by Seth Mnookin
HARD NEWS
The Scandals at
The New York Times
and Their Meaning for
American Media
SETH MNOOKIN
RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
Part One BEFORE
APRIL 8, 2002
THE SULZBERGER FAMILY
THE PRINCE
THE MAKING OF AN EDITOR
THE COMPETITION
THE DEPUTY
RACE IN THE NEWSROOM
THE AGENDA
A NEW ERA
THE WASHINGTON BUREAU
A GROWING MANDATE
PUSHING BACK, MOVING ON
THE DAILY REPORT
AUGUSTA
Part Two SPRING 2003
THE FIRST SIGNS OF SCANDAL
JAYSON BLAIR
SNIPER TIME
RESIGNATION
A TEAM ASSEMBLED
ONE WEEK IN MAY
THE TIMES’S REPORT
A FATEFUL GATHERING
THE FALLOUT
NEW ENDINGS, OLD BEGINNINGS
Part Three AFTER
ALL ABOUT HOWELL
A NEW TEAM IN PLACE
COURSE CORRECTIONS
SULZBERGER’S CHALLENGES
POSTSCRIPT
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
A Note on Sources
Source Notes
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright Page
For my parents
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
—Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, 1787
This was not exactly the truth, but then, what is, exactly?
—Howell Raines,
Whiskey Man, 1977
INTRODUCTION
The first newspaper printed in America lasted only one issue. Publick Occurences, Both Foreign and Domestick, was printed in Boston on September 25, 1690, but it wasn’t until a century later that newspapering in this country truly got going. By 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, there were 43 papers, and by 1787 the young American government had formally recognized how important a healthy press was to a healthy democracy: The First Amendment to the republic’s new Constitution famously promised that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Encouraged, the press mushroomed. By 1814, there were 346 domestic newspapers; by 1880, there were 11,314.
While America has always enjoyed a more or less free and healthy press, the commonly accepted practices of journalism have undergone a radical transformation between its beginnings and the present day. For the first century of the country’s existence, the notion of a uniformly “objective” press seemed quaint and naÏve. While some papers strove to be fair-minded and accurate, many others chose sensationalism, or political expediency, or tawdry slander. By the end of the nineteenth century, a pair of irascible (and incorrigible) press barons, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, had turned their bitter newspaper rivalry into a lesson in warmongering and dishonest reportage, creating scandals for the express purpose of embarrassing the competition and disseminating jingoistic propaganda. (Hearst, in his inimitable way, would later brag that he had all but started the Spanish-American War. He wasn’t far off.)
It was into this world that the modern-day New York Times was born. In the late 1800s, the Times was a small, struggling broadsheet, minuscule in comparison with Hearst’s Journal or Pulitzer’s World. The paper made a name for itself by seizing an underrepresented market niche. By emphasizing judicious reporting (and official proclamations), the Times transformed itself into a true paper of record, one avowedly uninfluenced by public opinion and dedicated to reporting the truth. Over generations, the paper earned a hard-won and much-cherished reputation for being fair and impartial. Readers, in turn, came to trust and rely on the Times with an almost religious fervor and, in doing so, helped to make the Times, and the sort of journalism it had created, the standard to which all other newspapers would have to compare themselves. More than any other single source, the Times would come to represent the closest journalism could get to unvarnished truth.
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TODAY, The New York Times is the most important newspaper in America. That’s not to say it’s always the best. The Wall Street Journal is frequently more eloquent. The Washington Post often leads the pack on political stories and of late has been both nimbler and more authoritative. For the last several years, the Los Angeles Times has produced a more purposeful news report, and in 2004 it thoroughly dominated the Pulitzer Prizes. But The New York Times—by dint of the talent of its staff, its location in the world’s media capital, and its decades-long position as the bible of the American elite—is the institution that represents the pinnacle of its field.
Whether or not it will remain so is an open question. In an increasingly fractured media landscape that is characterized by declining newspaper readership, a proliferation of cable news networks and weblogs, and a blurring of the lines between entertainment and journalism, the Times is fighting to maintain the grip it has had on America’s collective consciousness for more than half a century. Ironically, that fracturing is as responsible for the Times’s lingering dominance as is its journalistic excellence—these days, the number of media options is so overwhelming that there almost needs to be a default standard-bearer. The rest of the media world, from broadcast news to cable outlets to other newspapers to glossy magazines, still looks to the Times to tell it what’s important, what each day’s conventional wisdom will be. Every evening, when the Times sends out the next day’s story list on its newswire, it sets the agenda for hundreds of other daily papers across the country. Every morning, the Times’s front page comes closer than any other single source of information to determining what will count as major news for the next twenty-four hours. The New York Times continues to serve as a beacon for the rest of the media world, and it continues to set the standard to which all other media outlets must aspire or against which they must rebel. The Times is like Harvard or the New York Yankees. It so dominates our imagination that it has become an archetype of what it means to be a journalistic enterprise.
