Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

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  ON THURSDAY, MAY 1, Jacques Steinberg had arrived at the Times’s offices only dimly aware of Blair’s situation. Like everyone in the building, he’d read the Kurtz and Wemple pieces but hadn’t heard much else. Steinberg began his tenure at the Times as a Washington-based assistant to James “Scotty” Reston, the man closest to a personification of an institutional voice that The New York Times had ever had. Reston’s career at the Times—which stretched from the eve of World War II through the elder Bush’s administration—included a brief stint as executive editor, but he was best known as a D.C. correspondent and political columnist. Within the Times, Reston, who died in 1995, was seen almost as an adopted member of the Sulzberger family. “He adored this newspaper,” Steinberg says. “And he adored the family that ran it.” Steinberg grew up in southern Massachusetts, but his father was born and raised in Brooklyn. Every day, when Steinberg’s dad got home from the hospital where he worked, he’d pick up his son and drive into town to buy a copy of the Times from the drugstore. “Here’s my father, going out of his way to pick up this newspaper with this incredibly small print,” Steinberg says. “I learned by example that it was important.”

  After his time working with Reston, Steinberg moved from Washington to New York, where he covered education for the paper for eight years. Then, in April 2003, after briefly filling in at the paper’s Los Angeles bureau, he moved over to the newspaper beat. It was a high-profile assignment: Media coverage was one of the areas Howell Raines was most interested in beefing up. Steinberg’s introduction to the industry’s major players occurred on April 27 through 29, at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, which was held that year in Seattle. Once Steinberg got back to New York, he continued cultivating industry sources. On April 30, he had a get-to-know-you dinner with Lachlan Murdoch, one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons. (Lachlan Murdoch is in charge of all of the News Corp.’s stateside publishing interests, including the New York Post.)

  As the day wore on, word of Jayson Blair’s resignation began to make its way around the newsroom, although there hadn’t been an official announcement. Early that afternoon, Steinberg and Lorne Manly, the Times’s acting media editor, were called into Gerald Boyd’s office. Manly, a bespectacled, curly-haired journalism junkie, had been covering the media industry for over a decade—as a reporter for AdWeek and MediaWeek; as a reporter and editor for Folio:, an industry trade magazine; as the “Off the Record” columnist at The New York Observer; as one of the first hires at Brill’s Content, a now-defunct general interest magazine covering the press; as a media editor for Inside.com, a short-lived online publication covering the information industries*36; and then in a return engagement as the editor of Folio:. He was brought to the Times as the deputy media editor in early 2002 as one of Howell Raines’s first hires. In April 2003, media editor Dave Smith became an editor at the Sunday paper’s Week in Review section, and Manly settled into his new role.

  By this point, Bill Schmidt and employees from the paper’s news administration staff had worked through Blair’s expense reports and other records. “It was suggested to me that there was a suspicion that he might not have been [in Texas],” says Steinberg. But no one had actually reached Juanita Anguiano, the mother of the soldier Blair wrote about.

  That afternoon, Steinberg tracked down Anguiano at her home in Los Fresnos, Texas—he was the first reporter to reach her since the story had broken earlier that week—and began to ask her about conversations she’d had with reporters, including one from The New York Times. As Steinberg continued his interview, some of the reporters seated at the desks surrounding his realized what was going on. They gathered around his cubicle. It was at that point that Anguiano said she had to get off the phone. She was, she said, on her way to her son’s funeral—in the five days since Blair’s story had run, Edward Anguiano’s remains had been identified.

  “I very gently told her I just needed to confirm this one fact,” Steinberg says, “that Jayson had actually been there to see her.” Anguiano said he hadn’t. “I kept apologizing profusely,” Steinberg says. “But I asked her—several times, as I recall—if she was sure he hadn’t been there. Was there any chance she had forgotten? Remember, it was just a completely alien thought, at that point, to me or any other reporter, that Jayson would have datelined a story and not gone there. This was thought to be just a dustup over plagiarism.”

