Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  In the meantime, Steinberg, Liptak, and Glater worked on dividing up what was in front of them. They quickly realized the difficulties of investigating one of their colleagues. “You’re suddenly looking at the newsroom as sources of information,” Steinberg says. Colleagues began to e-mail the three reporters with tidbits about Jayson’s career at the cop shop or pointing out stories they remembered as being not quite right. “Almost as soon as we put word out, my phone started ringing,” Liptak says. “Lots of people had lots to say. So right off the bat, we’re working these two tracks—trying to get a fix on who Jayson is and was and trying to rereport the damn stories.”

  Rather than meet out in the open, the three reporters gathered in a small, windowless room that sits right outside the greeter’s desk on the third floor. The first thing the team did was draw up a list of documents they wanted access to. The list they came up with included all the obvious things—all of Blair’s articles from the Times, examples of Blair’s work at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, and stories from other news organizations that covered the same topics. They also requested internal communications about Blair or his work at the paper, his application and résumé, all his employee evaluations, his personnel file, his reimbursement requests, and any internal memos tracking corrections or error rates. Adam Liptak and Jonathan Glater—the team’s two attorneys—signed the request and sent it on to Gerald Boyd. There still wasn’t an editor besides Manly assigned to oversee the project. “It was similar to a litigation document discovery request,” says Liptak. The request included language like “including but not limited to,” because, Liptak says, “we meant to be comprehensive.”

  According to people in the newsroom who spoke with him at the time, Boyd was stunned by the request. “He couldn’t believe we didn’t wait to get an editor,” Steinberg says. “The normal Times protocol would be, editors talk to editors.” Boyd redoubled his efforts to figure out who was going to lead the reporting team. “Fairly early on,” Liptak says, “it became clear this was not going to be good for anybody’s career.”

  Everyone on the team had been chosen at that morning’s masthead meeting for a specific reason. Liptak was chosen because he was a recent transplant from the legal department. “He had a kind of mental rigor that we thought would be hugely valuable,” says Al Siegal, the Times assistant managing editor who was eventually put in charge of the project. Steinberg, as one of the paper’s media writers, was an obvious choice: “This was the biggest story conceivably he’d need to deal with ever,” says Siegal. Barstow is one of the paper’s top investigators. And Glater, in addition to his legal background, is black. “We had decided on the other guys, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, this group is awfully white,’ ” Siegal says. “The fact that we had a reporter who was young and black and a lawyer was a no-brainer.”

  —————

  GLENN KRAMON, the Times’s business editor, had a lunch meeting on May 2. He didn’t get back to the Times until around 3:00 p.m., and by the time he made his way up to the third-floor newsroom, several people had already told him that Gerald Boyd wanted to talk to him.

  Boyd told Kramon about the team that was being assembled to examine Blair’s fabrications at the Times and asked Kramon to work on the project. “I had never worked with Jayson, which I think is one of the reasons they put me on this,” says Kramon. “I knew him to say hello to, but not much more than that. I did remember people warning me, ‘Boy, this guy is trouble.’ ”

  Steinberg, Liptak, and Glater, meanwhile, were realizing that a significant part of their job would include reporting on their colleagues—the reporters who shared bylines with Blair, the editors who assigned him stories, the managers who promoted him. No one on the team knew about Blair’s sloppiness or the widespread concern about his work on the metro desk, but reporters and editors in the newsroom were soon seeking the team out to share their stories. “It became clear that we could not do this and work in the newsroom,” Steinberg says. “Already at that point, we’re digging up memos, we’re getting a paper trail going. We could already see that there had been issues with Jayson that were brought to people’s attention from way back. So I went to Gerald and said, ‘You gotta get us a place to work.’ Within an hour, there were tech people coming through the newsroom with carts and taking our computers off our desks.” The team was moved to the eleventh floor, to a temporary office space.

  Outside of the third-floor newsroom, the eleventh floor is one of the busiest at the Times’s headquarters. The paper’s cafeteria is on the east side of the floor, through a pair of defunct turnstiles. The building’s ATM is there as well, and beyond that, on the west side of the floor, is a catchall office space. On one side are several rows of desks, where reporters sometimes come when they’re working in teams or on special projects. The other side houses the work space for the Times Magazine’s special supplement sections. In May 2003, James Glanz and Eric Lipton were in a room off the back, working on their book about the World Trade Center, City in the Sky. It was here that the Blair investigative team was first moved. “There was no way to get any privacy here,” says Steinberg. So he and his colleagues asked news administration to try to find a more secluded location.

