Hard News (15 page)

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 realized the newsroom was out of control. It was anarchy. . . . [Raines’s] arrogance had actually become blinding.”

—————

B
Y 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

T
HE
F
IRST
S
IGNS OF
S
CANDAL

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.

—————

I
N THE SPRING OF
2003, Jim Roberts was perhaps one of the happier desk editors at
The New York Times.
He’d been with the paper since 1987 and had worked his way up the editing ranks, moving from copy editor to deputy national editor to national political editor. While some of the paper’s desk editors disagreed with Howell Raines’s “flood the zone” mentality, Roberts enjoyed—and excelled at—dispatching his correspondents around the country. He agreed with Raines’s philosophy of riding breaking news stories hard. The main source of tension for Roberts at the office was his prickly relationship with metro editor Jon Landman. The two men sat next to each other at every afternoon’s page-one meeting, but they rarely said so much as hello. Blair was one of the reporters they had in common; before joining Roberts’s team on national, Blair had worked under Landman.

That afternoon after the meeting, Roberts called Jayson Blair on his cellphone. Blair answered. He was supposed to be in Washington, covering the trial of the suspects in the previous fall’s sniper shootings. In fact, unbeknownst to Roberts, Blair was in Brooklyn, shuttling between his apartment and a local diner for infusions of caffeine. Roberts explained that questions had been raised about the Anguiano story and asked Blair if he had read Hernandez’s story in the
Express-News.
Blair said he hadn’t, and he mumbled out an explanation. Roberts’s heart sank. “His initial response was fairly implausible,” says Roberts. “What he tried to say was that he had just mixed up his notes. But during that period I wanted things to turn out a lot better than they did. I had a real hope that the implausible was still possible.”

After he hung up with Roberts, Blair called Macarena Hernandez at her desk at the
Express-News.
“He calls, and he says, ‘I just want you to know I didn’t see your story,’ and I was like, ‘Jayson, come on. Of course you did,’ ” Hernandez says. “Then he says that maybe the quotes were so similar because he got the daughter to translate and she probably just said the same thing. At that moment, I knew. Juanita Anguiano speaks English.”

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz,
The Washington Post
’s hard-charging and high-profile media reporter, had received a tip about the possible scandal from a colleague who had been assigned to follow up Blair’s Saturday story in the
Times.
The
Post
’s Manuel Roig-Franzia had been dispatched to Los Fresnos to write about the Anguianos and, while reading the clips, had noticed how similar Blair’s and Hernandez’s stories were. Kurtz, after reading the pieces side by side, agreed. He called Howell Raines’s office and left a message for the editor to call him back. He then called Catherine Mathis, the
Times
’s spokeswoman, who said only that the paper was looking into the issue. Finally, Kurtz called Robert Rivard, who still hadn’t heard back from anyone at the
Times.
“At that time, he hadn’t decided whether he wanted to make an issue of it,” Kurtz says. “I could have jammed the story in, but it was already late in the day, so I decided to follow up the next day.”

A couple of hours later, Jim Roberts called Jayson Blair back. Blair, Roberts told him, was being pulled off the sniper case—he’d need to come back to New York to answer some questions. Adam Liptak, the paper’s national legal correspondent, was already on his way down to Washington to cover Tuesday’s sniper hearing. “Even then, I had no idea what we were getting into,” says Roberts.

J
AYSON
B
LAIR