The Deal from Hell (22 page)

Like any other profession, journalists are vulnerable to the temptations that come with celebrity. When the gaffes occur, journalists get a taste of their own medicine—a straightforward formula that always seemed just to me.

S
everal weeks after Tribune Company took over at Second and Spring Street, Leo Wolinsky drove down the Avenue of the Stars, past the complex of law offices, strip malls, high-end hotels, and liquor stores that comprise Century City—the midzone between downtown Los Angeles and sunny Santa Monica—and paid a visit to his lawyer, Larry Feldman. He was increasingly worried about his future at the paper. It hadn't taken Tribune Publishing president Jack Fuller long to replace editor Michael Parks with John S. Carroll, a tall, fair-haired journalist and former editor of the
Baltimore Sun
. Fuller defended his replacement as a matter of course—a person from a Times Mirror paper would be a better fit than a Chicago journalist—but that did little to quell the unease of people like Wolinsky. Under Parks, Wolinsky was made executive editor, the highest position under the paper's full editor. But Carroll, after he arrived, stayed to himself and made little contact with editors on the floor—including Wolinsky. When Wolinsky confided to his lawyer a message that Carroll had conveyed to the staff—that no one would be fired—Feldman reassured him that he could make a legal case to keep
his job. Driving away from Century City, Wolinsky felt, if not relieved, a modicum of security from Feldman's counsel.

When outside forces descend on a storied local institution to impose a new order, it's not unusual for the collective pulse to rise by a beat or two. Tribune Company had not just picked off a huge paper reeling from the tumultuous reign of Willes and Downing; it had acquired a big paper with national ambitions. As editor of the
Baltimore Sun
, Carroll had traveled to Times Mirror headquarters for meetings, but he didn't know many Los Angeles journalists well nor they him. The conventional wisdom was that Tribune had acquired a paper in the throes of a crisis, but Carroll, who spent the first few days at his new post poring over the pages of the paper, found something quite different. “People were saying it had gone to hell. I think I had a more objective point of view than people who had been caught up in the storm. I felt it was an underedited paper. The people were very bright, but they didn't assert themselves to the degree I thought they should. It was just not part of the culture. I felt it needed more assertive editing,” he said. In other words, it needed leadership.

The
Los Angeles Times
that Carroll inherited employed a number of excellent journalists who practiced world-class journalism despite the buyouts and layoffs ordered by his predecessors. About three weeks before Tribune announced its deal, the
Times
broke a story on page one detailing how the physician most closely involved with the government's approval of the controversial diabetes pill Rezulin had urged its withdrawal from the U.S. market because of mounting injuries and deaths attributed to the pill, which had generated $1.8 billion in sales for Warner-Lambert, the New Jersey–based manufacturer. David Willman, a quiet but determined investigative reporter in the
Times
Washington bureau and a native of Pasadena, had unearthed the story from records and sources at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of numerous federal regulatory agencies that remained virtually uncovered by other major papers in the nation's capital.

A prize-winning, tenacious journalist, Willman had been sniffing around the FDA for a couple of years reporting on its permissive
atmosphere, after Congress, under political pressure over the demand for AIDS drugs, told the FDA to work more closely with pharmaceutical firms to get new medicines to the market. The
Los Angeles Times
gave Willman's stories good play because he was an excellent reporter, not because an editor had decided that an obscure but important federal agency needed scrutiny.

“I told myself that it would take six months to a year to get people off the ceiling. The first week I was there I found myself feeling unexpectedly at home in the newsroom,” Carroll later recalled. Before the
Sun
, Carroll had been editor of the
Lexington
(Kentucky)
Herald-Leader
and had worked at several others. He well knew that each newsroom had a peculiar brand of politics: “The
Times
newsroom was collegial; there were no games. Saturday night of the first week, someone asked me to go to the paper's book festival. I thought it would be half-dozen teachers in a basement. It turned out to be like the Academy Awards. We had drinks on a patio on one of those gorgeous, cool Los Angeles nights on the campus of UCLA. Here I was drinking wonderful wine with interesting people and I thought, ‘I'm glad I took this job.'”

Fuller had phoned Carroll at the
Baltimore Sun
the morning that Tribune had announced its deal. At the time, Carroll was considering an offer from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University to run the foundation's fellowship program for mid-career journalists. He had all but decided to go to Harvard when Fuller reached him: “Jack and I had been on the Pulitzer board together and we'd been friendly. I'd been at the
Sun
for nine years and eleven and a half at
Lexington
. I was getting bored. I was tinkering with a book and negotiating over the curator's job at Nieman. They had told me I would get an offer, and Jack urged me not to sign anything. I assumed he was talking about the
Los Angeles Times
editorship. It was the only logical thing from my point of view. Then he asked me to meet with John Puerner,” whom Fuller had just named publisher of the Tribune's new Los Angeles property.