That’s not to say the Times can, or indeed does, take its position for granted. Aside from the fact that consumers are less likely to read a daily paper today than at any time in the last hundred years, it is also easier to get instant access to news from almost anywhere in the world. A 2004 Project for Excellence in Journalism study on the state of the country’s news media found that “journalism is in the midst of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television.” That five-hundred-page study also spent considerable space addressing how “major news institutions have changed their product in a way that costs less to produce while still attracting an audience.” To continue to dominate the field, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publicly held Times Company’s uniquely powerful chairman and the The New York Times’s publisher, has had to try to reimagine what it means to be both a topflight newspaper company and a news-gathering operation. Sulzberger is keenly aware that he sits at the head of a company that his family—and the country—regards more as a public trust than as anything so prosaic as a business concern. For more than a hundred years, the Sulzbergers and the Times Company have operated on the principle that they know how to do one thing well: run a big-city broadsheet. Their dedication to this mission has demanded that they pass up some plum investment opportunities. At the
turn of the twentieth century, the Times Company declined an opportunity to invest in Coca-Cola because the soft-drink firm was too far removed from the company’s core business. Just after World War II, it turned down an offer from the government to create a television station in New York City for next to nothing, so that it could focus on newspapering. (The Hearst Corporation, by contrast, eagerly launched television stations when given the opportunity and today is one of the country’s largest media combines.) As media companies were becoming media conglomerates, as family papers like the Los Angeles Times were gobbled up by corporations like the Tribune Company, The New York Times remained relatively small and enormously successful.
Despite the efficacy of the Times’s historic single-mindedness, Arthur Sulzberger has become convinced this conservative road will eventually lead to ruin, a concern that has made him determined to broaden the Times’s audience while simultaneously increasing its revenues. Sulzberger considers himself a visionary with a single mission: to ensure that in ten and twenty and fifty years, The New York Times will still be the brightest star in the world’s information firmament. He is trying to achieve this goal both by expanding the newspaper’s reach—today almost half the paper’s daily circulation comes from outside the New York City metropolitan area—and by striving to make the Times Company “platform agnostic.” “TV, the Internet, all of that is integral to the growth of The New York Times’s brand,” Sulzberger told me in early 2004. “That’s how we’re going to reach more like-minded readers. That’s how we’re going to remain profitable in the years ahead. If print starts to become less of a growth area—which is not happening right now, but if and when it does—we need to be ready. We’re thinking long range here. . . . That means you have to invest in the future even as you’re managing a brand.”
This path of expansion has been, as often as not, tumultuous. Some Wall Street analysts question whether or not, in aggressively chasing after national readers and advertisers, the Times has neglected its extremely profitable New York base. Some wonder if it wouldn’t have made more sense to build a national network of premier newspapers instead of trying to force the Times on a national audience. (This has been the path of the Tribune Company, which today owns the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, south Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, The Hartford Courant, the Orlando Sentinel, and Long Island’s Newsday—many of which the Times itself has, at one time or another, had the opportunity to buy.) Journalists at the Times wonder why the company is investing so many millions of dollars in television ventures and the Internet while the newspaper is under what some feel are prohibitory budget constraints. What’s more, Sulzberger’s early efforts to expand the Times Company’s reach have produced decidedly mixed results. In 1999, the New York Times Company acquired Abuzz.com, an online information-swapping portal, for $30 million. In 2001, it closed the company’s offices and took a $22.7 million charge related to the site. In April 2002, the Times Company invested $100 million in the Discovery Times Channel, a digital TV station it co-owns with the Discovery Channel, which thus far has produced a string of well-reviewed programs that relatively few people have seen. Even investments that have been more obviously in tune with the Times’s core business have not always unfolded smoothly. In October 2002, Arthur Sulzberger forced The Washington Post to sell its 50 percent stake in the International Herald Tribune (IHT) for $70 million by threatening to start an overseas edition of the Times. Sulzberger maintains the IHT is needed to expand the Times’s global reach, although Europe has historically been a sinkhole for American newspaper companies trying to establish an international presence—the audience can be difficult to define, and the cost of doing business is often prohibitively high. What’s more, the Graham family, which owns The Washington Post, was insulted by what they viewed as Sulzberger’s heavy-handed ways.*1 *2
Whether in agreement or not with his manner or his business decisions, no one disputes that Sulzberger does have a vision. In the late 1990s, just as Sulzberger was reimagining what a newspaper company should look like, he was also thinking about what his newspaper should look like—and searching for an equally visionary editor to help implement his plans. He found Howell Raines. Raines, who had spent much of his twenty-three-year career at the Times cultivating Sulzberger’s attentions and affections, was named the paper’s executive editor in May 2001. (He started his new post on September 5 of that year.) The plan was that while Sulzberger was remaking the company, Raines would remake the paper into a true national daily. That meant the Times would dominate on every story, regardless of where it was breaking. Pop culture and college sports would get just as prominent play as presidential campaigns and foreign wars. Raines would train Times reporters to “flood the zone,” overwhelming the competition with the paper’s supreme firepower and resources. They’d do more quick-hit reports on the hot topic of the week and invest in fewer laborious, time-consuming projects, and they’d do it all with the same number of staffers and without a significant budget increase.*3 In his well-strategized campaign to become executive editor—a campaign that included battle plans, rehearsed speeches, one-on-one sessions with Times business executives, and a dedicated courtship of Sulzberger—Raines had argued that the Times was becoming bloated, lazy, and complacent and that he was the only man capable of fixing it.