  That afternoon, Glater, Liptak, and Steinberg, along with Manly and Kramon, assembled around a squawk box in one of the business department’s conference rooms and called Barstow in Portland. It was the first official meeting of the team that, in a bit of dark humor, some in the newsroom would call the Blair Witch Project. The meeting—and the assignment the team was asked to complete—was unprecedented in the history of The New York Times. The closest parallel to the team’s endgame—producing a published report on the paper’s doings—was an April 1, 1963, report filed by A. H. Raskin documenting the causes and repercussions of the 114-day newspaper strike that crippled the paper. (Raskin filed what amounted to a follow-up in 1974, detailing another bout of labor trouble for the Times and the city’s papers.) But the 1962–1963 newspaper strike had affected not only the Times; it had shut down all nine of the city’s daily papers, crippling the entire industry. The mayor’s office and then the White House got involved with the negotiations. Thousands of jobs and millions of readers were affected—Raskin estimated in his story that “600,000,000 daily and Sunday papers went unprinted.” The Times had to cover the newspaper strike if it had any hope of reestablishing itself in readers’ daily routines.

  Other times, the paper avoided reporting on its own mistakes. On May 6, 1964, at the height of race tensions in New York, the Times published a front-page story about the Blood Brothers, a black youth gang in Harlem that was said to be recruiting and training forces to kill whites. The article, by staff writer Junius Griffin, claimed the gang already had four hundred members who were being trained by dissident Black Muslims and were suspected in four recent murders of whites in Harlem.

  Almost immediately, the story came under fire. On May 11, the Times reported on page 27 that the NAACP had challenged law enforcement to prove the gang existed. “No doubt hoodlum groups do exist throughout the city and the crime rate is alarming, but it is inequitable, immoral and dangerously inflammable to scandalize an entire community on the basis of the flimsy evidence offered to date,” the NAACP said in a statement. The story was blamed by many in the black community for fanning the flames that led to the July riots that engulfed Harlem for five days. Griffin, the reporter, eventually resigned, and the story is now generally acknowledged to be wildly exaggerated, if not completely made up. The Times never published a retraction or correction of any kind relating to the Blood Brothers.

  More recently, when the Times has been faced with potential scandals concerning its journalistic standards, it has usually tried to address the matter quietly and privately—if at all. In 1991, when executive editor Max Frankel published a profile that identified Patricia Bowman, the woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith of rape, there was outrage in the newsroom that the Times had named an alleged rape victi
m. Anna Quindlen, then a Times Op-Ed page columnist, wrote a critical essay, calling the Bowman piece a “mistake.” Media watchers at other news outlets wrung their hands about the collapsing standards at the Good Gray Lady. But apart from a defensive editors’ note*37 that was published nine days after the initial story ran, the Times remained mostly silent on the controversy.

  Seven years later, under Joe Lelyveld, the Times once again faced criticism from within. This time, the subject was the initial paroxysm of the Monica Lewinsky coverage. The paper, some staffers felt, had ignored its own rules about sourcing and attribution in an effort to bite off a chunk of the story that was overwhelming the country. Lelyveld, who had been named executive editor in 1994, didn’t commission a reported review or order up an editors’ note. Instead, he asked Marty Baron, then an associate managing editor (and now the editor of The Boston Globe), who had been on vacation in Mexico when the story broke, to review the paper’s coverage. It was not an easy task for Baron, who was uncomfortable criticizing his colleagues’ decisions and understood both their intentions and the difficulty of the decisions they had had to make. “I feel a bit uneasy evaluating our performance in the matter of sourcing during the first wave of Lewinsky stories,” Baron wrote. “At the height of the frenzy, the biggest decision I had to make was whether dinner would be sea bass à la Veracruzana or chicken with mole sauce.”

  Baron’s report, which was circulated only internally, was harshly critical of the sourcing in two lead stories. He accused his colleagues of “repeating sensational reports . . . without confirming them,” “questionable exercises in mind-reading,” “passive voice . . . as a substitute for sourcing,” “speculation,” and “overstatement based on evidence seen or heard.” But readers of the Times never learned of Baron’s criticisms; indeed, for the most part the paper publicly defended its Lewinsky coverage.

