by Seth Mnookin
In April 2002, Engelberg quit, leaving his post as head of investigations to take a job managing enterprise reporting at The Oregonian, a 350,000-circulation daily. Life at The Oregonian has been an adjustment after the Times. “I often want a story on international affairs and I can’t get it because we don’t have a foreign staff,” Engelberg says. But The Oregonian is one of the strongest regional papers in the country and has long had a reputation for devoting ample resources to big stories. Just as important, Engelberg says, he is happy. “After 9/11, I began thinking, had I been in the World Trade Center, would I have spent my life and time devoted to the people I wanted to be devoted to?” says Engelberg, who has three young daughters. “Thinking about it like that made leaving a pretty easy decision.”
To replace Engelberg, Raines eventually settled on Douglas Frantz, a Times reporter who at the time was based in Istanbul. “It was a potentially great job,” Frantz says. “In some ways, it was the job I had spent my entire career getting ready for.” Frantz asked Raines if he’d support larger investigative projects and was answered with an enthusiastic yes. “He made a very persuasive case,” Frantz remembers. “Howell certainly convinced me that he wanted to have an investigative unit that did both the run-and-gun stuff for which the unit had become best known and longer-term, more serious investigations. That was certainly something I was concerned about, like a lot of other people. It’s hard to devote serious resources to other projects when the world is coming down on your shoulders, but Howell convinced me he really wanted it. He convinced me he fully intended to become known as the greatest editor in the history of The New York Times.” On October 1, Frantz became the paper’s new investigative editor.
Upon arriving in New York, Frantz, who had been away from New York for years, was surprised by what he found. “The whole paper was so Howell-driven in every way,” Frantz says. “Nobody wanted to argue with him, nobody wanted to give him any news. Even Gerald. And that was a real problem.”
Frantz also witnessed what he viewed as incredibly dysfunctional management. “I had been on the job for two or three weeks,” Frantz says. “Gerald was one of the people I knew who pushed for me to get the job. He’d asked me in a meeting what I needed in terms of staff. And I said what I really needed was a couple of young guns who would go out and work really hard and do whatever it is I ask of them. We were talking about outside candidates. Gerald said, ‘That sounds good. Get me a list of two to four people and we’ll talk.’
“So a few days later he and I were sitting in Howell’s office and the notion of my hiring outsiders came up again. I told Howell I was putting together a list of possible outside hires. Howell looked at me and said, ‘Who told you you could have outside hires?’ I pointed to Gerald, and he just shook his head. Howell went on to give this long explanation about the economic situation and how tight things were. And the whole time, I was just floored. When we left the meeting, Gerald put his arm across my shoulder and just said, ‘Sorry about that.’ I figured he just didn’t want to have talked out of school.”
Boyd’s refusal to acknowledge what he had said in a private conversation with Frantz was emblematic of everything that was going wrong with the Times. Even the second most powerful editor in the newsroom was afraid to contradict Howell Raines. Nor did Boyd seem concerned with the effect of his humiliating reversal on the editor who worked below him.
Another episode that occurred in February 2003 further alienated Frantz. At an editors’ meeting, Frantz and national editor Jim Roberts pitched a story about the space-shuttle disaster. According to a story that later ran in The Wall Street Journal, Boyd dismissed the idea, saying he had read a similar story that morning in USA Today. But when Frantz handed Boyd a copy of USA Today to show the story hadn’t been in the paper, Boyd became furious.
“You shouldn’t humiliate the managing editor,” Boyd snapped at Frantz. He then handed Frantz a quarter and told him to go call Dean Baquet. The next month, Frantz did just that, quitting the Times to work for Baquet at the Los Angeles Times. His term as investigative editor lasted less than six months.
“Gerald is a very likable if unpredictable fellow,” says Frantz. “You never know what’s going to come out of his mouth and how he intends some of his digs. But he has a real good heart. But by that point, I’d come to the conclusion that Howell Raines was not somebody I wanted to work for. I found he took a point of view on a story and pushed that point of view as hard as he could. And too many reporters and editors were willing to fold in the face of his pressure.”
After Frantz left, Raines and Boyd pushed for investigative reporter Tim Golden to accept a reassignment to a daily news beat. Instead, Golden quit as well, but not before, according to several people at the Times, having a one-on-one conversation with Arthur Sulzberger about the discord that was spreading in the Times’s newsroom.
Raines had alienated another important desk, and more and more staffers were considering leaving the paper. “Everybody started to get calls,” says Jon Landman, the metro editor at the time. “And some of the people who stayed, it had nothing to do with professional satisfaction. It had to do with things like ‘I’ve got to pay for college education. I’ve got to pay the rent.’ ”
THE DAILY REPORT
Throughout the first half of 2002, it was easy for Raines’s supporters—and Raines himself—to dismiss the newsroom’s unhappiness as mere whining. After all, Raines’s methods seemed to result in the sorts of accolades dreamed of by publishers and editors alike: April 2002 brought the paper’s unprecedented Pulitzer haul. But even when the breakneck pace of the news slowed, Raines kept riding his staff. Indeed, in his 2004 Atlantic piece, Raines wrote how he hoped to practice newsroom management by systematically exhausting some of his correspondents—as if they were racehorses or mules. “One person quits—sometimes in response to stepped-up metabolism—and another can be hired,” he wrote. “Inevitably, removing underperformers created newsroom grumbling. But I felt that if we could all stand being rode hard and put up wet until the end of 2003, an entire new cast of editors would be in charge at the lagging departments, and we could all begin to get some rest.”
