Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  The three reports, totaling almost one hundred pages, were released to the public in July 2003. They received only a sliver of the attention the Times’s May 11 Blair report had, but together these three documents may do more to permanently alter the newsroom culture of The New York Times—and in time will likely have a similar effect on the journalistic world at large—than anything else that had happened in the previous two years.

  One of the main goals of the committee reports was, not surprisingly, to codify the manner in which newsroom leaders were trained. Journalism tends to reward people who do well while operating as lone wolves. Historically, the farther afield the assignment, the more prestigious it is considered: Working out of far-flung domestic bureaus is a step up from toiling for the metro desk, and landing a foreign posting is more glamorous than writing for the national desk. Finally, when another foreign posting seems redundant, the best correspondents are asked to come back to the home office and serve as editors. The skills that make someone a valuable foreign correspondent include being self-motivated and possessing a healthy ego. A good editor, on the other hand, is someone who gets pleasure out of helping other people do well.

  “The most important character quality [to be a good editor] is you have to have reached the point in your life where you are willing to realize yourself through the work of others,” Max Frankel said soon after retiring. “If you’re still a star, if you still need to be center stage, if you’re still a performer, God bless you, go perform. If you want to be an editor, you’ve got to get your kicks the way a parent does out of children . . . and you’ve got to nourish them and support them in that task.”

  Before 2003, remarkably, there was no training program in place at the Times to teach enormously successful solo stars how to make the transition to being editors. “When I became foreign editor,” says Bill Keller, “nobody ever taught me how to evaluate a writer, how to deal with a budget. When we become foreign correspondents, at least we get basic instructions on benefits and how to rent a car and how to get money wired and all that.” In promoting editors from the ranks of foreign bureaus, Keller says, “we were taking people whose job it is one day to go out to a barricade and the next day they’re managing people.”

  While the recommendations that emerged from the committee reports were in many cases vague—one of the stated goals of improved management training was to “create a newsroom culture that values civility, diversity, openness, teamwork, trust and career development”—Arthur Sulzberger agreed to fund several new senior-level positions that were designed to shore up the Times’s standards and improve its training. They included an ombudsman—which the Times termed a “public editor”—whose full-time job would be to investigate and answer outsiders’ concerns about the Times’s coverage; a standards editor, to codify the Times’s practices on everything from the crediting of stringers to the use of anonymous sources; and a career-development editor. Both the standards editor and the career-development editor would be masthead-level positions.

  All three positions had been filled by the end of 2003. Daniel Okrent, a former top editor at Time Inc. (and the inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball), was named the paper’s public editor; he signed a nonrenewable, eighteen-month contract. Al Siegal was officially named standards editor, the post he had essentially been filling for years. And Glenn Kramon became the paper’s career-development editor.

  By March 2004, Kramon had helped oversee a major overhaul of the way the paper trained and evaluated employees and managers alike. Newsroom leaders would be required to take two-day management training programs, which, according to a memo Kramon sent to the newsroom, covered “communicating; writing and delivering annual reviews; ethics, standards and accuracy; recruiting and vetting job candidates; our employee assistance program; managing a budget and more.” Annual reviews were made mandatory for everyone in the newsroom. The Times’s database editor began working on creating a list of every job at the paper, so staffers could ask to be considered for future openings anywhere from Hong Kong to Broadway.

  “This can be a big, scary place,” says Kramon. “And there was an attitude that once you were here, you just had to survive.” Now, he says, that’s changed, hopefully permanently, although he knows it’s an uphill struggle to make any reform stick in an environment in which time is always in short supply and it’s often easier to fix problems instead of teaching people how to avoid them. For now, at least, new hires at the Times get something akin to freshman orientation: There are mandatory sessions to teach new employees about the Times’s standards and practices, cocktail parties (including ones at Jill Abramson’s and John Geddes’s New York apartments), and a prescribed mentoring system. “It used to be, you could be here for years and never get formally introduced [around the newsroom],” Kramon says. No longer.

  These changes are being watched carefully and in some cases emulated by the journalism profession. In the spring of 2004, The Washington Post appointed longtime reporter and editor Peter Perl to be the paper’s director of training and professional management, a newly created post. “This was another of our periodic realizations that we can do a better job in managing people,” says Perl. “My whole mission here is to try to improve communication that too often is top-down without there being enough bottom-up.”

  Another likely long-term result from the turmoil at the Times is a new standard of openness by which news organizations will be expected to systematically address their employees’ obvious ethical transgressions. Before the Times’s Blair report, to be sure, there were examples of news outlets conducting probing investigations of their own workers (The Washington Post’s 1981 internal investigation of Janet Cooke, for instance). But there was no generally accepted protocol for how news organizations should address their own journalistic scandals. Sometimes, as was the case with The New Republic’s Stephen Glass, the dissection was left mainly to other news organizations. Sometimes, as was the case with the Times’s own Blood Brothers dispatch, the scandal was essentially ignored. The Times’s response to Jayson Blair likely changed the ground rules forever. From now on, there will be an expectation that when it comes to egregious and self-evident rule breaking, news organizations will investigate themselves with the same prosecutorial zeal they bring to outside institutions.

