After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  At the same time, its one inviolable belief has become simply this, not a politics, right or left, but an ideology: the Times, as an institution, believes what has been published in its pages. To defend this belief it will go very far. The search, the grail, the motivating principle for individual reporters has become, not the uninflected reporting of news, but something by now almost entirely unrelated: the winning of a Pulitzer Prize. In the interim, some other prize will do. But once won, the Pulitzer turns into both a shield and a weapon—a shield in defense of otherwise indefensible pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, a weapon in the struggle for advancement within the hierarchy of the Times. The paper still has some very fine editors and reporters, with highly honorable concerns. But a five-year moratorium on the awarding of Pulitzer Prizes to journalists at powerful publications might be the greatest service to journalism the Pulitzer Committee could now perform.

  In any event, Howell Raines had said on The Charlie Rose Show that the Times was complacent. Sulzberger’s words were intended—and perhaps somewhere perceived—as a rebuttal to this remark. In recent years, executive editors of the Times have tended to find the paper much improved during their tenure. At a retreat in Tarrytown, New York, in September 2000, Joseph Lelyveld had expressed to eighty newsroom editors, and a few colleagues from other publications, his belief that the Times had become “the best New York Times ever—the best written, most consistent, and ambitious newspaper Times readers have ever had.” In July, in the course of the infamous Charlie Rose Show, Howell Raines said, “The newspapers that we have produced over the past twenty months are the best in the history of the Times.”

  Whether or not these were expressions of complacency, they would have been unthinkable for the predecessors of these men—for the executive editors, Turner Catledge, say, or A.M. Rosenthal, who said he only wanted to be remembered as the editor who “kept the paper straight.” Rosenthal did keep the paper straight, in a time that now seems unimaginably remote—with a first-rate staff and the discreet support of the Times’s publisher in those years, Sulzberger’s father. In any event, the current Sulzberger’s words on the subject of complacency, or non-complacency, marked the culmination of what has become the saga of The New York Times and Jayson Blair.

  The saga began on April 26, 2003, when the Times published a piece which a 27-year-old staff reporter, Jayson Blair, had essentially cribbed from an article published eight days earlier in the San Antonio Express-News. The original article had been written by Macarena Hernandez, a former intern (and colleague of Blair’s) at the Times; it consisted mainly of an interview with Juanita Anguiano, the single mother of an only son, Specialist Edward J. Anguiano, of Los Fresnos, Texas, the last American soldier still missing at that time in Iraq. Normally, as Jayson Blair had every reason to know, calling attention to errors in the Times, provided that they are absolutely trivial (misspellings of first or last names, mistaken middle initials, misidentifications of who is standing on the left and who on the right in photographs), may result in a Correction. Calling attention to major or substantial errors will have no result at all. The Times, committed to an image of infallibility on every important factual matter, will neither acknowledge them nor respond in any way.

  In this instance, however, Robert Rivard, the editor of the San Antonio paper, had an exchange of emails with the editors of the Times —who said they would “look into the matter.” Rivard asked them to “acknowledge publicly” that the Times had wrongfully appropriated Ms. Hernandez’s work. Perhaps aware of how such an allegation would normally be treated, Mr. Rivard took the trouble of sending copies of his email to others. So the saga began publicly on April 30, 2003—when both the Associated Press and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post ran the story. Had the Times not been “caught,” in this public way by rival publications, the paper would surely have done nothing and acknowledged nothing. In fact, it did nothing, until after the AP and Washington Post stories appeared. The next day, May 1, 2003, Jayson Blair resigned. On May 2, the Times reported his resignation, and added an Editors’ Note to the effect that the paper had begun “an internal review” of the piece in question, that it regretted the “breach of journalistic standards,” and that it planned an “apology” to the “family” that was the subject of the piece.

  The apology, if any, seemed misdirected. If it was owed to anyone, one would have thought, it was to Ms. Hernandez, whose piece had been cribbed. The Anguiano family had been in no way harmed by Jayson Blair’s piece; they were not even aware that it existed. On April 28, 2003, two days after the Times’s publication of the piece, the Department of Defense announced that Sgt. Anguiano was dead. On April 30 and May 1, however, the Times apparently found it necessary to phone his mother, to confirm in time for its report of May 2, that she “did not recall Mr. Blair’s having visited her home in Los Fresnos, Texas.” (“No, no, no, he didn’t come,” she said, according to the Times.) Everyone makes mistakes. Perhaps the reporter had called without reading the casualty lists released each day by the DOD. The Times account seemed an act of journalism run more seriously amok than anything contemplated by Jayson Blair. In any event, with the Times report, on May 2, 2003, of Mr. Blair’s resignation, and the reason for it, the matter should have rested. A minor reporter had made a mistake, and a miscalculation. Other reporters, more famous and highly regarded than Blair, had made mistakes with more serious consequences, not just for individuals but in matters of national importance. With one exception, the Times had paid no attention to the problems raised by any of them. (The exception was its coverage, in 1999 and 2000, of Wen Ho Lee.) The Times should simply have dropped, for its insignificance, the matter of Jayson Blair.