Some members of the masthead tried to warn Raines off this tactic. Many of the correspondents and editors being lost were a far cry from being “underperformers.” But Raines kept isolating himself, and even top managers began to conclude that he perceived any advice, regardless of its origins, to be the result of jealousy and ill will.
Had the problem been only Raines’s increasingly bitter fights with some of the paper’s editors and reporters, he might have been able to march onward with at least the passive support of most of the staff. The Times, after all, is a great, lumbering institution, one that trudges forward on its own momentum, regardless of management intrigue. But as the year wore on, the newsroom began to feel that Raines was forcing bad journalism into the paper. The staff began to view him as an editor concerned at least as much with burnishing his own image as with putting out a great newspaper. The feeling intensified after Raines began forcing his beloved “all-known-thought” pieces into the paper whether they were worthwhile or not; after all, he was the editor who had pioneered the genre.
“These [all-known thoughts] were often a repetitive thing,” says Soma Golden Behr. “We may have already done fifty stories on this subject. So we’d summarize those fifty, plus add in one other fact. If you’re a regular reader, you wonder why you should bother with the story. And if you do bother, you get pissed off. It’s three thousand words, it takes you half of Sunday to read, and for what?”
One example of Raines’s obsession with making a big splash regardless of whether or not the news warranted it was an April 21, 2002, front-page story warning of the dire economic impact of a recent drought in the Northeast. “If the drought drags on,” read the 1,700-word story, “possible delays in linking new housing or businesses to overburdened water systems could cause economic setbacks. . . . The potential for damage to the economy is
considerable. . . . Restrictions on water use could hurt small businesses, forcing car washes, for example, to cut back their hours. . . . Some tourists might alter their vacations, avoiding the Northeast and its hotels.” Rarely had conditional clauses gotten such a robust workout on the front page of the Times. Worst of all, the report contained this caveat: “So far, the economic damage has only been spotty and minor.”
“He decided we were undercovering [the drought],” says Jon Landman. “We were not undercovering it. We were covering it appropriately. We were not saying the world was going to end. And he wanted it to be faster, more, bigger. And he commissioned that piece that was an embarrassment.
“He gave the impression it wasn’t about journalism, it was about making a statement. When the making of a statement doesn’t coincide with good journalism, you have a real problem.”
By this point, Landman was another one of the paper’s desk editors feeling increasingly alienated and frustrated by Howell Raines. “I worked for him in Washington,” says Landman. “I learned a lot. I was excited that he was going to be editor. But this was not the same guy that I had known. . . . In Washington I found him to be an excellent listener, a guy with a genuinely deep interest in the things we were covering. He really enjoyed the back-and-forth of it.” Once Raines took over as executive editor, Landman says, something changed. Raines, who maintained that he thought the metro section was one of the strongest in the paper, kept killing stories for no apparent reason; at other times, he’d give orders with little regard to reality.
“I objected to the general thrust of things, and I told him so,” says Landman. “He didn’t want to hear it. Nor did Gerald. They were losing people, they were killing stories by first-class people. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because all of a sudden all these [writers] lost their journalistic standards. But he didn’t want to hear it. He said I should stop making a big deal out of it, that I was emotionally labile.”
As spring turned into summer, Raines continued to recast the Times’s news report to reflect his preoccupations. American journalism has a long, weighty tradition of aiming for objectivity in its news pages. That, of course, is a canard: Every news judgment, every article placement, every lead, reflects snap judgments about what is and isn’t important, what should and shouldn’t be emphasized. Investigative stories are a publication’s way of announcing that there’s an issue that is not receiving the attention or scrutiny an editor or reporter thinks it deserves. In hundreds of small ways, every editor is “guilty” of pushing an agenda; after all, editors are hired at least in part for their news judgments and convictions.
Raines, however, seemed not to be content with using the Times’s resources to spotlight specific stories he felt weren’t being covered. Much as he had with campaign finance reform while running the editorial page, Raines wanted to set the national agenda. It was this sense of journalistic activism that critics had worried about even before Raines took over as executive editor. “Every editor and reporter holds private views,” wrote Robert Samuelson in a Washington Post column a week before Raines took over the newsroom. “The difference is that Raines’s opinions are now highly public. His [editorial] page . . . was pro-choice, pro–gun control and pro–campaign finance ‘reform.’ . . . Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines’s positions compromise the Times’ ability to act and appear fair-minded.”
