by Seth Mnookin
“I remember being surprised by the relentlessness of [the Times’s Augusta coverage],” says Daniel Okrent, who was named the Times’s first-ever public editor (an ombudsmanlike position) in the fall of 2003. “There are a lot of things to worry about in the world besides whether some millionaire CEO who happens to be a woman gets into the Augusta Golf Club. There was this clear campaign at the Times . . . the whole coverage was out of proportion.”
“The Masters story,” says then business editor Glenn Kramon, “was like a crusade. The perception in the newsroom was that it was an agenda that went beyond the bounds.” The outcry over the paper’s Augusta coverage grew much more intense. On Wednesday, December 4, the New York Daily News’s media columnist, Paul Colford, reported that the Times had spiked two sports columns because they disagreed with the Times’s activist position on Augusta. Harvey Araton’s column asked whether there weren’t more important battles to be fighting in regards to discrimination in sports, and Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson’s column disagreed with a Times editorial that had called on Tiger Woods to sit out the Masters.
The reaction to Colford’s story was immediate and furious. Online media forums, such as Jim Romenesko’s media blog, overflowed with letters ridiculing the Times. In the newsroom, reporters and editors were shell-shocked—usually, rumors of columns being spiked on ideological grounds were just that: rumors. Later on December 4, Gerald Boyd, who had personally spiked one of the columns and was running the newsroom while Raines was away in Paris dealing with the Times’s takeover of the International Herald Tribune, wrote a staffwide memo that only made the situation worse. It was at once long-winded and unsatisfying, defensive and arrogant. Boyd’s memo read:
Howell and I believe you should know The Times’s response to questions that have been raised by some published reports in recent days about our coverage of the Augusta Golf Club story and our handling of sports columns on the subject.
First, we are proud of our leadership in covering this story. Our sports staff, with help from many desks, is doing exactly what some “accuse” us of doing: asking questions that no other organization is raising, and pressing energetically for the answers our readers want.
Augusta’s restricted membership policies have been legitimate news for decades. With the ascendance of Tiger Woods and the campaign by the National Council of Women’s Organizations, the club has become an inescapable story.
The decisions faced by CBS, a leading network that is a 46-year Masters partner of the club, are a significant part of the story. There is only one word for our vigor in pursuing a story—whether in Afghanistan or Augusta.
Call it journalism.
Columnists in the news pages hold a special place at The Times. Each has wide latitude to speak with an individual point of view, always informed by diligent reporting and intelligent reasoning. In the sports pages, columnists have unique license to go beyond analytical writing and—still informed by their reporting—engage in robust argument, even express personal opinions on any side of an issue, within the bounds of sport, broadly defined.
Still, these columns are not on the Op-Ed page, and all newsroom writers are subject to our standards of tone, taste and relevance to the subject at hand. We are an edited newspaper: that is one of our strengths, and we believe our staff takes pride in it.
Recently we spiked two sports columns that touched on the Augusta issue. We were not concerned with which “side” the writers were on. A well-reported, well-reasoned column can come down on any side, with our welcome.
One of the columns focused centrally on disputing The Times’s editorials about Augusta. Part of our strict separation between the news and editorial pages entails not attacking each other. Intramural quarreling of that kind is unseemly and self-absorbed. Discussion of editorials may arise when we report on an issue; fair enough. But we do not think they should be the issue.
In the case of this column, the writer had previously dealt with the Augusta controversy at least twice, arguing on October 6 against pressuring the golf club to admit women. His freedom to argue that way was not—is not—in question.
The other spiked column tried to draw a connection between the Augusta issue and the elimination of women’s softball from the Olympics. The logic did not meet our standards: that would have been true regardless of which “side” the writer had taken on Augusta. The writer was invited to try again, but we did not think the logic improved materially.
None of what appears here should be taken as criticism of our columnists, whose work we value tremendously. And we would be happy to discuss our thinking over lunch or in any appropriate setting. Perhaps we need better-understood definitions or a more pronounced sense of column boundaries.