  Steinberg hung up the phone, stunned. He assumed there had to be an explanation. Maybe Blair had been in Texas but reached the woman only by phone? Maybe Anguiano just completely forgot about Blair’s visit? After all, she had had a traumatic several weeks: Her son, first thought to be merely missing, was then presumed dead, and now she was off to bury him in a military funeral. Steinberg conferred with Manly and then punched in Jayson Blair’s cellphone number. His call was returned by Lena Williams, who was across the street at a hotel bar, trying to comfort Blair. Blair, Williams said, wouldn’t comment. Steinberg explained that Juanita Anguiano had just told him that Blair had never been to her house and that he needed to know if Blair had, in fact, even been in Texas.

  “I said, ‘Lena, you know how this works. I need to show the reader that I’ve tried to convey this information to Jayson to get a comment. I spoke with the people in Texas, with Juanita Anguiano.’ Even at that point, as a colleague, I’m thinking there’s got to be some explanation for this,” Steinberg recalls. Williams put down the phone for a minute and then returned to the line. Blair, she said, was covering his ears. “And so I went back and said, ‘Lena, you have to tell him, it’s not just that I spoke with her, it’s that she says he wasn’t there. She says he was never in Los Fresnos.’ And she said she’d try, but then whenever she went to him he’d cover up his ears.”

  “I couldn’t ask the question. He didn’t want to hear the question you had,” Williams said. Steinberg hung up the phone and turned to Manly. It now seemed entirely possible, they agreed, that Jayson Blair had never been in Texas.

  “I keep trying to come up with a better word than ‘surreal,’ ” says Manly. “But that’s what it was. It was like The Twilight Zone. . . . I mean, people would kill to get these assignments, to get a chance to go and talk to and write about people around the country. And here was this guy that might not even have bothered to get on a plane? What for?”

  Steinberg wrote up his story, a 644-word piece that ran on page A30 the following day, a Friday. Blair, Steinberg wrote, had resigned; he attributed that revelation not to any editor or spokesperson but to “The Times.” Steinberg quoted Juanita Anguiano saying, “No, no, no, he didn’t come.” He also reported that before his phone call, Juanita Anguiano was unaware of the Times’s article by Jayson Blair.

  As the reporters and editors were finishing up for the day, Gerald Boyd wandered over to the media cluster, on the far west side of the newsroom. Steinberg had known Boyd for years, from back when Steinberg was a clerk in Washington and Boyd was covering the White House. Steinberg, like all reporters, wanted more space for a good story. He asked Boyd if he could give the Blair saga the “David Shaw treatment,” referring to the Los Angeles Times media reporter who wrote a thirty-one-thousand-word report on a scandal that erupted in 1999 after the publisher of the Los Angeles Times had arranged to produce a 168-page Sunday magazine supplement devoted to the Staples Center, a downtown arena, splitting the $2 million in advertising revenue with the center. “I was thinking about Reston and what he’d want me to do in a situation like this,” says Steinberg. “And he’d say to just report the hell out of it. And much of who I am as a reporter was taught to me by Gerald himself. I just wanted to use all the techniques the paper has invested in me to just turn loose on this.”

  Without making any decisions, everyone went home for the night. “We both knew there was more to be done,” Manly says. “We were going to go back in the next morning and tell Gerald we should really go back at this.”

  “Whatever happened, I knew when I went h
ome that night that my life was going to be very different on Friday,” Steinberg says. That night, Steinberg—who has two children under five years old—told his wife, “You can expect not to see me for a while.” He was right.

  A TEAM ASSEMBLED

  On the morning of Friday, May 2, 2003, Gerald Boyd’s secretary summoned Adam Liptak to the managing editor’s office. Liptak, the Times’s thin, balding legal correspondent, had traveled an atypical path to the Times’s newsroom. For years, he had served as one of the paper’s in-house lawyers, working closely with the editorial side of the paper on libel and First Amendment issues. He’d always maintained an interest in writing—he’d written a fair amount for the Times and had once written a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker—but was still surprised when, in 2002, Howell Raines asked him if he was interested in serving as the paper’s national legal correspondent. Liptak, whose five-year-old daughter, Katie, was in kindergarten at the Bank Street School on 112th Street, had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for lunchtime, and when he was summoned into Boyd’s office, he called his wife to tell her he might not be able to make it. “I had no idea what this was about,” Liptak says, “but whatever it was, I assumed it was some issue that had to do with me.” Liptak arrived first and sat alone, waiting.