  Consider the case of former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, a Pulitzer finalist in 2002. In late May 2003, in the wake of Blair’s resignation from the Times, USA Today began investigating four stories by Kelley after the paper received an anonymous note from a staffer that questioned whether some of Kelley’s work had been embellished. It wasn’t until seven months later, on January 13, 2004, that USA Today published its first story on the investigation, an 1,800-word piece that ran on page 5A. The piece revealed that Kelley had resigned. It also said the internal investigation was over, without there being any conclusions about what had actually happened: “Left unresolved is the question at the foundation of the inquiry: whether Kelley might have embellished or fabricated stories.”

  That response didn’t satisfy anyone. Media watchdogs cried foul, and USA Today’s own staffers felt betrayed. Three days later, on January 16, USA Today announced it would appoint a panel to launch “an independent review” of all of Kelley’s work at the paper, which dated to 1982. An apologetic editors’ note on page 3A explained: “In the days since Kelley’s termination, new questions have arisen. They raise enough concerns that we feel we need to vet Kelley’s record completely and report the results publicly.”

  In March, the paper published an interim report on the panel’s findings in its pages, saying that “the team of journalists has found strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.” Within weeks, three of the paper’s top editors had resigned, including editor Karen Jurgensen and executive editor
Brian Gallagher.

  USA Today’s eventual reckoning was admirable, as was the Times’s account of the Blair fiasco. Surprisingly, however, neither these embarrassing episodes nor the enormous amount of attention paid to media fallibility during the last several years has sparked any kind of serious effort toward establishing safeguards designed to catch faulty information before it gets into print. In the last decade, both of the country’s leading newsweeklies—Time and Newsweek—eliminated their fact-checking departments owing to budget constraints; the recent journalistic scandals have not rectified that. And while a traditional fact-checking process would obviously be impossible at a daily newspaper—constraints on time preclude having a team of editorial employees on hand to essentially rereport stories before they run—there are several possible safeguards, all of which have been met with almost complete indifference in the industry.

  The first measure would be spot checks on randomly selected stories. These checks would be done either after the story has run or, if time allowed, before publication. These options have been discussed in the industry for years but have never gained traction. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, proposed a system similar to this in his New Yorker review of Jayson Blair’s 2004 memoir. “God is not going to stop making charismatic maniacs,” Lemann wrote, “so it falls to newspapers to figure out how to do a better job of apprehending them.” In March 2004, a single paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, decided to perform prepublication checks on several local stories each month. So far, it is the only major daily newspaper in the country to do so.

  Another option is random postpublication surveys sent to sources quoted in stories. Media watchdog Steve Brill (for whom I used to work) has long employed such a policy at his magazines, including the now-defunct media publication Brill’s Content. Brill’s surveys were helpful, and not only because they caught reporters intent on fabrication—they also let reporters know what the subjects thought of the work. “The whole notion that you can’t protect against a reporter who’s determined to lie to you is ridiculous,” says Brill, whose surveys helped nab a reporter at one of his legal publications who had been faking interviews. “If you have random checks, you can protect yourself.”

  Speaking of the fabricated story Jayson Blair wrote about the family of Jessica Lynch, Brill says, “The only way you’d find out if he made up what her house looked like was if [her family] got a self-addressed, stamped envelope with a survey. Maybe then they would have filled it out and sent it back. They certainly weren’t going to call up Howell Raines and complain.”

  Brill told Arthur Sulzberger about his postpublication surveys, but to no avail. “The consensus here, post Blair, was that [fact-checking] is unlikely to be effective,” Sulzberger wrote me in an e-mail. “The most plausible argument FOR spot checking is that if reporters know they might be fact-checked, they’ll be more careful. But here, they’d know that the odds are slim of getting fact-checked, and some whole categories (foreign news, intelligence coverage, much diplomatic coverage) would be hard to reliably fact-check. What we have done instead is to try to be much more aggressive about responding to signs of suspicion, areas where questions are raised within the paper, from outside, or through the public editor.”

  Another standard explanation for the industry’s tepid response to such safeguards is that journalism is a field that’s built on trust—the trust between a reporter and his source, the trust between a writer and his editor, the trust between a publication and its readers. This is true, just as it’s true that there’s an obvious code of honor among the overwhelming majority of working journalists: Make your work your own; stick to the facts; don’t take people’s quotes out of context. But this hardly seems satisfying or reassuring. After all, virtually all of civil society is built on unspoken bonds of trust yet we still have police forces and judicial systems. It’s a given that a free and vigorous press is one of the most important hallmarks of a healthy democracy, but with that freedom comes a responsibility to ensure a certain level of quality control. It’s up to the journalistic community to begin better policing itself. So why isn’t this happening?