By August 2002, media critics and conservative gadflies alike were accusing the Times of trying to shape, rather than chronicle, the national debate. In two successive front-page stories, the Times wrote about growing Republican dissent over the seemingly inevitable war with Iraq. “Leading Republicans from Congress, the State Department and past administrations have begun to break ranks with President Bush over his administration’s high-profile planning for war with Iraq,” began an August 16 story co-authored by Todd Purdum and Patrick Tyler. “These senior Republicans include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.” The next day, another front-page piece, by Elisabeth Bumiller, noted that President Bush was “listening carefully to a group of Republicans who were warning him against going to war with Iraq. . . . It was the first time Mr. Bush had so directly addressed the growing chorus of concern from Republicans, which now includes former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.”
But Kissinger had never argued against invading Iraq; all he had done was express some realpolitik reservations in an August 11 Washington Post op-ed piece. In fact, he’d written, “The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action.”
But the damage had been done. On August 18, Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post, “Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,’ has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines’s New York Times.” The Times had always been considered liberal, but now it was Raines himself who was being singled out as the source of the Times’s bias.
After several days of brutal criticism, the masthead asked David Carr, a Times media reporter, to write a story on how the American press was increasingly seen as driving the debate on Iraq. Carr researched the project, reading the clips and making calls, before returning to the paper’s editors. “I had to tell them the media wasn’t driving anything,” Carr says. “It was only us. It was only the Times.” In lieu of a story, the Times ran an editors’ note on September 4, explaining its mistakes.
“This is certainly a shift from The New York Times as ‘the paper of record,’ ” Alex Jones said at the time. “It’s a more activist agenda in terms of policy, especially compared to an administration that’s much more conservative.” It was as if Raines were determined to question the Bush’s administration’s push toward war, even if no one else was doing so. Tradition dictated that the Times needed someone in the nation’s elite to voice the sentiments it actually wanted to come out and say on its own. Now, it seemed, when they couldn’t find the right person, they simply wrote the story anyway.
It was Tyler, already seen as Raines’s favorite, whose reputation suffered most. “By this time, there were other reporters in the Washington bureau who were refusing to work with [Tyler] because they didn’t trust his reporting,” says Jill Abramson. Around that time, she ran into Paul Steiger, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and her old boss. “He said he thought the credibility of the Times was suffering because of [the Kissinger story],” Abramson says.
And it wasn’t just biased political stories that the staff felt Raines was hurrying onto the front page. That fall, Raines became convinced that Britney Spears was trying, and failing, to reinvent herself as an adult pop star. The ensuing 1,600-word, Sunday front-page story was yet another embarrassing example of Raines’s certainty that he had his finger on the pulse of American culture. “Ms. Spears,” the piece read, “who made her debut as a wholesome bubblegum star with a penchant for sweetly flashing her belly button, is caught in a vicious conundrum of fame acquired young: the qualities that made her accessible and popular as a teenage star may be precisely the ones choking her career as an adult, leaving her looking like an unseemly parody as she tries to become a grown-up recording artist.” In November 2003, Spears’s fourth album, In the Zone, hit number one its first week on the charts, making Spears the first woman ever to have four consecutive number-one records.
“There’s nothing wrong with putting stuff like Britney on the front page,” says Jon Landman. “If she’s on the front page because it’s an interesting story, great. But if she’s there because we’re so eager to show our youthfulness, then that’s a problem. People sense that. They understand what’s going on.”
AUGUSTA
As 2002 stretched on, Raines’s New York Times was about to show readers and critics alike that it would continue to tell the rest of the country what was and wasn’t newsworthy, regardless of what anyone else felt. On November 25, 2002, the Times ran a front-page story headlined “CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta.” It was the thirty-second piece the Times had run in less than three months about whether the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, would admit women as members.
The story spanked CBS, which airs the Masters, for “resisting the argument that it can do something to alter the club’s policy,” although it was unclear who—other than the Times—was making the argument; as the piece eventually noted, “Public pressure on CBS to take a stand has been glancing.” “[The Augusta coverage] was just shocking. It makes it hard for us to have credibility on other issues,” said a Times staffer at the time. “We don’t run articles that just say so-and-so is staying silent. We run articles when something important actually happens.” Media coverage of Raines’s Augusta obsession was scathing. Slate’s Mickey Kaus and Jack Shafer rode the story for days, and The New York Observer’s Sridhar Pappu added damning dispatches. “Raines is on the verge of a breakthrough reconceptualization of ‘news’ here,” Kaus wrote, “in which ‘news’ comes to mean the failure of any powerful individual or institution to do what Howell Raines wants them to do.” After praising the Times for its aggressive coverage of the Bush administration, Shafer wrote, “At some point, saturation coverage of a story begins to raise more questions about the newspaper’s motives than about the story being covered.”
In some ways, the criticism was familiar. “We’re The New York Times,” Arthur Sulzberger told me in a 2004 interview. “People are going to hold us to a standard that’s higher than others’. That’s okay. We like to think we hold ourselves to higher standards, too.” Historically, staffers had rallied against any attack on the paper, defending it to their peers and colleagues. This was different—this time reporters within the Times’s newsroom were embarrassed as well.