Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  *25 Sack lost his post on the campaign trail when Ross Perot dropped out of the race, and Michael Kelly, one of his generation’s best political writers, was assigned to cover Bill Clinton, effectively bumping Sack. Return to text.

  *26 Tyler did not speak with me for this book; however, he did send me several “clarifying comments” after I wrote to him explaining his presence in this book. Return to text.

  *27 Bragg said he would be “unable” to speak with me for this book. Return to text.

  *28 Raines had proposed in Paris the previous December, just as the furor over the spiked Augusta National columns was breaking. Return to text.

  *29 The Diamondback, like some college papers, pays its reporters. Return to text.

  *30 The Times also has an institutional tendency to exile undesirable staffers to unpopular beats or bureaus rather than fire them outright. Return to text.

  *31 During this time, Blair also joked publicly about how Landman and another editor on the metro staff “hijacked a plane and flew it into my career.” Return to text.

  *32 Blair would later disavow these comments and refer to his time with Landman as one that induced something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. Return to text.

  *33 The story had initially been suggested by a Times researcher who had dug up the names of the two soldiers still missing in action. Before Blair began the assignment, one of the soldiers was confirmed as having been killed in action. Return to text.

  *34 The Times’s journalistic integrity statement, issued in 1999, says that falsification of any part of a news report “will result automatically in disciplinary action up to and including termination.” A typical punishment for the first instance of plagiarism—assuming there was not a previous disciplinary record against the employee—would be an unpaid suspension. At this point in his Times career, Blair already had a disciplinary letter in his personnel file that warned him that his continuing problems with accuracy were putting his job in peril. Return to text.

  *35 The fictitious award was the “Brett Award,” given “to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap” and was given to “Jake Barnes.” The reference was to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in which the impotent Jake Barnes falls in love with Lady Brett Ashley. Return to text.

  *36 For about six months in 2001, Manly served as my editor at Inside.com. Return to text.

  *37 On the day the Bowman profile ran, the Times also published an unbylined story explaining that the paper “normally shields the identity of complainants in sex crimes, while awaiting the courts’ judgment about the truth of their accusations” but that the naming of Bowman in other news outlets, including a British tabloid, an American supermarket tabloid, and an NBC News report, “took the matter of her privacy out of [editors’] hands.” Nine days later, the editors’ note read: “An article on April 17 portrayed the life and background of the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith of rape at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 30. The article drew no conclusions about the truth of her complaint to the police. But many readers inferred that its very publication, including her name and detailed biographical material about her and her family, suggested that The Times was challenging her account. No such challenge was intended, and The Times regrets that some parts of the article reinforced such inferences. . . . The Times regrets its failure to include such a clear statement of the article’s limits and intent. It remains The Times’s practice to guard the identities of sex crime complainants so long as that is possible and conforms to fair journalistic standards. In cases of major political or civic interest, that practice needs to be continually reviewed. . . . Whenever possible, The Times intends to continue its longstanding practice of withholding the names of sex crime victims while informing its readers in the fullest and fairest ways about major cases.” Return to text.

  *38 In his May 2004 Atlantic article, Raines would claim that he hadn’t bothered to read the story when it was first available on the Internet on Saturday, nor had he bothered to read it in that evening’s bulldog print edition of the Times. Instead, he wrote, he read the piece on Sunday, “in sections” while on a shad-fishing excursion on the Delaware River. Return to text.

  *39 Raines went on to fault the article’s authors for his likely demise: “The article did not pursue the one area of reporting that might have worked in my favor—how and why critical information about Jayson never reached me,” he wrote, showing once again a total lack of understanding about the depth of anger and frustration in the Times’s newsroom. Return to text.

  *40 Raines, in his Atlantic piece, wrote that the real reason he gave Blair extra chances was his history of drug and alcohol abuse: “Whatever slack I was cutting Jayson had nothing to do with his accuracy problems. I thought I was giving this apparently talented and engaging young man a second chance based on a different problem that had been brought to my attention around the end of 2002. That was when Gerald had informed me that Jayson had told him that he had gone to the Times’s Employee Assistance Program and requested treatment for alcohol and drug abuse.” Not only does that rendering not make sense—why would Boyd have told Raines about Blair’s substance abuse problems but not his performance record?—but it also differs from what Raines told the reporting team when it was preparing its May 11 report, when he said that he had been unaware of Blair’s drug and alcohol abuse before May 2003. Return to text.

  *41 The Blair-authored profile—a simultaneously sycophantic and confusing piece—referred to Boyd as a man “with the well-known ability to shred a man’s ego and tie in the same softly spoken, understated sentence.” It ends on this garbled note: “A few years ago, Gerald attended a program called ‘Leadership at the Peak,’ . . . and there, he says, he learned to redefine success ‘in a collage of ways,’ including work, life, friends and family. And all that unleashed energy. Pretty picture.” Return to text.

  *42 Keating had been dismissed by the Times for allegedly staging a news photograph. Return to text.

  *43 At the time, Bragg was suffering from a medical condition that made it difficult for him to travel. Return to text.