  “The answer is very simple,” says Lemann. “I don’t know.” Brill is equally confused: “It’s mystifying.”

  COURSE CORRECTIONS

  If Jack Kelley’s downfall at USA Today illustrated one of the ways that the fallout from the Times’s Blair report will affect the rest of the industry, what is still less obvious—and what the Times itself is struggling with—is how news organizations will address stories that are flawed because of something less nefarious than wholesale fraud. The best example of this type of quandary is the Times’s own faulty coverage of both the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and the supposed ties between Iraq’s former leaders and al-Qaeda terrorists. During the last nine months of Howell Raines’s tenure, the Times seemed to break stories on these subjects both before and during the war in Iraq. On February 6, 2003, before the war began, Patrick Tyler wrote a piece headlined “Intelligence Break Led U.S. to Tie Envoy Killing to Iraq Qaeda Cell,” which appeared to outline the connections between Saddam Hussein and the terror network financed by Osama bin Laden. Several months later, Judith Miller began a run of stories that repeatedly took Bush administration and Iraqi exile claims about Hussein’s WMD capabilities at face value.

  The problem was, those stories and others like them weren’t breaking news, they were just plain broken. And they were, of course, pieces that had a tremendous real-world impact, both in guiding the debate as the nation attempted to decide whether or not to send troops into Iraq and in shaping the public’s understanding of the Bush administration’s rationale for heading to war. This time, there could be no simple explanation for what had happened, no easy narrative encompassing one reporter’s psychological meltdown. Throughout 2003 and into the first months of 2004, media critics became more vocal and insistent, picking out Miller’s reporting in particular as being dangerously flawed.*48

  It wasn’t until the last week of May 2004, as the anniversary of Raines’s departure from the Times was approaching, that the paper addressed the subject of its coverage, in an unusual editors’ note and a column by the public editor, Okrent. “Over the past year,” the May 26 editors’ note read, “this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. . . . It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.”*49 The 1,144-word note (which, notably, did not run on the front page but was instead printed on page A10) went on to cite “a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” as well as pick out “problematic articles” that “depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq.” Though the editors’ note alluded to a year’s worth of increasingly insistent criticism that had come to focus on the reporting of Judith Miller, it pointedly refrained from singling out “individual reporters.”

  “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism,” the note read, “were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

  In his column, Okrent was even more forceful, calling the coverage “credulous” and specifically faulting the “heavy breathing headlines.” Okrent did single out both Miller and Tyler by name, but he wrote, “The failure was not individual, but institutional.” He went on to write that he thought the editors’ note—which had been drafted personally by Bill Keller—got it “mostly” right: “The qualifier arises from [the] inadequate explanation of the journalistic imperatives and practices that led The Times down this unfortunate path.”

  There was good reason for leaving out these explanations. The Times’s flawed Iraq reporting was often directly the result of the manner in which Howell Raines ran The New York Times, and Bill Keller took over the paper determined to spend his first year healing the newsroom instead of reminding it of its r
ecent trauma. But the insistent chorus of internal and external criticism—most persistently and eloquently from Slate’s Jack Shafer and Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books—made ignoring the past impossible. In his column, Okrent cataloged those aspects of the Times’s culture that contributed to the paper’s failure, listing a “hunger for scoops”; a culture in which flashy, front-page stories were prized; a tendency for “hit and run” journalism whereby skeptical follow-ups were rarely assigned; and an ethos in which prized sources were coddled.

  After each clause, Okrent could have added “by Howell Raines.” Notably, Raines had treated Miller—like Patrick Tyler and Rick Bragg—like a star. At one point soon after September 11, he personally instructed her to go out and “win a Pulitzer.” What’s more, Raines had effectively chased investigative editor Stephen Engelberg out of the paper; Engelberg, who had co-authored a book on biological warfare with Miller, was known as the one editor who had the knowledge and background to rein Miller in when she became excitedly insistent about whatever latest supposed scoop had been leaked to her. With Engelberg gone, Raines implicitly and explicitly instructed his staff to get her stories prominently into the paper. In addition, according to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn’t editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs, something he was especially intent on conveying after the beating the paper took for both its Augusta reporting and its flawed coverage of Kissinger’s position on an invasion of Iraq. “My sense was that Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the warmongering out of Washington,” former investigative editor Doug Frantz wrote in an e-mail to me. Frantz, who personally edited some of Miller’s stories, went on to write, “He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration’s position on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of Al Qaeda. Because of that, Judy Miller’s reporting was encouraged by other senior editors at the newspaper, sometimes over the objections of other editors.”