  But no. On Sunday, May 11, with four pieces, beginning on Page One, and totaling approximately 15,000 words, the Times let loose. The first piece (7,165 words) was a narrative, which cast Jayson Blair as a sometimes charming, basically calculating villain, whose intent was not (as any reader of ordinary intelligence might have thought) to publish a lot of pieces and get ahead, but to deceive and victimize his too credulous, forgiving—and even understaffed—employer. The narrative, by five reporters (one a fine lawyer, Adam Liptak) and two research assistants, relied on “more than 150 interviews,” as well as expense accounts and phone records, to conclude that Jayson Blair, in 600 pieces written over a period of four years, had “flouted long-followed rules” at the Times in “a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving.” By turns accusatory, sanctimonious, sympathetic, self-exonerating (“the deceit of one Times reporter does not impugn the work of 375 others”), the article quoted outsiders, deans of journalism schools for example, to support the Times’s view of Blair’s career, its importance and his motives.

  “There has never been a systematic effort to lie and cheat . . . comparable” to Blair’s, said one. “It is difficult to catch someone who is deliberately trying to deceive you,” said another. Lying. Riddled with lies. Journalistic fraud. Systematic fraud. A cause of “pain” and “hurt.” This last was mystifying. Not one of Blair’s pieces, mostly soft, human-interest news of the sort which the Times has increasingly favored, seemed harmful either in intent or in effect—at least for their subjects. On the contrary. One couple whom Blair had interviewed by phone, the parents of a Marine scout then stationed in Iraq, were so “delighted” with his piece that they wrote a letter, which the Times published. Another, a wounded soldier whom Blair also interviewed by phone, was so taken with a sentence Blair ascribed to him that he apparently could not quite bring himself to relinquish it: “he could not be sure,” he told the Times, “whether he had uttered” the sentence—which the Times had, in fact, chosen, on April 19, 2003, as its “Quotation of the Day.” The story, like many of Blair’s stories—like many stories of far greater importance published routinely by the Times, among other newspapers—was largely false.

  Stories published under deadline pressures, in an effort to cover the world on a daily basis, are bound
to contain quantities of misinformation. The difficulty is to sustain, within the news itself, a continuous process of correction. (This is why the Times Corrections column, with its restriction to silly and often repetitive minutiae, creates a disingenuous impression of care for accuracy while it undercuts the fundamental integrity of the paper. A newspaper that insists on infallibility in large matters, while pointing out, as the Times does in correcting Jayson Blair, “The sister of Corporal Gardner is named Cara not Kara,” is a less trustworthy source of news than a paper without a Corrections column of any sort.) But the subjects of these pieces did not care. The normal reader did not care. In fact, not even the most fanatically press-obsessed reader could much care about the endlessly detailed re-reporting of what had been from the outset trivial stories.

  The narrative piece did contain, near the end, one nearly perfect anecdote, the capstone of its accusations, in a claim that Mr. Blair had in fact been assigned to something important, “one of the biggest stories to come from the war.”

  After the Hunt Valley article in late March, Mr. Blair pulled details out of thin air in his coverage of one of the biggest stories to come from the war, the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch . . . . Mr. Blair wrote that Private Lynch’s father, Gregory Lynch Sr., “choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.” The porch overlooks no such thing.

  “Pulling details out of thin air,” the Times seemed to forget was, from the very first day, the essence precisely of the story of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch—at every stage of the military’s coup in promoting through an obliging press a fiction, a highly implausible, unusually effective piece of propaganda, as “one of the biggest stories to come from the war.” The Times went straight to the heart of the matter. Huffy, in a wonderfully schoolmarmish way, “The porch overlooks no such thing” could be one of the great lines in press criticism, if not in journalism itself. Though “Correcting the Record” was the title of the narrative (7,165 words)—as it was of the next of the four Jayson Blair pieces—of May 2, 2003, the Times never disclosed what the porch does overlook.

  The second piece, the “accounting” (6,591 words), divided each of several flawed articles by Blair into (capitalized) categories of flaw: DENIED REPORTS; FACTUAL ERRORS; WHEREABOUTS; PLAGIARISM; FABRICATIONS; and OTHER ISSUES. As an intellectual matter, it was clear that there was something wrong with this list. Readers who noticed that “WHEREABOUTS” did not, in any obvious way, belong in a list of transgressions had to realize that the “dateline”—the place the reporter claims to be filing his story from—had become, in this case, an obsession, a subject of limitless horror and indignation for the Times. The investigators may have been too scandalized to name it with precision. Readers, who have long been aware that most journalists, particularly famous journalists, do a lot of their interviews by phone, probably pay little attention to even the most exotic datelines. If Lally Weymouth of Newsweek is reporting on an exclusive interview with Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, it is important that she has in fact spoken directly with him in Karachi. If John F. Burns, of the Times, is reporting on his treatment by agents in Baghdad, it is crucial that he is in fact there and not filing on the basis of a call from a bedside phone at the Plaza in New York. But these are distinguished reporters, and their actual location, at the time of reporting, is part of the essence of their work. A “dateline” in itself is meaningless.