  Boyd’s secretary also called Jonathan Glater. Glater, an African American reporter with wavy hair and braces, is exceedingly polite. He was coming up on his three-year anniversary at the Times; he’d arrived during the paper’s (and the industry’s) last big round of hiring, back in the fall of 2000. Before that, Glater had been removed from the world of daily journalism for half a decade, since he left The Washington Post in the mid-1990s. After the Post, Glater went to Yale Law School and then spent two years working as a lawyer, first in private practice in Buenos Aires and then as a litigator in the New York office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. The whole time he was practicing law, Glater says, he missed writing. In the summer of 2000, he decided to send out his clips. “The great thing about law is, sometimes you can make a difference—usually for one client at a time,” Glater says. “As a journalist, you can make a difference for a whole lot of people at once.” To his surprise, he was offered a job on the Times’s business staff covering law firms, accounting firms, and consulting firms. He knows his timing was fortuitous. “Six months later in 2001 [after the stock market bubble burst], no one was hiring at all, least of all one more wannabe law firm refugee with various journalism internships but no clips in years,” he says.

  Glater thought he’d been summoned for a debriefing about his recent monthlong reporting stint in Los Angeles, where he had replaced Jacques Steinberg, who had also been there on a temporary posting. It was Glater’s first real assignment for the paper’s national staff, but he knew it might not be his last. Ever since September 11, the Times had been in triage mode, as many of the paper’s most enterprising reporters were recruited to cover the first terror strikes, then the war in Afghanistan, then the war in Iraq. Adding to the staffing problems was the fact that Howell Raines had forced out a handful of the paper’s national correspondents in 2002. Glater, whose wife works in a Manhattan law firm, didn’t have the flexibility to ask for a posting overseas, but earlier in the year he had gone to Boyd and said he would welcome the chance to spend a month or so filling in at one of the paper’s domestic bureaus.

  When Glater saw Liptak in Boyd’s office, he concluded that Liptak had been tapped as the next person to fill in at the L.A. bureau. To pass the time until Boyd showed up, Glater spoke to Liptak, recounting details from one of his more amusing and memorable stories. “Adultery May Be a Sin, but It’s a Crime No More,” published on April 17, 2003, was a lighthearted piece about a gated community more than an hour’s drive from Los Angeles that had recently removed from its books a statute outlawing adultery. (The piece quoted a retired banker who dated another woman during his divorce: “Arguably that would’ve run afoul of this,” the banker said. “I try not to violate these provisions.”) Glater told Liptak about how he drove all the way out to the community, called Rolling Hills, only to be turned back at the gate. As he was finishing his story, Boyd walked into the room.

  “Well, at least you went,” said Boyd. That was the first hint Glater got that the meeting wasn’t going to be about Los Angeles. Jacques Steinberg and Lorne Manly arrived soon after. (Earlier that morning, Manly had been told he’d have the “acting” removed from his title and would be made the paper’s permanent media editor.) Boyd told the three reporters and one editor that he wanted them to work on a team that would examine the career of Jayson Blair at The New York Times. “The notion that Jayson wasn’t in Los Fresnos changes things substantially,” Boyd said. “We need to go back and look at everything, starting with the work he did for the national desk.” The team, Boyd said, should get started immediately. “The initial marching orders were not incredibly precise,” says Glater. “Our sense was we’d need to come up with twenty-five hundred words by Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Gerald started to lay out a working hypothesis of what he expected us to find out about Jayson,” Liptak says. “And that’s that Jayson had no credit, that he had reached his limit on the company credit card, and this was why he got boxed in to this position where he’d either need to turn down assignments or make stuff up.” The Times, like many media companies, requires its reporters to front their travel expenses and file receipts to be reimbursed. For a national reporter making last-minute reservations and flying around the country, this can result in outlays of thousands of dollars. Glater mentioned how he had been fronting significant sums of money while he was in Los Angeles.

