Hard News (2 page)

“Howell seemed to think that if the September 11 attacks had occurred one week earlier, we’d all have been sitting at our desks with our thumbs up our asses,” veteran
Times
foreign correspondent and columnist Clyde Haberman told me in 2004. In the months following September 11, Raines received so much affirmation that many of his underlings feared he had begun to see anyone who questioned him as an impediment to his vision. He embraced his authoritative nature and began editing the paper according to his whims and predilections, in the process embarrassing and marginalizing people who disagreed with him. Although departing members of the staff voiced their complaints, Sulzberger continued to pledge his unequivocal support.

Over the next year,
The New York Times
became an increasingly unhappy place to work, and that unhappiness began to be reflected in the pages of the newspaper. Key editors stopped talking to one another and, worse, stopped expressing their concerns about the paper’s missteps and problems. In late 2002, Raines was ridiculed for launching a relentless crusade against Augusta National, a Georgia golf course that hosts the Masters Tournament and doesn’t admit women as members, and was publicly embarrassed when two sports columns that disagreed with the
Times
’s stance were killed by editors fearful of Raines’s anger. That summer, the paper’s coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq alternated between flat-out wrong and woefully disorganized. The paper’s reporting on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq proved to be an embarrassment, as
Times
reporter Judith Miller, with Raines’s active encouragement, bullied her way onto the paper’s front page with a series of “exclusives,” many of which were later revealed to be either incomplete or incorrect. In its own sorry way, the
Times
came to reinforce the public’s perceptions of the media as another special-interest group, one more concerned with profits and its own agendas than the truth. According to one recent study, Americans today think journalists are “sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes, and generally more harmful to democracy” than they did just twenty years ago. Even the paper’s own employees took offense: More and more staffers who had clawed their way into a job at the
Times
—long the serious print journalist’s brass ring—began defecting to other papers, including more than half a dozen of the paper’s highly regarded national correspondents in 2002 alone. Raines, for his part, seemed not to care about reporters’ bruised egos, the petty concerns of weak-willed editors, or a public that wanted desperately to be shown why it should have faith in its institutions. He was focused instead on his legacy, and he wanted to put his distinctive stamp on the most revered newspaper in the world.
Times
policy dictated that he would have to retire before February 5, 2009, his sixty-sixth birthday, and he surely heard the clock ticking every day.

All this turmoil might have been of little interest to anyone but journalism junkies and ivory tower academics. Howell Raines might have ridden out the storms of his first years. He might have realized the damage he was inflicting on the paper and recalibrated his leadership style accordingly. Arthur Sulzberger might have finally understood the extent of the mess in the newsroom and moved to fix it. But before any of this could happen, a journalistic suicide bomb detonated in
The New York Times
with the May 1, 2003, resignation of Jayson Blair, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter. An internal investigation turned up three dozen stories that Blair had fabricated or plagiarized in one six-month period. Following the investigation, the
Times
devoted four full pages of its Sunday paper—more space than it gave to coverage and analysis of President Bush’s State of the Union address—to an astonishing report about the incident that was part mea culpa, part journalistic tour de force, and wholly unprecedented. In true form, the rest of the media world fell into line, dedicating endless pages of newsprint and hundreds of hours of airtime to the paper’s dysfunction. Jayson Blair’s story became an indictment of Howell Raines’s leadership, and Raines’s leadership became emblematic of every poor decision Arthur Sulzberger had ever made. The
Times
’s policy and track record on affirmative action came under scrutiny (Blair is African American), and minority staffers felt the unwelcome glare of suspicion as white staffers muttered privately that they always suspected black reporters were given more slack.
The New York Times,
the reserved newspaper where reporters and editors traditionally toiled in relative obscurity, became the subject of open ridicule, of demeaning and humiliating news reports by lesser competitors around the country, even of late-night talk-show quips. (“You know the old slogan of
The New York Times,
‘All the news that’s fit to print’?” David Letterman deadpanned one night in his opening monologue. “They’ve changed it. The new slogan is, ‘We make it up.’ “)
^*4
Eventually, the clamor became an open staff rebellion, and Sulzberger was forced to fire Howell Raines, less than a month after announcing he wouldn’t accept Raines’s resignation even if it was offered and less than two years after he had appointed Raines to lead the
Times
into its bright future.

—————

I
N HINDSIGHT
, every august institution can point to the years in which it was forced to change in fundamental ways. For the
Times,
the twenty-one months of Howell Raines’s tenure as executive editor will surely be those years. Raines wanted to go down in history as a revolutionary editor. The changes his tenure resulted in will indeed be revolutionary, but history will not look kindly on his leadership. Arthur Sulzberger, meanwhile, has been trying his entire life to prove he deserves the post he received by an accident of birth. The verdict is still out on whether he will be seen as the publisher who led the
Times
into a new era or the publisher who, by tinkering with what the
Times
does best, permanently damaged the company he’s in charge of.

