Hard News (31 page)

After almost two years in which he could instantly command media attention, Raines’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show elicited barely a shrug outside the insular world of the New York media. The attention it did get was almost universally negative. The next week, at a cocktail party hosted by former
New Yorker
and
Talk
editor Tina Brown, several other magazine editors spoke of how they had considered asking Raines to write for them until his appearance on Rose’s program. “I felt like I was watching a man unraveled,” one editor said to a chorus of assents. “And frankly I’d be scared to trust him with the pages of [the magazine].”

On Monday, July 14, Sulzberger announced that Bill Keller would become the seventh executive editor of
The New York Times
(or the eighth, if you were inclined to count Lelyveld twice). Once again, Jacques Steinberg recorded the scene for the next day’s paper. Keller’s ascension, Steinberg wrote, was “portrayed by the company’s management . . . as a reaffirmation of The Times’s core journalistic values.”

Standing in the same spot where Raines had made his good-bye speech six weeks earlier, Keller said there was no reason to treat working at the
Times
as “an endless combat mission.” He told his staff to “do a little more savoring” of life. “That will enrich you and your work, as much as a competitive pulse rate will.” Sulzberger looked on approvingly, and he followed with a direct refutation of the criticisms Raines had laid out on Charlie Rose’s show. “There’s no complacency here,” he said. “Never has been. Never will be.”

Keller was only fifty-four years old, younger than Raines (fifty-eight), Lelyveld (fifty-seven), and Frankel (fifty-six) had been when they took over the paper. That meant he potentially had over a decade in which to make his mark, significantly longer than Raines would have had even if he had served out a complete term. In one of his first interviews, with
Newsweek,
he worked to show his staffers that he was on their side.

“I don’t want to dwell on my predecessor,” Keller told me. “But I will say this: The one thing that made me a little sick watching [Raines’s
Charlie Rose
appearance] was the collateral damage. I don’t mean me and Joe and the publisher, or even Gerald, who was kind of sideswiped in the course of that. I mean the whole staff of this place, all these people who worked their hearts out for him. There he was saying, ‘Before I came on the scene, you were a bunch of slackers.’ All the people who covered a couple of Balkan wars and the presidential election and the recount were part of a culture of complacency and lethargy. I thought that was insulting and wrong.”

Keller also made sure to say something positive about Raines and about Arthur Sulzberger’s decision to name him as the paper’s executive editor in 2001. “After the
Times
did what it did on September 11,” Keller said, “you would have had to scour the country to find someone who was questioning Arthur’s judgment. You can’t erase from memory the fact that [Raines] led one of the most prodigious feats of journalism in American history.”

Now that Raines was gone, even articulating his legacy seemed difficult. What, exactly, staffers wondered, had he wanted to do? Cover more pop culture? That was a battle that had been fought for decades; for years, it had been common to see stories about teen idols on the front page of the
Times.
Feature lively writing? Raines couldn’t claim credit for that, either: The
Times
had been making a concerted effort to hire and promote writers with robust narrative voices since the 1960s. Run more of Rick Bragg’s stories on the front page? Joe Lelyveld had also favored Bragg’s stories; besides, that hadn’t worked out so well.

“Doing a lot of college football coverage is a change, but it’s not a profound cultural change,” says Jon Landman. “Doing the ‘all-known-thought’ pieces, that wasn’t even really a new genre. What was new was that he routinized them and he liked the sensation of making everybody run around at the last minute to make everybody produce them. The exercise of pulling the puppet strings seemed very important. And bizarre. . . . The problem is the substance [of Raines’s changes] was a little obscure. It was change, but from what to what? Moving faster is not a transformation—it’s an adjustment. He really greatly exaggerated the level of innovation he put into the place. And unfortunately some of the change really was transformational, but bad.”

In the end, the catalog of Howell Raines’s systemic contributions to the
Times
—increased coverage of college football; the all-known-thought pieces; a year and a half of advocacy journalism; an exhausted and resentful newsroom—seemed a sad legacy for a man whose tenure had begun with so much hope and enthusiasm. Raines, of course, had also assured his place in history as the executive editor who presided over the paper while it gracefully and compassionately covered the biggest story of his generation. But that was only one part of his legacy. The other part told a vastly different, darker story. Raines’s obsession with his own place in history—and his compulsive need to see himself as the central force in the
Times
’s universe—would, in the end, translate to a legacy that was dominated by hubris, narcissism, scandal, and failure.