  It is true that Jayson Blair’s having almost never traveled to the place reflected in the dateline of his pieces seemed an extreme case. Perhaps he hated travel, had become phobic about it. Perhaps, since the Times narrative said he had (among other “personal problems”) a cocaine habit, he wanted to stay near his dealer. Most likely, though, on the basis of the versatility and frequency of his pieces (sometimes, though the Times narrative does not mention this, two and even three bylined pieces in a single day), Blair was staying near home in order to write. Travel takes time. Blair, having been hired, promoted and given the status of full-time reporter under Lelyveld, and thrived under Raines, could only sustain his pace by making economies of time and energy: no travel, some appropriation of other people’s work, some embellishment of stories, some fabrication. Grounds for dismissal, certainly—once Blair had made the cardinal mistake of stealing from a publication whose power to expose the theft was greater than the Times’s power to conceal it. Just to illustrate, however, the level of corrections the Times found it worth the huge expenditure of its own space and energy to make:

  February 10, 2003, FACTUAL ERRORS—“Ms. Adams did not suffer from back pain; she said she suffered from shoulder and neck pain.” . . . OTHER ISSUES—“Mr. Ballenger said he discussed the fact that his son, James IV, had dropped out of college on the condition that it not be published, and that he was upset to see it in the paper.”

  This last point rests on two fairly odd assumptions: first, that a man who has “discussed” with a reporter a “fact . . . on the condition that it not be published” can, in most cases, expect the reporter to see to it that it is not published; and second, that when a Mr. Ballenger, having been “upset” to see a fact he regarded as private published in the paper on February 3, 2003, finds it published again in the same paper on May 11, something of value has been achieved.

  The third Times piece that Sunday, May 11, 2003, carried the headline: “Editors’ Note.” It was brief, and remarkable mainly for the nature of its apology. Among those who deserved an apology, the Times included “all conscientious journalists whose professional trust has been betrayed by this episode.” In its two long pieces, the narrative and the account, The Times had apparently been under the delusion (1) that by making corrections to already trivial stories it was conveying useful information, and (2) that it was engaged in some act of self-criticism, or even self-examination, in enumerating the errors of one small, unimportant reporter on its staff. What was beyond explanation was the need to apologize to a whole profession for an “episode” which can have caused no conceivable harm to any conscientious journalist, anywhere.

  The sentence, however, brought inescapably to mind another “episode”—for which the Times has never offered an apology to anyone, least of all to its genuine victim, Dr. Wen Ho Lee. A series of pieces in the Times, between March 6, 1999, and September 26, 2000, played a major part in sending an innocent man to prison, and keeping him there, for nine months, in solitary confinement, often in shackles—until a federal judge, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, apologized to him on behalf of the United States government and ordered his release. If the Times had spent a fraction of the space, energy and zeal which it devoted to its “investigation” of the errors of Jayson Blair on a genuine investigation of its own factual and ethical transgressions in covering the case of Wen Ho Lee, it would have made a valuable contribution, even marked a turning point in the history of journalism, particularly its own.

  Instead, on September 26, 2000, the Times published an Editors’ Note, “a public accounting” (1,663 words), and, two days later, an editorial “Overview” (1,725 words), in which it appraised its own coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee and found it good—“careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources,” of which the paper remained “proud.” On a single day, March 24, 1999, the paper had carried on its front page a story that Dr. Lee had once hired as a laboratory assistant a Chinese citizen “already under investigation as a spy.” The FBI was looking for this suspect, to question him. “And the research assistant has disappeared.”

  A reporter who had actually traveled that day from Washington to Los Alamos saw the Times exclusive story and despaired. Then the reporter asked somebody at the lab whether he knew anything about the missing man. Certainly. It turned out the research assistant was a graduate student, an intern, who had returned to his regular studies at Penn State; he could easily be reached on the university’s website or by phone. Neither the Times reporter nor anyone else from the Times (or the FBI a
pparently) had troubled to try so direct a route. Too busy with extensive cross-checking and multiple vetting of sources.

  In retrospect, and in the context of the Jayson Blair pieces, the coverage of Wen Ho Lee looks worse than ever, based on profound, unacknowledged, continued and truly damaging errors—which the Times to this day insists were not errors at all. The paper was not just the instrument of other powerful institutions against the individual; it had become a driving force in the prosecution and vested its reputation there. This is not the role envisioned in the First Amendment for the press. No apology, then, to the few “conscientious journalists” (the late Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News chief among them) who virtually dismantled the Times’s case against Dr. Lee—or to the many, perhaps somewhat less conscientious journalists who trusted the Times’s story and took it up, or to readers who were and perhaps remain misled by it. And, far from an apology, in all subsequent Times pieces about the matter, continued attacks on Dr. Lee.