  *44 Raines, it turned out, had actually been aware of Bragg’s unusual working relationship with J. Wes Yoder. In May 2002, Bragg was dispatched to Birmingham, Alabama, to cover the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry, the last defendant in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black teenage girls. Raines had been living in Birmingham at the time of the bombings, but he said he hadn’t been “brave enough” to demonstrate at the time. He took an intense interest in the trial, traveling down to Birmingham and taking notes when Bragg needed to leave the courtroom. While in Birmingham, Raines met Yoder, who also took notes for Bragg when he wasn’t in the courtroom. Yoder wasn’t paid (although Bragg did pay his rent), and he had no official affiliation with the Times. At least once, Raines, Yoder, and Bragg ate dinner together. Return to text.

  *45 A year later, when Kramon was being feted after being named to the paper’s masthead, he publicly thanked Harris for helping to buck up his staff. Return to text.

  *46 That afternoon, after writing about Kramon’s meeting with his staff, I received an e-mail on my Newsweek account from someone with a Yahoo.com address and the handle “nyt nyt.” It read, “When are you going to disclose to your readers (or perhaps your editors) that you begged and pleaded Howell Raines for a job? He didn’t give you one. . . . And you’re a media ‘watchdog’? I don’t think so. Can’t wait to see the editor’s note.” In late 2001, after my employer, Brill’s Content, closed down, I had sent in a cover letter and clips to the Times and more than a dozen other newspapers and magazines. I never had a conversation with Howell Raines. Return to text.

  *47 In July 2004, Laura Chang was named the Times’s permanent science editor. Return to text.

  *48 Miller did not respond to e-mails or phone calls asking for comment for this book. Return to text.

  *49 Privately, some top editors at the Times acknowledged one reason the
y had avoided examining Miller’s work even after realizing it was flawed was a desire to avoid the kind of flagellation that occurred after the paper’s Blair report. Return to text.

  *50 In his 2004 Atlantic piece, Raines compared the relationship between an executive editor and a publisher to a marriage and described how, when making his sales pitch to Sulzberger to run the paper, he sipped white wine while letting Sulzberger drink a martini, waiting for him to “mellow enough to listen to something he might not want to hear.” Return to text.

  *51 There is a long history of Times publishers portraying their administrations as more business minded than those of their predecessors. In 1951, Punch Sulzberger’s father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, described his tenure as a transition from the “paternalistic management” of Adolph Ochs. “It became my task to build a machine, to make an institution,” he said. Return to text.

  *52 In the October 2003 issue of Details, Raines wrote a piece about his son Jeff, a guitarist in the band Galactic. Return to text.

  *53 In May 2004, New Millennium was liquidated and its back catalog was sold at auction. Return to text.

  *54 Boyd is currently writing a memoir for Amistad/HarperCollins, writes a regular column for the United Press Syndicate, and is the director of the case study program at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Return to text.

  *55 In his proposal, Raines continued to make factual errors that elevated his own importance to the Times. The Times, Raines wrote, only won the top Pulitzer—the prize for “public service”—three times in a century. Two of those, he wrote, were for work published “in the 20 [sic] months I served as executive editor.” In fact, the Times has won five public service awards since the award was instituted in 1917—in 1918, 1944, 1972, 2002, and 2004. Return to text.

  A Note on Sources

  This is how Janet Malcolm began her classic book The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness. . . .” It’s a famous line in the industry, and one I’ve always found to ring false; writing about the media—and specifically about The New York Times—crystallized what has always seemed so wrong to me about Malcolm’s formulation. Malcolm’s thesis grew out of her work on a specific case—the author Joe McGinniss’s fawning subject-author relationship with an accused (and later convicted) murderer named Jeffrey MacDonald, a relationship that soured when McGinniss wrote a damning bestseller about MacDonald and his trial. Like most of her writing, Malcolm’s work on MacDonald began as a “one off,” a long-form piece for The New Yorker in which she immersed herself in the life of her subject over a period of several months and then walked away when her piece was finished, “never to see [him] again.”

  The majority of journalists—journalists working beats, journalists who write for daily newspapers, journalists who need to return to the same carefully nurtured sources day after day—don’t have the luxury of working a con. White House reporters who have a mile-long trail of bylines following them to each news conference and interview would be foolish to try to pretend they’re doing anything but angling for a juicy scoop. For a reporter on the media beat, this is doubly true. Other journalists know the tricks of the trade. They also understand that tension and conflict make for compelling stories. In this case, if the subject is convinced that the upcoming profile is going to be wholly flattering, he’s the one who is either stupid or full of himself.

  For this and many other reasons, writing about The New York Times is a unique challenge. The journalists at the paper are naturally wary of being the subjects of another writer’s reportage, a wariness made more acute by the intense scrutiny that has long been focused on the Times. What’s more, writing about people in the industry (as opposed to “civilians,” as journos often refer to that segment of the world that doesn’t make its living humping deadlines and buttonholing interview subjects) means, inevitably, writing about your peers, your once and future colleagues, and sometimes even your friends. It’s a tricky, and often uncomfortable, dance.