Part Three

AFTER

“A
LL
A
BOUT
H
OWELL
”

In the wake of Howell Raines’s abrupt departure, media pundits and
Times
staffers alike were left struggling to make sense of his brief, chaotic tenure. The answer, they realized, didn’t lie within Jayson Blair’s troubled psyche; ultimately, the former reporter was little more than a catalyst, the
Times
’s own Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist whose murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had set off World War I. The real causes of the tumult that gripped the paper could be found in the ways in which Raines’s narcissistic personality had manifested itself in his leadership.

In his twenty-one months atop the
Times
’s masthead, Howell Raines had attempted to centralize power not around the
position
of the executive editor—that had been done before—but around himself personally. Raines loved being the center of attention, loved the entrée his job gave him. He wore an eye-catching white panama hat, even as he rode the subway to work. He was, in all likelihood, the first executive editor ever to have his picture taped up on the mirror of his local hair salon next to cutouts of Elvis and postcards of topless women. He loved seeing his name in boldfaced type in other papers’ gossip and society pages. He loved making grand entrances at cocktail parties and book soirees, holding court in a corner in a seersucker suit.

Raines’s faintly comical self-aggrandizement might have been tolerable—if distracting—at another company, but the success of
The New York Times
has always depended on a culture in which a majority of employees feel some sense of ownership and responsibility for the company and its mission. “When he was here,” says Glenn Kramon, “the staff felt it was always all about Howell.” Arguably, for the
Times
to be the
Times,
its employees—at every level—need to be willing to sublimate their own egos to serve a larger, quasi-public good. “My staff is worth a lot more on the open market than I can pay them,” Kramon says, and, in the days after the May 14, 2003, town hall meeting, he says, “I needed to find a way to keep them here, to make this something they believed in.”

Unfortunately, Raines did more than just temporarily alienate many of the paper’s reporters and editors. In his effort to force the
Times
to revolve around him, Raines sought to permanently transform the way in which the newspaper was run. In doing this, he came to personify a shift that had been occurring in America for decades, as daily newspapers started modeling themselves after glossy magazines in a response to increased competition and the ubiquity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The
Times
had been aggressively adopting editorial innovations from the magazine world since the 1970s, when it added “service” and “soft news” sections in an effort to compete for readers with outlets like the advertising-rich
New York
magazine, which had itself begun as a weekly supplement to the now defunct New York
Herald Tribune.
By the 1980s, that competitive impulse had transformed the “hard news” pages as well, as CNN put pressure on daily papers to add insight and analysis and, especially, drama to their coverage of breaking news. Even though these innovations were viewed with wariness by journalism traditionalists, they were considered necessary to newspapers’ collective survival in an ever more entertainment- and information-saturated culture.

“We are not the first, on any important story, to bring you the news,” Max Frankel said more than a decade ago. “What does that mean? Why do you read? . . . The kind of thing that we used to wait a week for the newsweeklies to give us, ideally, we’re giving you tomorrow morning. We’re going to explain this event and combine in a very artful way a report on what happened and why it happened and who says what happened.”

Raines took this evolution to arguably perilous ends. If the country’s dailies were adopting more and more of the characteristics of magazines—with the additions of lyrical dispatches, tension-filled narratives, and portentous analyses—then why not go all the way and
run
the
Times
in a manner similar to how New York’s celebrity magazine editors, such as Tina Brown or
Vogue
’s Anna Wintour, ran their titles? Not content with merely helping to advance the
Times
’s brand, Raines decided to brand himself. Every page of the
Times
would reflect his unique sensibility, his personal news judgments, his passions and predilections. He’d force out writers and editors he didn’t get along with and ignore those he couldn’t rid himself of. He’d seek buzz and place more importance on getting the big story than on getting the right story, or even on getting the story right.

