by Seth Mnookin
Once again, the reporters struggled to find a way to describe the situation. Again, the only word they could think of was “surreal.” “It was an amazing story,” says Barstow. Blair’s use of technology was also startling. “As we went on, we realized the level of journalistic crime here is much worse than some cribbed notes,” Barry says. “He was literally not showing up. It was dawning on us that with cellphones and laptops, this was a whole new age in terms of journalism and integrity. [Blair] showed how someone could get away with this. And to explain this, we wanted to do a classic New York Times takeout.”
At the start of Monday night, the five reporters had identified half a dozen stories they had questions about. After an all-night session, Steinberg and Barstow had identified thirty more stories that seemed to be problematic. On Tuesday, Manly reported to Al Siegal that the number of suspect stories was now up to thirty-six—almost exactly half of the seventy-three stories Blair had written since he had been temporarily reassigned to the national desk in October. “Siegal just said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s more than a half-page story, now, doesn’t it?’ ” Manly says.
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THE REST OF THE WEEK was marked by the growing tension between the reporting team and the paper’s two top editors, as both sides realized the extent to which Raines and Boyd would necessarily figure in any accurate explanation of the Jayson Blair saga. “[Monday, May 5] was the one time Howell got really mad at me,” says Kramon. In a meeting with Kramon and Manly, Raines barked out that he wanted to know why none of the reporters had asked to speak with him yet—if he was running the show, Raines said, he’d damn well have talked to the people in charge. “He was saying that I didn’t know how to do an investigation, that I was doing it all wrong,” Kramon recalls. “He was as angry as I’ve ever seen him.
“He was realizing it was getting out of control. This was a far worse problem than anyone had realized. But I just said, ‘I’ve been through enough of these, and I’m gonna do it the way I always do it,’ ” Kramon says. “I knew the guys were already working eighteen-hour days. There was no way I was going back in that room and telling them I caved, because they just would have killed me.” Unbeknownst to him, Raines’s intractability was helping to strengthen the bond between the reporters and their editors. He was also painting his own portrait as the classically combative, defensive subject of an investigative report. Kramon stood firm. “I was used to having chief executives in my face [because of reporters’ articles],” he says. “You have to ask yourself, Do you think you have a case? And if you do, you stick with it. And in this case it was pretty clear we had a case, so I just said to Howell, ‘I’m working with a bunch of professionals. You’ve got to let us do our job.’ ”
Gerald Boyd, meanwhile, took the opposite tack and went out of his way to appear congenial. On Monday afternoon, he walked up the staircase to the fourth floor and walked into the room where the team was working. Everyone froze, and several of the reporters moved to cover their screens. Lorne Manly stood up and walked over to the door. “I just wanted to see if anyone needed anything,” Boyd said. Manly walked him outside. Boyd later complained about what he interpreted as “adversarial body language.” Manly explained to him that the reporters were just trying to do their job and were taken by surprise when he charged into the room.
“We knew they wanted us to talk to them,” says Liptak. “In the ordinary course of things, you’d jump. But we wanted to move as methodically as we could from start to finish.” Liptak agreed he would talk to Boyd. Jacques Steinberg, who’d already dealt with Arthur Sulzberger as part of his beat, would talk to the publisher. And Barry and Barstow would interview Raines.
Liptak met with Boyd, more to appease the managing editor than to ask specific questions. “I found him to be very defensive, in a very unseemly way,” Liptak says. “It made me think that he viewed Jayson’s story and his own as quite intertwined. He seemed to feel there was a whole lot riding on this. He kept ticking off all the things he and Jayson didn’t do together. ‘We didn’t have lunch, he never came to see me in my office, we never talked about his career.’ For him to be running for cover like that struck me as very unbecoming. The reality is, he did play a very significant role in Jayson’s advancement.”
Dan Barry scheduled an appointment with Raines. “I just went and said, ‘I hear you have something you wanted to say,’ ” Barry says. Raines was welcoming and friendly. He focused on Blair’s record of corrections—how corrections weren’t necessarily a good indication of a reporter’s progress, how some of the corrections were due to caption errors or simple misspellings. “We had already gone so far beyond that,” says Barry. “But I just heard him out.”
As the week went on, the reporters continued interviewing their bosses. Jonathan Glater had now teamed up with Adam Liptak to talk to Boyd. It wasn’t a job he was eager to do. “When we were talking about who was going to talk to whom in the newspaper, I was not particularly eager to interview either Howell or Gerald,” he says. “As a young reporter who had not been at the Times that long, I would be interviewing them, and at the same time they would be evaluating me.” But Glater agreed it made more sense for both reporters to be present. They interviewed Boyd on Wednesday and again on Friday.
By this point, the reporters had zeroed in on the decision to send Blair to help cover the sniper shootings around Washington, D.C., as a crucial moment in their story. Liptak and Glater pressed Boyd repeatedly: Had he been the one to recommend Blair to Jim Roberts? “Several times, in a very bureaucratic and disingenuous way, he said something along the lines of how this had been a consensus decision and he had been the most senior person in the room,” Liptak says. Blair’s name had first come up during a meeting that included Boyd, associate managing editor Andrew Rosenthal, and Roberts. “Everyone seems to remember it being Gerald’s call,” Liptak says. “I don’t think even Gerald disputes that. But he’s holding on to this notion that there’s a consensus. The Times is not a consensus-decision type of place. Certainly not at that juncture in its history.” Boyd seemed to be formulating a defense that would enable him to hold on to his job rather than helping the reporters come up with the most accurate picture possible.
