After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  A newspaper, surely, cannot be said to have a subconscious and yet, in raising this curious question of apology, the Times called attention to what is really an unlikely nexus, not just between the “episodes” of Blair and Lee—each an unprecedented “investigation” by the Times of what has appeared in its pages—but in issues they raise: responsibility in the exercise of power; the identity and reliability of sources; politically correct “diversity” as defined by category (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preference) so as virtually to exclude individuality, and thereby paradoxically assure uniformity; pack journalism; vendetta journalism; coerced agreement; the enforcement of received ideas; fear, widespread and justified, of the Times; and the issue of genuine openness to correction and journalism in good faith.

  Not inconsistent with these considerations was the fourth document of May 11, 2003, the briefest of all (31 words). It too bore the headline Editors’ Note. “Readers with information about other articles by Jayson Blair that may be false wholly or in part,” it said, “are asked to e-mail the Times: retrace@nytimes.com.” The Times’s appetite for hounding had reached the Internet. Having leveled virtually the entire arsenal of the paper at a man whom its own narrative had already described as “troubled,” it now invited the whole world to join it in this hunt. Blair turns out after all to have been a fairly sturdy fellow, who read the Times “culture” very well. For all the lectures he was apparently subjected to, for all the talk of “disciplinary” action, “short leashes,” “reprimands” (in much of the narrative, the Times sounds for all the world like a cross between the Curia and a particularly dull reformatory or boarding school), Blair showed that, while he had little respect for the system, he was all right with individuals. When he praised, as he often did, some other writer’s work, he had the good sense for instance, uncommon even in professional writers, to single out “something far down in the story,” as one of the Times’s really fine reporters said, “so you’d know he read it.” On the other hand, at least one editor gave the right warnings, at the right time: the place to address problems with Blair’s reporting was internally, and the way to resolve those problems would be to stop publishing his work.

  The address on the web inviting further complaints about Blair ran in the Times for several days. After a while, there was some pretense that the invitation extended to complaints about any and all Times reporters, but this was clearly untrue. One of the finest, most beloved and respected editors at the Times, in the years of its greatest reliability, distinction, and aspiration toward objectivity and fairness, told me that he had never, in any publication, been quoted accurately. Since then I have met no one with experience of being quoted who has not made the same observation. A complaint of misquotation or any other error to a web address at the Times called retrace, everyone agrees, would be as futile as, say, a letter to the Book Review pointing out a complete and deliberate misrepresentation of a nonfiction book.

  Retrace did, however, produce one, innocent casualty. Blair had clearly incurred, at the Times, a lot of envy. So, apparently, had a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Rick Bragg. A “reader” now apparently questioned whether Mr. Bragg had really done the reporting for a bylined piece about oystermen in Apalachicola, Florida. From the subsequent public expressions of outrage by Times reporters it was not hard to guess who the “reader” was, or were. Mr. Bragg had, in fact, made extensive use of the notes of a stringer, a young man named J. Wes Yoder, who greatly admired Mr. Bragg’s work, and who had asked to work for him, in order to learn from him. Terrible. What a scandal. One would hardly know from the ensuing outcry that the practice is so widespread it is an assumed and honored part of the journalistic tradition. Stringers, legmen, a form of apprenticeship since before the days of the green eyeshade. In the Jayson Blair turmoil at the Times, however, Mr. Bragg was suspended for two weeks.

  Then Mr. Bragg did the unpardonable: he spoke the truth, in public. He said not only that stringers were not uncommon but also that he had always considered it a point of honor actually to go to the place mentioned in the by-now-sacred dateline, in time to claim it honorably for his piece. Well. The hounding began. Such a barrage of furious, self-righteous email posted by Times reporters. We might have been in the realm of dateline—or perhaps whereabouts—fraud again. Everyone knew, or rather everyone who paid any attention to the matter knew, that racing somewhere for a single day just to claim the authority of a dateline is a common practice even among the most admired journalists writing about the most serious, contentious subjects. Astonishment and dismay, however, expressed on many blogs. Much later, word from the Times’s current executive editor Bill Keller that if such an “outrage” had even been suspected, Mr. Bragg would have been out “in a heartbeat.”