At any rate, we hope no member of our staff really needs this assurance that our news columns enforce no “party line.” But all of you are welcome to come and talk with us whenever you have concerns or want to hear ours.
Media critics were not impressed. “If Boyd’s memo is an example of his idea of ‘logic,’ I really don’t want to read the columns he killed because ‘the logic did not meet our standards,’ ” Mickey Kaus wrote in Kausfiles, his Slate blog, within minutes of the memo’s inevitable leakage.
Reaction in the newsroom was just as severe. “Gerald’s memo was totally disingenuous,” says Clyde Haberman, a Times metro columnist. “And I told Gerald, ‘I don’t understand how this mistake could be made.’ How could they not have foreseen the reaction? How did they not know people would see this as a crusade? It was totally blind of them.”
Raines, meanwhile, had returned from Paris. When he heard that news of the spiked columns had leaked, he wanted to post the columns immediately on the Times’s website. Boyd disagreed. Raines didn’t give any extensive interviews about the flap at the time, but he did speak to Sports Illustrated writer Alan Shipnuck for his 2004 book, The Battle for Augusta National. Raines acknowledged to Shipnuck that it was unusual for the executive and managing editors to become involved in a debate on a column’s tone: “I guess it was because of the whole buzz about the Masters,” Raines said by way of explanation.
In recounting the story to Shipnuck, Raines belittled the very people he had entrusted with the power to lead the paper. “There was a very strong feeling on Gerald’s part, and others’, that [running the spiked columns] was the wrong thing to do on principle, that in both cases we had acted on reasonable journalistic principles,” he told Shipnuck. “And we shouldn’t simply reverse ourselves. At that point, I had to face a decision. Do I overrule my masthead—whose authority and confidence I’m trying to increase—from [Paris] three thousand miles away, or do I wait and get back to meet with them? I chose the latter. I wish I had gone on my initial impulse, but managerially, you can’t overrule your six top executives without them having a chance to meet with you.” He also told Shipnuck that Boyd’s decision to hold Araton’s column hadn’t even been the right one. “I think Gerald made the wrong decision,” he said.
On Saturday, December 7, the Times ran a one-thousand-word story on the debacle. The piece noted that Colford’s Daily News dispatch “prompted critical commentary in the news media and resentment in the Times newsroom.” The next day, both Araton’s and Anderson’s columns finally ran in the paper.
The Augusta chapter was a sorry episode for the Times, a moment in which Raines seemed to have shamelessly co-opted the paper for his own crusades. Slate’s Jack Shafer noted that it was as if the Times had set itself up as a de facto opposition party on any issue that Raines felt wasn’t getting enough attention otherwise. Times staffers looking for a silver lining hoped that Raines’s public dressing-down would serve to temper his activist zeal.
It didn’t. In early 2003, when the Times’s submissions for the Pulitzer Prizes were due, Raines insisted the paper’s Augusta coverage be included as an entry. A longtime veteran of the Times who was for years a close personal friend of Raines’s says, “I was appalled. It was at that moment when I r
ealized the newsroom was out of control. It was anarchy. . . . [Raines’s] arrogance had actually become blinding.”
—————
BY THE BEGINNING OF 2003, as Howell Raines began his second full year as executive editor, it seemed as if the paper, much like the country, were settling into its new normal. Despite frequent frustrations, Raines had made his mark on some of the paper’s key sections. Katy Roberts was no longer the editor of the national section; she had been moved over to the Week in Review and was replaced by Jim Roberts (no relation). Many of the national correspondents had either moved or moved on, and Raines had replaced them with younger staffers. The Sunday Arts & Leisure section, one of the areas of the paper Raines thought had suffered most under Lelyveld, had been shored up under the direction of Jodi Kantor, an energetic young editor Raines had hired from Slate. Visually, the Times looked better than it ever had. Raines even joked about the staff dissension. “If there’s ever a revolt,” he’d crack, “at least photo and graphics will defend me.” After more than a year of chaos, it appeared that Raines was finally getting his chance to put an enduring mark on The New York Times.
