Raines Says He Was Asked To Resign at N.Y. Times
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2003; Page C01
Howell Raines said last night that he had been told to step down as executive editor of the New York Times after five tumultuous weeks in which the newsroom revolted against him.
"Arthur asked me to step aside," Raines said, referring to Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
In his first public comments since leaving the paper on June 5, Raines said on PBS's "The Charlie Rose Show" that he probably would not have stepped down if Sulzberger had not asked him to do so.
Raines said he had caused "friction" as a "change agent" who tried to transform a "lethargic culture of complacency" in the newsroom -- with "entrenched folkways" and a "deep sense of self-satisfaction" -- into a "performance culture." And he acknowledged that his hard-charging style proved to be his undoing.
"I moved the newsroom too far and too fast," Raines said. "And that was a mistake on my part." And then, he told Rose, "I stepped on a land mine named Jayson Blair." As a result, "I became a political liability."
The Washington Post reported at the time of his resignation that it was not entirely voluntary, since Raines had been making future appointments with reporters until the day before he announced he was quitting. Publicly, however, the Times maintained that Raines had made the decision.
Raines said Sulzberger told him in asking him to resign that "I don't think we can calm this place down," even as the publisher said the conversation was "breaking my heart."
In describing the events leading up to the disclosures that reporter Blair had fabricated and plagiarized dozens of stories, Raines said he was never told that Blair had an accuracy problem until April 30. On that day, he looked at an e-mail from the editor of the San Antonio Express-News about similarities between Blair's supposed interview with a woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq and the Texas paper's story. A Washington Post report on the plagiarized Blair piece had been posted online the afternoon before.
No one other than two mid-level editors, Raines said, saw an April 2002 memo by Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman that said: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." It wasn't until the scandal erupted, Raines said, that he looked at Blair's personnel file and saw "a pattern of errors."
Still, he said, "I was the captain of the ship. The ship hit a rock under my watch. The details are irrelevant."
Raines told Rose he had just met with members of the Siegal committee, a Times panel examining newsroom practices in the wake of the Blair scandal. "The staff has and will rally," he said.
Although he had granted no interviews in the final weeks of his tenure or since his departure, Raines chose to break his silence with the PBS talk show host, who told viewers that the Alabaman is "a friend."
Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd quit five weeks after the Blair scandal erupted. The furor over Blair, and a subsequent controversy over reporter Rick Bragg and his use of stringers, sparked a newsroom uproar in which many reporters and editors expressed anger and resentment at Raines's autocratic management style.
Raines said he began thinking about boosting the Times's energy level in the late 1970s and 1980s, when he felt the paper would "stand around waiting to get its back end kicked" by such competitors as Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward at The Post. He also said that the business section, before he took over, "didn't mind getting beat" by the Wall Street Journal.
He repeatedly described himself as pushing the staff in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when he said the Times "truly became the national paper of record. . . . I worked them too hard and didn't rest them enough." He said his "so-called star system," in which he tried to reward the most talented editors and reporters, replaced a "buddy system" that favored staffers "based on who they knew or how plugged in they were to the old-boy network."
Sharply criticizing part of the staff without naming anyone, he said there was an "ideological war" at the Times between himself and "people who wanted to continue the status quo" and "want the paper to remain more parochial," more focused on New York, as opposed to a national and international audience.
Raines also said he was pushing to bring "the back of the book" -- the softer feature sections, such as sports and culture -- "up to the level of quality of the front of the book," the hard news sections. He portrayed the newsroom as a "conservative environment" where "all change is regarded as threatening," down to the level of seating assignments.
Raines denied, however, that his descriptions of the paper's previous culture were meant as a criticism of his predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld, now the interim executive editor.
Despite the widespread view that he had little support in the newsroom, Raines said he had received "hundreds of communications" from staffers who felt it was a "terrible mistake" for him to quit. At the same time, he said, "I was disappointed, frankly, that many people on the paper who shared my vision didn't speak up."
He sidestepped a question on whether the punishment -- his ouster -- "fit the crime," saying: "That's for others to judge."
He said he realized it would have taken one to two years of his remaining five-year tenure to deal with the "huge management problems" and the "cyclone" of emotions that had been unleashed before he could return to his mission of changing the newsroom.
Raines's successor may be announced as early as next week, and most Times staffers believe the job will go to former managing editor Bill Keller (now an op-ed columnist), who was passed over when Sulzberger picked Raines in 2001.
Raines said he is talking to publishers about writing novels and a book about journalism, and is not interested in offers he has received from other newspapers. "Although I loved the Times," he said, "it's not my life."
washingtonpost.com |
