhanded con who knew he had Raines and the rest of the liberal editors wrapped around his finger – except Jonathan Landman, who originally sent the e-mail telling The Times’ brass that Blair’s reign of error needed to be stopped. (But if only Landman would have followed through with the caveat.)
For starters, according to a Washington Times editorial, Raines “boasted in 2001 about Jayson Blair as an example of the Times’ commitment to “diversity” – because Jayson Blair is black. White reporters do not get promoted for doing what Mr. Blair did.”
What’s more, The New Daily News reported that a Times spokesperson denied reports that Raines struck an off-work friendship with Blair, who “reportedly was dating a temporary employee in The Times photography department whose mother is friendly with the mother of Raines’ wife.”
Although Blair isn’t the only questionable reporter that has had the concession of working for The Times, he opened up a Pandora’s Box that revealed a more serious managerial and cultural problem that has long plagued The Times: The bleeding-heart liberalism entrenched in its editorial guidelines, hiring policies and overall climate. It has only become more pronounced since Raines’ took the helm in 2001.
By all accounts, Raines has banned The Times from any truthful and hard-hitting news reporting to the point where its front pages and its op-ed pieces are indistinguishable. Due to liberalism, The Times has reaped a whirlwind at the expense of its readers, who deserve honest news coverage. Sadly, however, it took a swindler like Blair to finally force The Times to face its own journalistic malfeasance – again, because of the menacing malignancy of liberalism.
That’s because, as a typical liberal, Raines hides behind the banner of “diversity” and affirmative action, and eventually proved himself to actually be a bigot in the sense that he thought Blair needed him to fulfill some bloated career aspiration. But ironically, Blair also needed Raines because he was pivotal to promoting Blair’s own liberalism. After all, as long as Blair didn’t think he’d get caught, he continued to play Raines like a fiddle.
In fact, columnist George Neumayr suggested that it was as if Boyd was telling his staff: “Got that? No examination of the evidence that might lead to division is welcome. Don’t draw any conclusions from the facts that might arrest the liberal agenda.”
But it had everything to do with their liberal agenda. That’s what keeps the facts from ultimately escaping Raines’ lips. His leftist slant is so deeply rooted, he can’t even admit to himself there’s a real problem at The Times, and that it’s time for a managerial change.
Yet, as Neumayr also pointed out, “the diversity cheerleaders [Raines] exploited also falsify reality, yet they never lose their jobs and never issue corrections.”
The Spectator, in its May 12 edition, had an insightful and truthful take on Raines: “If executive editor Howell Raines were at Enron, his name would be Kenneth Lay.”
Raines not only sold out to the distorted precepts of liberalism, he has sold out his staff by bowing down to its golden calf. And this he did at the expense of his staff (which are The Times’ heart and soul). Although many Times reporters adhere to the same left-wing ideals as Raines, again, there still are some genuinely honest and hard-working Times reporters who don’t deserve to have their good names and reputations dragged through the mud, or sacrificed to Raines’ politically-motivated agendas.
Ultimately, although Blair relishes in playing the victim in this twisted tale, Raines aided and abetted this flake in the name of “diversity,” of which he said he did unconsciously. Sadly, liberalism, in the long run, has made editorial frauds of all three stooges – Raines, Sulzberger and Boyd.
It is now imperative that honest Times staffers hold Raines, Sulzberger and Boyd accountable if these reporters ever hope to bring about the slightest remnant of change.
THE LEFT WANTS TO STOP FOX NEWS, CONSERVATIVE TALK RADIO
Moreover, what’s currently going on at The Times is a prime example of how the Left has tried to silence the conservative voice – a voice that provides the fairness and balance that has long been lacking in such liberal rags as The Times.
In fact, The Federalist recently quoted two liberal Democrats who seek to eliminate the competition in the supposedly free marketplace of ideas:
“The connections between [Fox News Chairman and CEO] Roger Ailes and the White House. What the h-- is that all about? It's like there's a direct line between the administration and Ailes. You can see it. There are plenty of political and policy implications in that,” said John Conyers, questioning the possible merger of News Corp and Hughes Electronics in a committee hearing, according to The Federalist.
The publication added that ultra-liberal Democrat Maxine Waters told Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch regarding the potential merger: “Maybe we should make a lot more noise than we’re making. You scare the h-- out of me,” she said.
Could it be that the sin of liberalism, which Raines aspires, is finding the Democrats out? Maybe the reason Waters is so scared is because she’s afraid of the truth, which is why liberals will do almost anything to stifle the conservative voice, which exposes the Left.
Hence, the reason the Left continues to rail against Fox News, the Washington Times, the New York Post, WorldNetDaily.com, Newsmax.com, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and other news sources like the Weekly Standard and National Review. It’s what this issue with deregulation is all about. The truth about liberalism is finally being told and the Democrats don’t like it.
In Raines’ case, his liberalism is exposing him for who he really is.
For example, New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper told the Hartford Courant that “professionals shouldn’t indulge double standards for the sake of appearances or moral relief,” (which is what liberalism does) because “there arises another legitimate complaint by a reporter or manager - black or white - about having gone the extra mile (or two) for a young black reporter with insurmountable skill deficiencies or demons.”
What Raines and the rest of his sorry excuse for newspaper executives fail to realize is that wayward “reporters” such as Blair and other plagiarizers can’t be rehabilitated under The Times’ version of “diversity.” It just won’t work – especially for one as devious and unrepentant as Blair, who used the system as a means to his own selfish ends.