It seemed that 2003 was to be a banner year personally as well. On March 8, Raines wed his longtime girlfriend. Raines had met Krystyna Anna Stachowiak, a Polish-born thirty-nine-year-old public relations executive, in 1996 when she brought in a client, Poland’s president Aleksander Kwa´sniewski, to meet with the Times’s editorial board.*28 The day after the wedding, Raines hosted a reception at Ilo, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Bryant Park Hotel. The event had the air of a coronation. New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, was there, as were Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. NBC’s Tom Brokaw, CBS’s Dan Rather, and PBS’s Charlie Rose attended as well, as did a number of Times heavies, including Arthur Sulzberger, Max Frankel, and A. M. Rosenthal. In another effort at détente, Raines had invited Jill Abramson up from Washington. Rick Bragg was in from New Orleans, and Grady Hutchinson, Raines’s former maid and the subject of his Pulitzer Prize–winning magazine article, came in from Alabama. It was one of the most buzzed-about weddings of the year.
The New York Observer described Raines’s new wife as a “blue-eyed brunette” who wore “strappy white sandals and a shiny, backless white silk gown that revealed the small curve of her abdomen and porcelain-perfect shoulder blades.” (Alex Kuczynski, the Times Style-section writer, helpfully told the Observer the dress was designed by Monique Lhuillier.) All of Raines’s best qualities—his forceful charm, his natural sense of authority, his theatrical flair—were on display that night, and for a moment the turmoil of the last year seemed to be forgotten.
Toward the end of the reception, Stachowiak was asked if she thought wedded life would lead to a “kinder, gentler” era at the Times. “I don’t know about a new era,” she said, laughing. “But I know this is going to be a happy marriage.”
Part Two
SPRING 2003
THE FIRST SIGNS OF SCANDAL
On Saturday, April 26, 2003, Robert Rivard, the editor of the San Antonio Express-News, woke up and drove two hours out to his weekend cabin in the Texas hill country along the Llano River. He was planning on spending a weekend off the grid, catching up on his reading and relaxing. Rivard brought a pile of newspapers with him, including Friday’s Wall Street Journal and Saturday’s New York Times. Rivard started with the Times. “I got out there and I put my feet up, and immediately, this front-page story caught my eye,” Rivard says. The story was about Juanita Anguiano, a Texas woman whose enlisted son was the only American soldier still missing in action in Iraq almost a week after retired U.S. general Jay Garner had set up office in Baghdad as the country’s new civil administrator. It was written by a reporter named Jayson Blair, and it got huge play—three columns spread across the most valuable real estate in journalism. The headline read, “Family Waits, Now Alone, for a Missing Soldier.”
Rivard chuckled to himself when he saw the dateline. Los Fresnos is a tiny farming community—it has a population of fewer than five thousand people—nestled in the southernmost tip of Texas along the Mexican border. “I was pretty sure that was the last time I’d see Los Fresnos on the front page of the Times,” Rivard says. The Express-News had recently written a similar story about the Anguianos—the monthlong conflict had officially ended the week before, and newspapers around the country were searching for ways to keep readers interested in the situation in Iraq. Even before he started reading, Rivard assumed the Times had seen his paper’s story and decided to follow up with a dispatch of its own. That kind of regional poaching is a common (and more or less accepted) practice among national correspondents at the country’s largest dailies; indeed, one of the implicit responsibilities of the Times’s regional reporters is to read the local papers and see if any of them had uncovered any good stories that deserved a broader audience.
For the editors of many of the country’s midsize dailies, reaction to this kind of story appropriation ranges from pride to frustration to outright anger. It’s nice to see your work validated in the most powerful paper in the world, but not quite as nice when there’s no attendant acknowledgment. Rivard had worked as a senior editor at Newsweek in the 1980s and understood how New York City journalism worked. What’s more, he was, perhaps, oversensitive to suggestions of pilfering by the Times. Four years earlier, in the spring of 1999, Rivard had accused a Times reporter of lifting material from one of his reporters’ stories about a suspect in the disappearance of atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Rivard had complained to then managing editor Bill Keller, who wrote back a snippy and belittling note. Rivard let the matter drop but never forgot about it.