  Boyd also made it clear that the team would need to report on their superiors, including himself and Howell Raines. “He told us that he was going to be deciding what sort of cooperation to extend us,” Liptak says. “He was saying, ‘There are some things I might tell you, some things I might not. There are some records we might share, and some we might not.’ He was plainly setting up an independent unit in the paper to report on the paper.”

  “We were going to report this as Times reporters,” Steinberg says. “It wasn’t even clear yet who was going to lead us, so we were told to just kind of sit tight, and they were in the process of getting in touch with people who might head up the team. But it was clear we were heading into uncharted territory.” Later, Steinberg called his wife and told her, “It’s happening exactly the way I’d thought it would happen.”

  After Glater, Liptak, and Steinberg left Gerald Boyd’s office, Boyd spoke to Manly about how the project would evolve. “I wasn’t going to be the main editor,” Manly says. “But Gerald had no idea who would be. He talked vaguely about wanting someone who wasn’t involved in the newsroom but knew the culture. But at this point he was mainly just stressing that they wanted the record corrected.” Manly had been in charge of the paper’s media coverage for only two weeks, and he was still trying to feel his way around the Times’s power structure. “Gerald can talk in riddles sometimes,” Manly says. “So it was a little hard to tell exactly what was happening.”

  Several hours later, in Portland, Oregon, David Barstow was returning to his hotel room. Barstow was a four-year veteran of the Times. After graduating from Northwestern, he spent three years as a reporter on the Rochester Times-Union. Then he moved to Florida to work on the St. Petersburg Times, one of the best regional papers in the country. It was in Florida that Barstow learned how to handle the pressure of producing the day’s big story. “When I got [to The New York Times] I got down on my knees and thanked God that I didn’t get hired here when I was in my twenties. I was not ready,” Barstow says. “Everyone has this experience at some point: It’s three o’clock and the spotlight swivels and you’re the man and you need to deliver by six. [At the St. Petersburg Times], I was the go-to guy on a lot of big stories in a lot of weird circumstances. I’m glad I learned how to do that there.” While in Florida, Barstow was a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes
in three separate categories—breaking news, investigative reporting, and explanatory reporting. At the Times, Barstow worked in metro before becoming one of the linchpins of the paper’s investigative unit.

  Barstow can be an intimidating presence in the newsroom. He’s tenacious and fearless and gets so immersed in projects that he essentially disappears down a wormhole for weeks at a time. In Portland, he was working on a follow-up to a three-part series he had co-authored with Lowell Bergman on McWane, Inc., a Birmingham, Alabama–based pipe company the Times called one of “the most dangerous employers in America.” (The series, coupled with a later project by Barstow and Bergman titled “When Workers Die,” won the 2003 George Polk Award, the 2003 James Aronson Award, the 2004 Sidney Hillman Award, the 2004 duPont Award, the 2004 Goldsmith Prize, and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.) When Barstow arrived at his hotel the morning of May 2, he had several urgent messages telling him to call Gerald Boyd. Barstow called Paul Fishleder, his editor back in New York, who told him that he didn’t know what the calls were about, either. Even though that day’s Times had run Steinberg’s story about Blair’s resignation, and the newsroom had been rife with speculation about the former reporter for days, Barstow didn’t know anything about the situation. “I was deep into my other story,” he says. “I hadn’t heard anything about it.”

  Barstow’s first desk at the Times, back in the spring of 1999, was across from Blair’s. Barstow isn’t involved in the Times’s social scene; he never got to know the young reporter well. But he saw enough to know he wasn’t impressed. “On his best day,” Barstow says, “he was mediocre.” Barstow finally called in to the office and was told he was needed immediately for a project examining Blair’s career at the paper. He was to fly back to New York City as soon as possible.