Columnist Spencer Warren further observed that even before the Blair debacle, The Times’ editors had “destroyed the newspaper’s reputation in the eyes of fair-minded readers, “losing any sense of proportion, they have slanted the news so steeply toward the Left’s agenda that truth, honesty and fairness have long been sliding off the deck.”
In Raines’ case, liberalism has also turned him into a spineless jellyfish – professionally, managerially, ethically and morally. Rather than act like a real man – and a real editor, who needed to be decisive, responsible and accountable to his other employees, Raines, instead, chose to take the supposedly “moral high ground.” His liberalism made him end up placating an undeserving immoral, asinine ingrate who has made a laughing stock of The Times.
But Raines should have known Blair didn’t deserve to be promoted, much less handed such a prestigious reporting gig. But, again, Raines’ liberalism won out over common sense.
Ann Coulter recently said of The Times’ seething liberalism: “As this episode shows, the Times is not even attempting to preserve a reliable record of events. Instead of being a record of history, the Times is merely a “record” of what liberals would like history to be – the Pentagon in crisis, the war going badly, global warming melting the North Pole, and protests roiling Augusta National Golf Club. Publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger has turned the paper into a sort of bulletin board for Manhattan liberals…”
That’s because, as editor of the “propagator of record,” Raines’ liberalism has redefined diversity. While true diversity is ethnicity with equal treatment, liberalism perceives diversity as giving minorities every advantage, no matter how unethical or immoral the approach.
THE TIMES BLEEDS RED #3: LONG-TIME, PRO-COMMNIST SLANT
Coincidentally, it’s no secret that The Times has bled red through its Communist and Marxist dogma that has stained its pages for many years.
Two blaring examples of how The Times has perpetuated these viewpoints without the slightest retraction is former reporters Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews.
According to Newsmax.com’s Phil Brennan, “as is now being widely noticed as others in the media take a closer look at the Times, a prime – and absolutely shocking – example was the lengths to which the Times, through its correspondent Walter Duranty went to cover up the murder by starvation of millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants, denying what he knew to be true.”
Duranty was ultimately awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his lies, which The Times refused to return, even as Duranty was found later to have been blackmailed by the Soviets over his “rather peculiar sexual activities and had willingly done their will to avoid exposure.”
Then there was Herbert Matthews, a Times correspondent who was a brazen admirer of the murderous despot, Fidel Castro. Brennan said Matthews tried to “convince the world that Fidel Castro was not a Soviet stooge seeking to turn Cuba into a Soviet satellite, should be enough to expose the Times as a conscious propaganda tool of the world’s Marxist movement.”
Actually, Warren went as far as to liken The Times’ affirmative action diversity scandal to Communism, which “demonstrates much more than the folly of the Left’s reverse racism and the top management’s arrogance. It is an example of the Left’s instrumental treatment of truth, which is the inescapable consequence of their worship at the altar of absolute equality of condition.
“Absolute equality is of course the utopian vision of the Left, which scorns the equality before the law that is the glory of America’s Constitution and of free government. Because the Left’s vision – or, to put it more accurately, obsession and fetish – is contradicted by the reality of human nature, the Left, when it has been in a position to attempt to realize its obsession, has always had to make war on objective truth.
“For Communists, it became a war on the very society they claimed to be perfecting: from Lenin to Stalin to Mao, from Castro to Pol Pot to Kim Il Sung and his demented son.”
RAINES NEEDS TO RESIGN
Ultimately, Raines’ dereliction of duty shows the achingly toxic corruption that has already eviscerated the liberal newspaper industry, especially The Times.
During his initial employee meeting, Raines was reported to have said, “I’m here to listen to your anger, wherever it’s directed,” adding that, “to tell you that I know that our institution has been damaged, that I accept my responsibility for that and I intend to fix it…I was guilty of a failure of vigilance that, since I sit in this chair where the buck stops, I should have prevented.”
(But since Raines banned the mainstream press from the meeting (and knowing what we already know about The Times, it’s open to debate as to whether or not he actually said this.)
If this were true and Raines truly is contrite for his role in perpetrating the Blair fiasco, he would be tendering his resignation right now, and allowing The Times to get some fresh blood flowing in editorial management.
What’s more, if The Times wants true diversity, how about hiring a conservative editor to balance out its predominantly liberal managerial culture? That would be a welcomed and revitalizing change in its 152-year history.
What’s truly sad about this sordid yarn is that people expect the truth to come out from inside the pages of their newspapers. Whether it is about equally exposing Democrats or Republicans; investigating civil government fraud; or gathering and reporting the details of domestic crimes, subscribers have the right to expect The Times to be honest and fair.
In the end, most readers aren’t giving their hard-earned money over to partisan politics, half-truths, fabrications and blatant lies – they want the truth. But as long as Raines is at the helm, truth will still be a stranger to readers.
Ultimately, the Blair debacle leaves more questions than answers because Times’ brass are still assigning blame, not only to Blair but also to one another.
As Rush Limbaugh observed, anything that now comes out of The Times must come with a disclaimer. In other words, every word must be taken with a grain of salt and challenged for fear of falsification, fabrication and deception.
Like Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Raines’ “Rosebud” – which, in his case, represents the liberalism Raines still desperately longs to hold on to – is getting thrown into the fire of scandal and is slowly burning up this very moment.
Copyright 2003 by Doug Schmitz. All Rights Reserved.
Doug Schmitz is a free-lance journalist, conservative columnist and media critic, and holds a master's degree in journalism. He's a regular columnist for AmericanDaily.com, Etherzone.com and has been a guest columnist for Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org). He's a proud member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. |