The New York Times
’s struggles—with the electronic age, with race, with the increasingly porous wall between editorial and business operations—have come to illustrate the challenges facing all news organizations, and they’ve affected the way we conceive of information itself. The story of the
Times
is also the story of how media institutions have had to adapt to the public’s tastes as they also shape them. It is no longer enough to serve as “the paper of record”; today, consumers want “value added,” just as with any other product. They want analysis and attitude and star power. Media companies need to maximize profits, and the
Times
may be one of the few institutions that believes that high-quality journalism and the impressive margins that come with more popular fare can be had simultaneously.

Howell Raines convinced Sulzberger—and initially his staff—that he was the only leader who would be able to accomplish this. In the process, he made the fatal mistake of many talented men and women who allow their rise to the top to be defined by ego and blind determination: He confused his own identity with that of the company he led. In the end, this self-created man was done in by his need to see himself at the center of every story. By claiming the paper (and its successes) as his own, he also found himself ultimately responsible for its failures.

Part One

BEFORE

A
PRIL
8, 2002

The third-floor newsroom of
The New York Times,
located about one hundred yards west of Times Square, can be a grim place. The exposed ventilation system, the humming fluorescent lights, the claustrophobic cubicles, and the standard-issue off-white paint job make the newsroom feel simultaneously retro and futuristic, as if the
Times
’s nerve center were designed as a contemporary interpretation of the stereotypical city room of old. For many of the hundred-plus metro, national, and business reporters whose desks are on the third floor, the newsroom is an intensely stressful place to work, a place where career-long reputations can be badly dented by one deadline-induced mistake, a place where staffers fight ruthlessly over bylines and credit. One metro reporter described the newsroom as a simulacrum of a bitterly competitive premed program, where success is strictly relative and no one can achieve without someone else failing. Reporters, especially those lower on the slippery newsroom totem pole, carry with them a jangling fear of looking dumb in front of their editors, of falling out of favor, of failing to deliver. Max Frankel, the retired executive editor of the
Times,
once quipped that he enjoyed the paper only when he was away from the office, reading it.

The newsroom’s uninspiring décor and its vaguely Hobbesian feel contrasts mightily with, say, the minimalist sophistication and noblesse-oblige ethos that pervade the Condé Nast building, located a block from the
Times
’s headquarters. Condé Nast, home to high-end magazines like
The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
and
GQ,
has a Frank Gehry–designed cafeteria and special guest chefs from Hong Kong and Tuscany. The
Times
has a commissary furnished with plastic ferns and Formica tables. Condé Nast writers get generous expense accounts, flexible deadlines, and private offices with frosted-glass doors and wood-paneled bookshelves.
Times
reporters get embittered copy editors and off-beige desk dividers. What’s more,
Times
reporters and editors are, on average, paid less and work more than their colleagues in the glossy magazine world.

But
Times
men, of course, get an immeasurable level of prestige and an inexorable sense of purpose. They get the recurring adrenaline rush of knowing that they have the power to move markets, to influence elections, to shape world affairs. They get their fingerprints (and their bylines) on the first rough drafts of history. In this regard, at least, not much has changed since the 1960s. In his fascinating 1969 bestseller,
The Kingdom and the Power,
author and former
Times
reporter Gay Talese described how the political and cultural elite looked to the paper he worked at for more than a decade as “necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity.”

On most days, this power is barely acknowledged. Reporters push their way in through the
Times
’s revolving doors on the north side of West Forty-third Street around ten in the morning. Soon after, section editors begin working the floor, checking for scoops or updates or new angles on old stories. By noon, reporters write up “sked lines,” one- or two-sentence summaries that their editors can use at the daily page-one meeting to pitch their stories. A couple of hours later, if a reporter has picked up a breaking news story, as opposed to a feature or an off-news color piece, there’s the familiar ritual of canceled dinner plans, apologetic phone calls to frustrated spouses, thrice-postponed drinks dates postponed one more time. By 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., after circling back to this or that source for a juicier quote or a flashier anecdote, when it’s finally time to stumble out into Times Square’s neon-lit frenzy, there’s still an hour or two of cellphone queries from copy editors to look forward to.
Isn’t there anyone who’d go on the record about the mayor’s new parking initiative? Would you mind if we changed your lead around?

Such a schedule leaves very little time for self-congratulation, but the afternoon of April 8, 2002, was a break from the numbing daily slog, a time to pause and celebrate
The New York Times
’s unique role in American society. The seven months since the September 11 terrorist attacks had been defined by balls-out reporting, seven months in which countless staffers worked without a single day off, seven months in which reporters were relocated from local government beats to war zones throughout the Middle East and in Afghanistan.