  By then, Mr. Bragg had quit. He will be working with Jessica Lynch, to help write the story, presumably—since the Lynch family has always been (in contrast with all those who claim to speak for them) honest—the true story of Jessica Lynch. NBC has decided meanwhile to produce a special television program in time for the November sweeps. Jessica Lynch has withdrawn her cooperation. No matter. NBC has decided the story was always anyway an “action/adventure” story, already largely in the public domain. “Frankly,” NBC’s Entertainment president Jeff Zucker said, Private Lynch had only “a minor role.” The military will help with the program. And the real hero will be one Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief—the Iraqi lawyer who, in early versions of the story, witnessed Private Lynch being “slapped,” and therefore walked six miles, back and forth, several times, to inform the American military and draw a map of the hospital where she was. You may have wondered what happened to that Iraqi lawyer. Apart from this work for NBC (which will shoot the film from “his perspective”), and a large contract for a book, he has a job with a lobbying firm in Washington. In any case, the hounding of Mr. Bragg, who holds a Pulitzer Prize, was not without risk for the pack. The Pulitzer might lose some of its magic properties for them as well.

  What will come of all this? I used to think one needed The New York Times, and perhaps one does, but not this Times. A reader has neither the time, nor the inclination, nor the resources to approach his newspaper with sufficient skepticism to doubt every single element of every story; to look in vain to the corrections column and find a correction of middle initials; and then to scour the earth for some good faith source of factual information. When there were many newspapers, with conflicting political positions, there was at least some equivalent of what is, in the law, the adversary system, and the idea that through this conflict some sort of truth is sorted out. Such conflicts may exist today among magazines, which also have the time, in the absence of daily deadlines, for genuine research and even for thought. But if a reader has reason, as he clearly does, to distrust his newspaper—not its Jayson Blairs, but its whole conception of what is important, what is true, what part genuine self-doubt as opposed to searching for scapegoats and examining other people’s datelines plays in the process of finding out and reporting what is true—then the news itself will cease to matter to him. The paper will continue for a while, in its self-regard based on the values and achievements of another time. But that’s it. In the absence of a basis for trust, the news itself becomes unascertainable, even ceases to exist—or is reduced, as is now almost the case, to contending strategies of public relations.

  Then one remembers something Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to quote from Michael Polanyi: People change their minds. Institutions can change as well. On May 11, 2003, Sulzberger was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Echoing the by now famous remarks quoted in his own paper earlier in the day, to the effect that there would be no searching the newsroom for “scapegoats” (“The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher”), he said, “This is not a Howell problem, this is not an Arthur Sulzberger problem—this was a bad man doing bad things.”

  Mr. Su
lzberger said that there is little anyone could have done to prevent Mr. Blair, who had worked at the Times nearly four years, from putting false information in the paper.

  “Do we have a system to uncover venality? No, we don’t. And you know something, I guess I am not unhappy with that. I don’t want us to become a police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company.”

  Whatever is meant by “scapegoat,” “demonize,” “venality,” “police state,” and even “ripping off the company,” this is an odd formulation of the problem. Venality? Ripping off the company? Institutions change, but this is not the language of a change for the better in a newspaper. What is needed is the return of someone who would want to be remembered for having kept the paper straight.

  The American Spectator

  October 2003

  RENATA ADLER was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d’E.S. from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an honorary LL.D. from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of The New York Times, remained at The New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986); Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Decision That Made George W. Bush President (2004); and the novels Speedboat (1976, Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and Pitch Dark (1983).

  MICHAEL WOLFF, currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a columnist for The Guardian, USA Today, and British GQ, is one of the most prominent journalists and pundits in the nation. He has written numerous best-selling books, including The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, Burn Rate, and Autumn of the Moguls. He appears often on the lecture circuit and is a frequent guest on network and cable news shows.