The Express-News story on the Anguianos, written by a young Express-News reporter—and former New York Times intern—named Macarena Hernandez, had run on April 18, eight days earlier. As Rivard began reading the Blair story, he felt suddenly uncomfortable; it seemed to him there were frequent echoes between the Times piece and the piece his paper had run. Since Rivard’s cabin has no Internet hookup and no phone, he couldn’t look through his paper’s electronic archives online or call an editor at his paper’s offices to compare the two stories. On Monday, he thought, when he was back in the office, he’d check this out.
Back in her office, Macarena Hernandez had also seen Blair’s story and had recognized entire passages of her piece—lifted nearly verbatim—immediately. She was furious. Hernandez knew Blair: The two were part of the same minority internship program at the Times in 1999. “Jayson was always just a big kiss-ass,” Hernandez says. “He wasn’t even very smooth about it. I thought he was always more interested in being at The New York Times than he was in being a journalist. But he seemed harmless. A little misguided and immature, but harmless.”
Both Blair and Hernandez were offered the chance to stay on at the Times after their internships ended, an offer Hernandez said she planned to accept until a few days later, when her father died in a car accident. “Instead of going to the Times, I moved in with my mother, who doesn’t speak English or drive,” she wrote in The Washington Post in June 2003. “I took a job teaching English to high school sophomores and tried not to cry when my students asked me why I had left journalism.” In 2001, she got a job writing for the Express-News.
Now, four years after she had left the Times, it appeared as if Blair had brazenly ripped her off. “It was just completely obvious that he had taken major chunks of [my story],” Hernandez says. The second paragraph of her story read:
So the single mother, a teacher’s aide, points to the ceiling fan [Edward Anguiano] installed in her small living room. She points to the pinstriped couches, the tennis bracelet still in its red velvet case and the Martha Stewart patio furniture, all gifts from her first born and only son.
Blair’s story began:
Juanita Anguiano points proudly to the pinstriped couches, the tennis bracelet in its red case and the Martha Stewart furniture out on the patio. She proudly points up to the ceiling
fan, the lamp for Mother’s Day, the entertainment center that arrived last Christmas and all the other gifts from her only son, Edward, a 24-year-old Army mechanic.
The rest of Blair’s piece was filled with identical quotes and turns of phrase. In both stories, Juanita Anguiano says, “I wish I could talk to a mother who is in the same shoes as I am.” In both stories, the author writes how Anguiano’s sleep comes only with “a pill.” “I was blown away,” Hernandez says flatly. What’s more, the Anguianos’ Martha Stewart patio furniture wasn’t on a patio, as Blair had written—when Hernandez had seen it, it was still in its boxes in the middle of the living room.
First thing Monday morning, Hernandez talked to Rivard and then placed a call to Sheila Rule, the Times recruiter who had hired both Hernandez and Blair, to let her know about the situation. Rivard decided to wait and see what the Times’s reaction to Hernandez’s call would be before doing anything else. “Since someone at the Times already knew about this, I didn’t want for us all to gang up on it. I decided to give them a news cycle to acknowledge and correct this,” Rivard says.
In New York, Sheila Rule told Gerald Boyd about Macarena Hernandez’s complaint. Boyd immediately summoned national editor Jim Roberts. Blair’s Los Fresnos story had run in Roberts’s section, and Blair—a seemingly indefatigable twenty-seven-year-old reporter—had been working for Roberts for the previous six months, ever since he had been drafted as an extra set of legs in the Washington, D.C., sniper story, in October 2002. Boyd, Roberts, Rule, and Bill Schmidt, an associate managing editor in charge of newsroom administration, met in the managing editor’s office. It was a dispiriting meeting. “By the time I got there, they had already concluded this looked really bad,” says Roberts.