Steinberg, meanwhile, began talking to Arthur Sulzberger on Thursday. That day, Steinberg told the paper’s publisher that there were at least three dozen stories by Jayson Blair that contained plagiarized or fabricated material. “I was calling him as a source, and I asked him to keep this to himself. I felt strongly and the team felt strongly that we as a newspaper needed to be the first to report this number,” Steinberg says. Sulzberger, Steinberg says, was unequivocally accepting of that arrangement.
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ON MARCH 1, 2003, C. J. Chivers, a reporter and former marine, sent metro editor Jon Landman an e-mail from Iraq, where he was stationed. Chivers had spent weeks at ground zero after September 11 and had distinguished himself as one of the paper’s shining talents. “I have a story,” Chivers wrote to Landman. He continued:
[Photographer] Ruth Fremson and [reporter] David Rohde showed up here a few days ago . . . and, no shit, David had two partial copies of the paper. It was quite a smuggle, because the papers provided a chance to show our translators and drivers the thing we make very [sic] day. I handed the larger edition to my translator, who is a young MD, and after a minute or two of deliberate study he snatched the Metro section and started to flip through it at this quick speed, amazed. “All this news is from New York” he said. “Just from New York?”
Then he used a Kurdish word, twice: “Zora! Zora!”
Roughly translated, it means “So much! So much!”
He’s been with us for a while, and he more or less knew that The Times was special, but the page-by-page, tactile experience of reading the broadsheet rounded him out, and for a while after his face was really full of something that looked like pride. It was a good moment for me, because I’ve been a bit lost in my notes and isolation here, and i
t brought me back, throughout the day, to remembering what a whole bunch of our readers think. . . .
Jon, I haven’t seen the English language paper in months, and suddenly I was reading this one. It was a jolt. I know that people who put this thing out everyday [sic] probably take it for granted, but it was a moment of discovery for my translator and rediscovery for me, and it’s incredible how just this one day of production made a lot of us over here feel pretty fucking good.
Chivers sent the e-mail during a particularly bleak period for Times staffers. Landman forwarded the e-mail to Howell Raines, and the two men decided to print up T-shirts for the metro staff, with ZORA! ZORA! on the front and SO MUCH! SO MUCH! on the back.
By Thursday, May 8, the Blair team had been working around the clock for four days. The fourth-floor room they were working in was unventilated. “My shirt was getting rancid. My teammates were complaining,” says Barstow. After printing up the ZORA! ZORA! shirts, Landman had given one to Barstow, which he stowed away in his desk. On Thursday, desperate for some clean clothes, Barstow walked down to his regular desk, got the shirt out of his drawer, and put it on. But the newsroom had by that time become so divided and suspicious that even Barstow’s change of clothes was seen as a significant, cloaked message. “I’m walking through the newsroom, and I’m starting to get this weird vibe,” Barstow says. “At that point so much of the staff was convinced of this Landman-versus-Howell thing that some people interpreted my wearing the shirt as my giving a shout-out to the Landman faction.” That day, he and Dan Barry went to a Gap store in Times Square to buy fresh clothes for their Friday interview with Raines.
The reporting team wasn’t getting much sleep, and the pressure to produce a story was mounting. On Thursday night, May 8, the reporters met in the page-one conference room to map out their assignment. It was still somehow supposed to come in somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 words. Instead of quibbling over word counts, Glenn Kramon told the reporters to just write as much as they felt was needed. If the story deserved the space, Kramon said, it would get it. Time, too, was becoming an issue. The reporters knew that Raines was hoping to get the story into Sunday’s paper, which meant they’d need to produce a draft by Friday night. Because the Times produces a bulldog edition of its Sunday edition that’s available on New York City newsstands on Saturday evening, they’d lose almost a full day of reporting time.
Dan Barry and David Barstow both live in suburban New Jersey, but for most of that week they remained in Times Square. One night, they caught a catnap for a couple of hours in a small windowless reception area to one side of the elevator bank on the third floor. Even when they tried to grab some sleep in a hotel, they were stymied. On Friday morning, Dan Barry wrote until almost 4:00 a.m. and then was going to trudge over to a recently opened Westin hotel on Forty-third Street. When he got to the Times’s lobby, he couldn’t leave because the floor was being waxed. Finally, he was allowed to tiptoe out and walked the half block west to the hotel. “I get to the front desk, and the guy says he can’t check me in right away because the computers were down. So I just sat there, just so tired, until after five in the morning. And then finally they let me in, and I slept for an hour and a half and came back to the office.” The Westin had recently introduced a new feature, the Heavenly Bed. It included a custom-designed pillow-top mattress, three sheets, and a down blanket. Even though—or maybe because—Barry slept in his for only ninety minutes, he said it more than lived up to its billing.
