Sign of the Times
An ethics scandal, a management fiasco--and a crisis of confidence in American journalism
The Gray Lady is limping. In the wake of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair's resignation earlier this month under charges of plagiarism and fabrication, problems at the nation's newspaper of record just keep piling higher. An unprecedented front-page, 13,900-word opus in the paper's May 11 Sunday edition excoriated Blair's sustained fraud, calling his plagiarism, faked quotes, and false datelines a "low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper." Then, a full-staff meeting to discuss the debacle--over 500 Times employees squeezed into a midtown Manhattan movie theater last week, while others in bureaus worldwide listened in--blew the lid off many staffers' long-simmering resentment at the regime of executive editor Howell Raines. Finally, the paper admitted that the Blair affair has spurred informal inquiries into other Times reporters' work.
It's the kind of institutional scandal the Times is accustomed to covering, not starring in. And Raines, whose 20-month tenure at the top of the Times has been tumultuous, is in the spotlight. Assuming the paper's senior slot on Sept. 5, 2001, Raines shepherded its critically acclaimed coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, which snared the Times an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes. But staffers and outside critics say his mercurial management--a penchant for playing favorites, a focus on writing style over reporting substance, and a compulsion to steer the paper's coverage toward his own political crusades--not only helped drive away talented staffers but also blinded the 60-year-old news veteran to Blair's faults.
And while it's far from certain that the fallout from the Blair affair will shake Raines from the helm of the nation's most powerful paper, the incident's wider import is undeniable. "The Times is the standard," says media scholar Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "When the New York Times is in trouble, all of American journalism is in trouble."
Indeed, analysts say the Blair brouhaha highlights a general erosion of public trust in the media. One of the incident's most troubling aspects is how few of the people featured in Blair's stories bothered calling the Times to correct details he got wrong, as if fudging facts were par for the journalistic course. Blair's actions, says Kalb, may have damaged the Times's credibility so much that the next time the paper "does a story that's critical of the administration," for instance, "the White House can very well brush it off."
Race matters. This potential credibility gap has Times staffers seething at the knowledge that higher-ups had ample evidence of Blair's incompetence but advanced him up the paper's fiercely competitive ladder regardless. At last week's meeting, Raines conceded that Blair's race--the young man is black and first came to the Times through a minority internship program--affected his judgment. (Through a spokeswoman, Raines declined to be interviewed for this story.)
But many Times staffers say blaming Blair's advancement entirely on race is too simple. "It's a function of the [paper's] view on race," allows one current staffer. "But it's also the fact that this regime has favorites, and they'll be on the front page regardless of what they write." So far, Raines hasn't done a very good job convincing his critics--inside the paper or out--that things will change. "The Times's own story on Blair," points out Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, "left unanswered questions" about the true extent of the management failures and flaws in the paper's culture that permitted the 27-year-old to lie so brazenly for so long.
And while publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. leapt to Raines's defense, saying in last week's meeting that he wouldn't accept the editor's resignation even if tendered, there are rumblings that Blair's fall could precipitate Raines's. Susan Tifft, coauthor of The Trust, a history of the Sulzberger family, says preserving the paper's integrity is "the North Star" for the family behind the Times. For all Raines's talents, she notes, "You can't have a successful newsroom that's in active revolt against the executive editor. That's just not going to work."
This story appears in the May 26, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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