Naturally, Raines gravitated toward writers who were willing to help him realize his vision. “In the newspaper world,” media columnist Simon Dumenco wrote in discussing Raines’s and Blair’s careers, “if you think like a magazine editor, if you think like a magazine writer—
drama! glamour! style! narrative!
—you get ahead.” Jayson Blair intuitively recognized this, just as he intuitively realized that the path to success under Howell Raines was one that often seemed to prize style over substance. So what if the details of Blair’s sniper coverage weren’t quite right? His stories were gripping. Who cared if Blair hadn’t actually interviewed the characters in his pieces? He’d shown a willingness to produce whatever it was that Raines’s team ordered up—unlike some writers, who griped about impossible-to-meet deadlines and ridiculous travel demands.

Not surprisingly, Raines found upon taking over the
Times
that the mechanisms that had been put in place over many decades didn’t work for him. When he came to power, he did so preaching the virtues of an empowered masthead, of including more people in the daily decision-making process. After discovering that those people had concerns about his way of doing business, he cut them out of the equation rather than negotiate or compromise. But unlike a typical national magazine, with, say, fifty or a hundred staffers, the
Times
has more than a thousand journalists working for it, and the type of autocratic management that might work at the average glossy is destined to fail miserably at a large, unruly news organization where only a small percentage of the staff can ever hope to get meaningful face time with the boss.

Turner Catledge, the
Times
’s first executive editor (and one of Raines’s acknowledged heroes), wrote about the need to delegate authority in his 1971 memoir,
My Life and
The Times. “The
Times
was too big to be bossed by the traditional shirt-sleeved managing editor. Our news staff numbered some eight hundred reporters and editors, in New York and elsewhere, and I could deal with them only through a chain of command. . . . The kind of men I wanted in the top positions at the
Times
were independent, creative men, thoroughbreds, and they were not the sort who could be bossed or browbeaten.” Catledge went on to say that he needed subordinates who knew things he didn’t: “I considered myself an expert in one subject, national politics, and in other areas I expected initiative and imagination from responsible editors.”

In an August 2002 interview with Charlie Rose, Howell Raines paid lip service to this type of approach. “You cannot perform quality journalism without quality management and quality leadership,” he told Rose. “No one person can have enough ideas in a day to feed the intellectual engine of
The New York Times
or even a single department in
The New York Times. . . .
Whatever greatness adheres to us, it’s from the collective brainpower. So my philosophy of management is to try to get more people being shareholders in that process.”

The reality, of course, was much different. Raines ensured that only the select few felt they truly had any influence on shaping the
Times.
In the process, not only had he created a culture in which a sociopath like Jayson Blair was allowed to thrive, he had enabled a series of embarrassing miscues that sullied the most valued brand in journalism. He effectively negated the power of the
Times
’s greatest resource—the pooled intelligence and experience of its many employees. Instead of working for a larger good, employees at the paper were forced to focus on protecting their own hides.

“Everybody felt under siege [under Raines],” says Roger Wilkins, the former
Times
editorialist and columnist who served on the Siegal committee. “The instinct to cooperate and watch your buddy’s back is diminished. When Thor is up there throwing thunderbolts, your happiest moments come when those thunderbolts hit someone else.” The result was a paper that, at its worst, was considerably less than the sum of its parts.

What’s more, Raines seemed intent on twisting the role newspapers have played in contemporary American culture. When he became obsessed with Augusta National’s refusal to allow women as members, to cite but one example, he “flooded the zone” in a way that very obviously didn’t reflect the reality of the rest of the world’s concerns. Instead, it reflected Raines’s own preoccupations to an extent that gave the lie to the newspaper’s historic mission: to inform the world of each day’s top stories “without fear or favor,” as Adolph Ochs famously stated in 1896.

For decades, the
Times
has maintained its dominance by being a New York newspaper that also serves the country’s media, intellectual, and political elites. Howell Raines, though, tried to make the
Times
wholly his—not his employees’, not his readers’. It was a costly mistake.

In doing so, Raines unintentionally highlighted what will be an ongoing challenge for the
Times
as it continues its national expansion during a period when the intense variegation of the media has given rise to more and more outlets (witness Fox News and the recent circulation gains of its corporate sibling, the right-wing tabloid the
New York Post
) that find an underrepresented audience niche and work to fill it. Over the next decades, will the
Times,
and the country’s other leading newspapers, be forced to niche-ify themselves in order to target readers in hyperspecific socioeconomic groups or with ever more blatant political affiliations? Will the American press move closer toward the British (and Western European) media industry, in which each daily speaks very particularly to political partisans?

A N
EW
T
EAM IN
P
LACE