Dan Barry and David Barstow delivered a preliminary draft of the story on Friday morning, May 9. At 9:00 a.m., they were due for their final interview with Howell Raines. It would be the last time they would talk to him before they filed their story the next day. “We did not look like two professionals in the mother ship,” says Barry. “I’m completely unshaven,” says Barstow. “We looked like two hungover, mangy dogs.”
By then, Raines’s demeanor had changed. Earlier in the week, he had been comfortable with the explanation that Jayson Blair was a sociopathic reporter who would have been impossible to catch under any circumstances. By Friday, as the team’s understanding of the situation grew, Raines’s own self-confidence had waned. Yes, Blair was a sociopath. But there had been ample warnings, and at times Raines and Boyd seemed pointedly to ignore those warnings because of their disdain for the editors who were doing the warning. Raines was taking dozens of media calls a day, and on some level he must have realized that he was fighting for his job. At 9:00 a.m., when Barry and Barstow showed up at his door, he had still not said whether or not he’d edit the final piece.
“At that point in time, given how tired we were, I felt like I just found my foundation in the core principles of journalism,” Barstow says. “We were blocking and tackling, reverting to the basic essence of who you are when you go in to talk to a powerful person.” Barry agrees. “There was little sense of us talking to our superior,” he says. “All three of us had our game faces on.”
The two reporters each had his own legal pad on which he’d listed topics to address. How well did Raines know Jayson Blair? What was Raines’s connection to Blair’s girlfriend, Zuza Glowacka? How had Raines responded to complaints from the federal prosecutor about Blair’s sniper coverage? Had Raines ever seen Blair’s personnel files? Had he been aware of his problems on the metro staff? Had he seen the infamous Landman e-mail? Had he signed off on Blair’s promotion to the national staff?
“He did all the things you typically see in those kinds of interviews,” says Barstow. “Sometimes he used Rumsfeldian intimidation. Sometimes it was Clintonian hairsplitting.” Raines had his own written notes, and he referred to them frequently. “This,” Barry says, “could not have been fun for him.”
The interview lasted nearly three hours. At the end, Barry and Barstow told the executive editor of The New York Times the extent of Blair’s deception—that of the seventy-three stories Blair had written between October 2002 and May 2003, at least thirty-six had substantial problems. “He was floored,” Barry says. “He didn’t know that.”
As dismaying as the investigation was for the team, they appreciated a good story and were proud of their work. “In the piece, we were already heading in the direction of this being a low point in the 152-year history of the paper, and this was our scoop,” Barry says. “We didn’t want [Raines] to deliver it to our competitors.” The reporters knew when the news broke that Blair had falsified dozens of stories, it would become one of the biggest journalistic scandals ever. They also felt sure that the fiercely competitive Raines would protect the scoop for the paper he ran, even if it was a personally painful exclusive. “We’re walking out the door,” Barry says, “and we tell him we’d hope he’d keep it to himself. He assured us that he would keep this as a Times exclusive. Then we shook hands and walked back up to the fourth floor.”
Raines had also finally agreed not to read the report unless there was a last-minute need. Sulzberger, too, had called Siegal to ask if there was any reason he needed to see the piece before publication.
“Clearly, if you’re putting a story in the paper that bears upon the organization being dysfunctional and is going to reflect badly on its top leadership, a case can be made that the publisher should see it ahead of time, or the executive editor, or both,” Siegal says. “But given the climate of opinion and morale in this newsroom, I think they saw value in being able to say, ‘Let the chips fall where they may.’ At that time, I was conscious of the nervousness of the reporting team, which had asked me several times and at many stages, ‘Are you sure that what we write is going to go in the paper?’ And I told them, ‘What you write is going to go into the paper if I think it is accurate, responsible, and proportional.’ ”
Siegal asked Craig Whitney and John Geddes, two other assistant managing editors, to read the finished piece with him. They decided that if all three men did not agree unanimously that the report was responsible and complete, they would either get it fixed or go to Raines with their concerns. O
n Friday night, the three assistant managing editors read a draft of the piece. There were several small holes that needed filling, a handful of explanations still needed. But these were minor issues. “The team immediately agreed [to the fixes],” Siegal says. “There weren’t many problems with the piece.” There was no need, the men decided, for Howell Raines to see it before publication.
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THAT FRIDAY, MAY 9, at 6:00 p.m., Raines appeared on PBS’s NewsHour, where he spoke with former Times correspondent Terence Smith. Raines wore glasses and a striped tie, and he looked puffy and exhausted. He described the formation of the reporting team:
We also told this team that we wanted them to have full access to all executives of the Times, including me, and to the information that we possessed. And we also assured them that their findings would go in the paper in an independent way. My plan is to read this story for the first time on Sunday—if they’re able to get it ready in time for Sunday—along with the rest of our readers.
Smith then asked Raines to explain how Blair’s deceptions had been discovered and what else was being done to examine his work. Raines answered:
One of the things that we have asked this reporting group to do is to work through the record. They tell me, in the course of interviewing me today, two of our reporters told me that they had already found 36 instances of fabrication. As I say, we’re committed to fully disclosing every circumstance of this.