As the day stretched toward 3:00 p.m., a space was cleared in front of the spiral staircase that connects the third and fourth floors of the
Times
’s newsroom.
The New York Times
was about to win seven Pulitzer Prizes, half of all the Pulitzers awarded for journalism and four more than the previous one-year record the
Times
shared with two other newspapers.
^*5
Six of the awards that year recognized the paper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks on America. It was as if the Pulitzer board were affirming the
Times
’s place as the center of the journalistic universe.

After Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, made the official announcement from Columbia University, Raines, a short, bow-legged Alabamian with brushy gray hair and a bulbous nose, strode up to a small wooden platform underneath the staircase. Reporters and editors snaked up the stairs and jammed the hallways. For the first time in
The New York Times
’s storied and celebrated history, all of the paper’s living executive editors had gathered in one room. A. M. Rosenthal, who hadn’t been inside the
Times
’s West Forty-third Street building since his rambling Op-Ed page column had been canceled two and a

half years earlier, was there. Rosenthal’s successor, Max Frankel, one of the few men who inspired fear in Raines (and who was said to have resigned early to block the possibility of Raines’s ascension in the early 1990s), was there. Joe Lelyveld, Raines’s immediate predecessor, was there, along with the man Lelyveld had openly campaigned for as his successor, former managing editor Bill Keller, now a biweekly Op-Ed page columnist and
Times Magazine
writer. Assembling these five men in one room was a major undertaking of its own. Rosenthal’s and Frankel’s mutual disdain was legendary. Frankel had been particularly insulting to Rosenthal in his memoir, in which he referred to himself approvingly as “the not-Abe.” And Lelyveld, who since leaving the
Times
had been working on lengthy pieces for
The New Yorker
and
The New York Review of Books,
made no secret of how happy he was to have moved on to the next phase of his life.

Off to the side of the wooden platform, a stooped and frail old man overshadowed even this summit of journalistic lions. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known both inside and outside the paper simply as “Punch,” was making one of his increasingly rare trips to the newsroom. Punch had handed over the publisher’s title to his son in 1992 and had given Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—or “Young Arthur,” as he was sometimes known—the title of chairman of the New York Times Company in 1997. (Behind his back, Sulzberger Jr. was occasionally referred to as “Pinch,” a moniker he found demeaning. “A man deserves his own nickname,” he once said.) Punch leaned in to speak quietly with Lelyveld, two legends of American journalism watching a new generation eclipse their accomplishments.

To a round of applause, Raines stepped onto the platform. “I was reminded today of the words of Mississippi’s greatest moral philosopher, Dizzy Dean,” Raines, a proud southerner leading the most elite of northern institutions, told the throng of journalists. “ ‘It ain’t bragging if you really done it.’ Ladies and gentlemen of
The New York Times,
you’ve really done it.” On that day, Raines was eloquent and forceful, humble and proud. “We are ever mindful of the shattering events it was our task to record in our city, nation, and world community,” he said. It was also important to realize, he added, that the
Times
’s September 11 journalism “will be studied and taught as long as journalism is studied and practiced. . . . We have a right to celebrate these days of legend at
The New York Times.
” Raines made a point of acknowledging and thanking Lelyveld and Keller—it was, after all, the staff they had assembled and trained that won all those Pulitzers—before handing over the microphone to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whom he called “a great publisher.”

Punch, a shy and private man, was probably just as happy that Raines hadn’t singled him out. Raines later told Ken Auletta, the
New Yorker
media writer whom he had invited into the newsroom to record the scene, that he intentionally didn’t mention the elder Sulzberger so that his son would have a chance to pay homage to the family patriarch. But to some in the newsroom, it was a noticeable and telling slight, a sign that Raines’s humility and graciousness were nothing but lip service. “Howell mentioned a lot of folks on whose shoulders we stand, but he forgot one,” Arthur Sulzberger told the crowd. “And I’m grateful that he did, and that is my father.”

T
HE
S
ULZBERGER
F
AMILY

Every company likes to refer to itself—at least publicly—as a family. Most of the time, that’s a specious metaphor. But in the case of
The New York Times,
the analogy is nearly accurate. It’s true that
The New York Times
existed before Adolph Ochs came on the scene—it was founded in 1851 as a daily broadsheet. But the modern incarnation of the
Times
was born in 1896, when a virtually bankrupt thirty-eight-year-old first-generation American named Adolph Ochs (his parents were German-Jewish immigrants) was able to acquire notes worth $75,000 of credit to gain control of the financially struggling daily known then as
The New-York Times.
Today, the New York Times Company has a book value of some $1.4 billion, and its market capitalization is $6.9 billion. (Annual revenues in 2003 were $3.23 billion.)