Carroll hit it off with Puerner when the two men met at the Willard Hotel in Washington, but Carroll's mind was made up. Or so he thought. He later recalled returning to his home in Baltimore and going out for a
walk. “Just for the hell of it I started thinking about LA and what I would have done on the first day as editor, on my second day. Then I noticed I was walking with a lot more spirit in my step,” he said. Back at his house, Carroll called Fuller to talk more about Los Angeles and made some calls about Tribune Company and its reputation for its single-minded devotion to the bottom line: “I knew there were risks. I talked with some people. Tribune had a reputation different than Times Mirror or Knight Ridder. I talked to Jack. I got no guarantees. But he said we'd be crazy to do something bad with that paper. This is the
Los Angeles Times
; we'd be crazy to screw it up.” He decided to take the job.

Otis Chandler's larger-than-life personality had instilled in the
Los Angeles Times
staff an almost ravenous desire for a strong newsroom leader. All eyes fell upon the tall, lanky, unflappable southerner when Carroll wandered onto the third floor in the spring of 2000. Carroll soon heard the same song that anyone who occupied the editor's office in Los Angeles would hear from his editors: “I went in and spoke to each department head. One thing I kept hearing is that the newsroom was woefully understaffed. At that time, the head count was 1,163 people. That was triple what I had at the
Sun
.” Willes and Downing had established a bifurcated staff with a huge stable of experienced veterans like Willman, and a smaller yet significant cadre of less experienced, lower-paid reporters to man “Our Times” editions, intensely local sections designed to serve readers and lure ad dollars from affluent neighborhoods like Santa Monica. “They had confused, to some extent, the identity of the paper,” Carroll recalled. “It was like reading two papers: a small local weekly with certain editing standards that are necessary in papers of that size and then also a very sophisticated, big metro daily. The two clashed.”

Wolinsky started to see a cadre of new faces walking the halls of Times Mirror:

In the business offices of the
Times
, Puerner shook things up immediately. CFO Skip Zimbalist remembered:

In editorial, Wolinsky's fears accelerated when the quality of the workplace started, slowly but surely, to show signs of change: Employees' reserved parking spots, formerly denoted with their names, were replaced with parking space numbers; vending machines that had once dispensed aspirin for free were now coin-operated; a full-medical staff that had served the paper's employees was eliminated. Perhaps worst of all was the unshakable sense of resentment by
Tribune
staff for the perks that had become standard fare for their Los Angeles counterparts. Change was decidedly afoot.

Wolinsky felt the immediate threat of the new management when Carroll emerged from his office to convene a series of lunches and dinners with senior editors and reporters. Carroll thought he needed new editors to instill more discipline into the newsroom. “I wanted to hire them from the West,” Carroll explained. “After looking around, I hired some people from the East. They had some excellent people on the staff, people like Rick Meyer, who was absolutely first-rate. But there was no discipline on story length. I felt kind of a bloatedness about everything. Story dopings [summaries] were too long. I ordered one-paragraph summaries of stories. I restricted the news meeting to a half hour. I had three managing editors and a slot for a fourth. I wanted one person.” Carroll soon set his sights on a charismatic African American editor in his forties at the
New York Times
who had just turned down a job offer to become the editor of the
Miami Herald
.

Dean P. Baquet was an unconventional choice for someone as grounded in the clubby world of establishment journalism as Carroll, who was a card-carrying member of organizations such as the American Society of News Editors. You wouldn't find Baquet roaming the corridors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors or the Black Journalists Association conventions trolling for a job. A native of New Orleans, Baquet grew up in a working-class neighborhood where he helped clean his parents' Creole restaurant, Eddie's, one of those places with red-checkered tablecloths on the first floor and white linen on the second. The son of a mail carrier-turned restaurant owner, Baquet lived
in the rear of Eddie's with his parents and four brothers, until he left New Orleans in the 1970s to study English at Columbia University. But he dropped out of Columbia two years later, homesick for his native turf. During a summer internship at the
New Orleans States-Item
, he fell hard for journalism and returned as a reporter covering police, the courts, and city hall. He wrote hard-hitting stories for the paper, including one
Times-Picayune
article that prompted a local black political group to boycott Eddie's. One of his fondest New Orleans journalistic memories was of covering Governor Edwin Edwards, the infamous Louisiana politician who once told Baquet, “The only way I can lose this election is if I'm found in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”

Baquet left New Orleans in 1984 when a former New Orleans colleague, Jack Davis, hired him to work at the
Chicago Tribune
. It was there, in 1988, that he would share a Pulitzer Prize with Ann Marie Lipinski for exposing the extent of corruption at the Chicago City Council. Two years later, he parlayed his success at the
Tribune
into a job as an investigative reporter at the
New York Times
. In 1995, he was tapped to be national editor, the job he held when he got a call “out of the blue” from Carroll. “I didn't know John and the conversation was a little vague, although I figured I knew what he was calling about,” he said. “He'd already been named editor in Los Angeles. He said he was going to be in New York and wanted to know if we could have dinner.”

Surrounded by lush green plants, dark wood, and nude paintings at the Café des Artistes just off Central Park, Carroll told Baquet he was looking for a managing editor. A week after their lunch, Carroll called Baquet to see if he'd like to come out to spend a little time with him and Puerner. After thinking it over, Baquet accepted. Upon his return to New York, Carroll offered him the job. “I thought this was a really strong paper, a great paper, that had just been bought by a company I had a lot of respect for. I knew Tribune,” said Baquet. He also felt he could have a bigger impact in Los Angeles than he could in New York, so he, too, headed west.