Before Raines had a chance to begin implementing his vision, though, the world was transformed. In the days after September 11, 2001, when for the first time in a generation the country viscerally realized the importance of being well informed, the Times found itself suddenly and urgently necessary in a way it had not been in years. While shrill pundits on both the left and the right were making a mockery of the notion of an objective press, the Times proudly demonstrated to the world why it is still crucially important to give equal stories equal weight, to base coverage on news judgments and not personal vendettas or convictions, to never let a compelling story get in the way of the true story. The Times’s coverage of the crisis was exemplary, and the paper received overwhelming accolades for its work. This praise was gratifying, but it must also have been confusing to Raines. If, as he had argued, the Times had for years been falling asleep on the job, how could he explain its tremendous achievements? For Raines, the answer was simple: The Times could not have performed as well had he not been at the helm.
“Howell seemed to think that if the September 11 attacks had occurred one week earlier, we’d all have been sitting at our desks with our thumbs up our asses,” veteran Times foreign correspondent and columnist Clyde Haberman told me in 2004. In the months following September 11, Raines received so much affirmation that many of his underlings feared he had begun to see anyone who questioned him as an impediment to his vision. He embraced his authoritative nature and began editing the paper according to his whims and predilections, in the process embarrassing and marginalizing people who disagreed with him. Although departing members of the staff voiced their complaints, Sulzberger continued to pledge his unequivocal support.
Over the next year, The New York Times became an increasingly unhappy place to work, and that unhappiness began to be reflected in the pages of the newspaper. Key editors stopped talking to one another and, worse, stopped expressing their concerns about the paper’s missteps and problems. In late 2002, Raines was ridiculed for launching a relentless crusade against Augusta National, a Georgia golf course that hosts the Masters Tournament and doesn’t admit women as members, and was publicly embarrassed when two sports columns that disagreed with the Times’s stance were killed by editors fearful of Raines’s anger. That summer, the paper’s coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq alternated between flat-out wrong and woefully disorganized. The paper’s reporting on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq proved to be an embarrassment, as Times reporter Judith Miller, with Raines’s active encouragement, bullied her way onto the paper’s front page with a series of “exclusives,” many of which were later revealed to be either incomplete or incorrect. In its own sorry
way, the Times came to reinforce the public’s perceptions of the media as another special-interest group, one more concerned with profits and its own agendas than the truth. According to one recent study, Americans today think journalists are “sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes, and generally more harmful to democracy” than they did just twenty years ago. Even the paper’s own employees took offense: More and more staffers who had clawed their way into a job at the Times—long the serious print journalist’s brass ring—began defecting to other papers, including more than half a dozen of the paper’s highly regarded national correspondents in 2002 alone. Raines, for his part, seemed not to care about reporters’ bruised egos, the petty concerns of weak-willed editors, or a public that wanted desperately to be shown why it should have faith in its institutions. He was focused instead on his legacy, and he wanted to put his distinctive stamp on the most revered newspaper in the world. Times policy dictated that he would have to retire before February 5, 2009, his sixty-sixth birthday, and he surely heard the clock ticking every day.
All this turmoil might have been of little interest to anyone but journalism junkies and ivory tower academics. Howell Raines might have ridden out the storms of his first years. He might have realized the damage he was inflicting on the paper and recalibrated his leadership style accordingly. Arthur Sulzberger might have finally understood the extent of the mess in the newsroom and moved to fix it. But before any of this could happen, a journalistic suicide bomb detonated in The New York Times with the May 1, 2003, resignation of Jayson Blair, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter. An internal investigation turned up three dozen stories that Blair had fabricated or plagiarized in one six-month period. Following the investigation, the Times devoted four full pages of its Sunday paper—more space than it gave to coverage and analysis of President Bush’s State of the Union address—to an astonishing report about the incident that was part mea culpa, part journalistic tour de force, and wholly unprecedented. In true form, the rest of the media world fell into line, dedicating endless pages of newsprint and hundreds of hours of airtime to the paper’s dysfunction. Jayson Blair’s story became an indictment of Howell Raines’s leadership, and Raines’s leadership became emblematic of every poor decision Arthur Sulzberger had ever made. The Times’s policy and track record on affirmative action came under scrutiny (Blair is African American), and minority staffers felt the unwelcome glare of suspicion as white staffers muttered privately that they always suspected black reporters were given more slack. The New York Times, the reserved newspaper where reporters and editors traditionally toiled in relative obscurity, became the subject of open ridicule, of demeaning and humiliating news reports by lesser competitors around the country, even of late-night talk-show quips. (“You know the old slogan of The New York Times, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’?” David Letterman deadpanned one night in his opening monologue. “They’ve changed it. The new slogan is, ‘We make it up.’ “)*4 Eventually, the clamor became an open staff rebellion, and Sulzberger was forced to fire Howell Raines, less than a month after announcing he wouldn’t accept Raines’s resignation even if it was offered and less than two years after he had appointed Raines to lead the Times into its bright future.