  —————

  THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of more than a hundred interviews, many of which were with current or former employees of The New York Times. I’m grateful to them for the candor, time, and trust they extended to me. Virtually the entire current editorial team leading the Times agreed to talk to me despite the fact that they knew the result was likely to be painful for them and for some of their colleagues and friends. This was not, as Malcolm would have it, because these journalists were vain, ignorant, or lonely, but rather because of their belief that an accurately reported story is, in itself, worthwhile. More than one editor at the Times told me to “write a good book,” by which they meant: Write a fair, accurate, and lasting document of a difficult but fascinating time in the paper’s history.

  A couple of style points: A quote that was obtained through an interview conducted exclusively for this book is accompanied by a present-tense verb—“says,” “remarks,” “remembers,” “recalls.” If it’s in the past tense, then the quote is either from my previous reporting—for Newsweek, New York magazine, or Inside.com—or from outside sources. There are a few exceptions, all of which are indicated in the source notes.

  A number of people chose not to speak with me for this project, including Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, Joe Lelyveld, Max Frankel, and A. M. Rosenthal. Anytime I describe a scene or situation involving one of those men, I’m doing so on the basis of reporting from other sources. For the most part, the specifics of this are explained in the source notes as well, although occasionally you’ll find a scene or reminiscence attributed solely to a mysterious “author interview,” which is the book version of an anonymous source. I sought multiple sources of confirmation before describing a scene involving any of these former editors—and especially when I dealt with Raines and Boyd. I sent both Raines and Boyd many letters and e-mails over the course of reporting and writing this book, and I also left them phone messages and relayed messages through friends and colleagues. Neither responded.

  I also want to make clear that while I did interview Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for this project, our conversations were limited to the Times’s business plan and strategies. He did not want to talk about the events of 2003 or his relationship with Howell Raines. As with scenes involving Raines and Boyd, the information used to portray any scene involving Arthur Sulzberger was obtained through other sources.

  Finally, given the dozens of off-the-record and background interviews I conducted for this book, I chose not to include as part of the bibliography a list of people interviewed. In cases where I interviewed people on the record and used their quotes, I have included their names in the source notes.

  Source Notes

  Introduction

  The first newspaper printed in America Frank Luther Mott. American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940. New York: Routledge, 2000. pp. 43–58.

  Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst David Nasaw. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. pp. 104–6.

  Hearst, in his inimitable way Ibid., pp. 125–30.

  in 2004 it thoroughly dominated “The Pulitzer Board Presents the Pulitzer Prize Winners 2004.” Available at www.pulitzer.org/cgi-bin/year.pl?1912,25.

  A 2004 Project for Excellence The Project for Excellence in Journalism. The State of the News Media 2004. Available at www.stateofthemedia.org.

  declined an opportunity to invest Arthur Sulzberger. Speech to the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Harvard University. Cambridge, Mass. November 20, 2000.

  Hearst Corporation, by contrast “Hearst Timeline.” Available at the Hearst Corporation’s website, www.hearstcorp.com/about.

  almost half the paper’s daily circulation Janet Robinson to author.

  “platform a
gnostic” Arthur Sulzberger. Speech to the German Newspaper Publishers Association. Berlin, Germany. September 30, 2003.

  “TV, the Internet, all of that is” Sulzberger to author.

  Some Wall Street analysts Author interviews.

  the Tribune Company, which today owns Available at the Tribune Company corporate website, www.tribune.com.

  Abuzz.com David Simons, “The NY Times Guarantees VC Investment.” Available at www.forbes.com/2000/05/03/mu10.htm. May 3, 2000.

  Discovery Times Channel “The New York Times in Television: About Us.” Available at the New York Times Company corporate website, www.nytco.com/subsites/nyttv/about.htm.

  International Herald Tribune Jack Shafer. “Art Dumps Don: The Times Moves the Post out of Their Paris Flat.” Available at www.slate.com/id/2073060. October 23, 2002.

  What’s more, the Graham family Author interviews.

  He found Howell Raines The New York Times Company corporate website, www.nytco.com/company-executives-hraines.htm?searchpv=nytco.

  approximately one thousand editorial employees Author interviews.

  “Howell seemed to think” Haberman to author.

  According to one recent study The Project for Excellence in Journalism. The State of the News Media 2004.

  Times policy dictated Ken Auletta. “Opening Up The Times.” The New Yorker. June 28, 1993.

  “You know the old slogan” Roy Rivenburg. “All the Jokes Fit to Tell.” Los Angeles Times. May 17, 2003. Section 5, p. 1.

  May 2004 episode of The Simpsons Robert Levine. “The Season Finale That Isn’t a Season Finale.” The New York Times. May 23, 2004. Section 2, p. 17.

  Part One

  BEFORE

  April 8, 2002

  third-floor newsroom Author interviews.

  Max Frankel, the retired executive editor Auletta, “Opening Up The Times.”

  “necessary proof of the world’s existence” Gay Talese. The Kingdom and the Power. New York: World Publishing, 1969. p. 72.