  Almost three years later, Lelyveld again had to ask one of the paper’s insiders to conduct a review of reporting that had come under fire. This time the stories were about Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese American scientist who was fired from Los Alamos for security violations in March 1999. Over the next year and a half, the Times was often out in front of the story and just as often drew fire from media critics and Lee’s defenders, who argued the Times’s coverage had resulted in a witch hunt.

  When the din got too loud to ignore, Lelyveld asked Dave Jones, the former national editor who had competed with Lelyveld for the managing editor’s position under Max Frankel, to review the paper’s work. “Joe wanted me to just examine the coverage and tell him what I thought,” says Jones. “It wasn’t an assignment I was looking forward to. When Joe first came to me, I said, ‘Let this cup pass from my lips.’ But I felt an obligation to Joe and the paper, particularly since I was under contract.”

  Jones was allowed to interview anyone on staff, with the exception of the reporters who wrote the articles. At the end of his investigation, he told Lelyveld and Bill Keller, then the paper’s managing editor, that too much credulity had been given to the prosecutors, that there was a lack of adequate balance in the coverage, and that the paper hadn’t asked its science reporters to help with the coverage early in the story, which could have helped prevent problems that arose later. The lesson, Jones said, was to bring the full resources of the paper to bear on a story at the outset.

  Lelyveld and Keller, Jones says, seemed to agree. They commissioned an editors’ note, and on Tuesday, September 26, 2000, the paper ran a 1,600-word, unbylined, page two “From the Editors” column. It didn’t satisfy anyone. The Times reporters and editors who had been involved in the project felt attacked, and the paper’s critics were unappeased. The piece read, in part:

  As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion—and the stakes involved, a man’s liberty and reputation—convince us that a public accounting is warranted. . . . In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.

  It was these types of stories that would, at other papers, be addressed by an ombudsman, a quasi-independent person on a newspaper’s staff who investigated and reported on lapses in quality or judgment or addressed readers’ complaints. Since the first ombudsman was appointed in the United States, at Kentucky’s Courier-Journal and Louisville Times in 1967, many big-city papers, including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, had installed some type of public representative. The Times, however, had always resisted, both out of a fear that an insider critiquing the paper’s judgment would give ammunition to the paper’s ideological critics and out of a philosophical belief that all editors and reporters are meant to serve the public.

  When Raines decided to turn his reporters loose on Jayson Blair, he called Dave Jones at home and asked him to oversee the assignment. Jones was no longer under contract to the Times and, to his relief, was able to refuse. “This time,” Jones says, “I did let the cup pass from my lips.”

  —————

  BACK IN THE business-department conference room, members of Bill Schmidt’s office in news administration were guiding the reporters toward stories that deserved further examination. Using Blair’s expense reports and phone records, Schmidt’s staff had been able to determine several other instances when it seemed as if Blair had said he was on assignment but had remained in New York. Schmidt suggested the team pay particular attention to a dispatch from Hunt Valley, Maryland, where Blair had supposedly gone on March 24 to write about the parents of a marine who was missing in Iraq, and one from April 7 in Cleveland, Ohio, where Blair said he had interviewed Reverend Tandy Sloan, the father of a dead soldier. Liptak, meanwhile, was still talking with news administration over whether the team would have access to Blair’s personnel files. As a former Times in-house attorney, he’d been on the other side of transactions like these many times. Now, the paper’s lawyers were arguing that if they gave the reporting team access to Blair’s personnel records, they’d be obligated to share those records with other news outlets as well, an argument Liptak thought was specious.

  In the middle of the meeting, there was a knock on the door: Jayson Blair was on the phone and wanted to speak with Steinberg. Blair, ever mindful of the machinations of the media, told Steinberg he had a statement, and he was going to give it only to the Times and the Associated Press, thereby assuring it would be available to every paper in the country. “It was just a simple thing, expressing regret. We didn’t even write about it,” Steinberg says. “I just went back to the meeting and told them what he’d said.”

  From Portland, Barstow asked how many stories Blair had written, and the response that came back stunned everyone: over six hundred. “I said, ‘This is nuts,’ ” Barstow says. “ ‘We need to be real about the magnitude here.’ ”

  By Friday evening, the paper’s top editors agreed to assign at least one more reporter to the project. Kramon called Abby Goodnough, a reporter on the paper’s metro staff. “We needed someone else to help, at least just with the writing and wrapping it all together,” says Kramon. “I was aware, too, that this was an all-male team.” But Goodnough was out for the evening and didn’t get the call until the next day. Kramon also asked Joan Nassivera, the weekend editor for the metro desk, if she would call Dan Barry, then a general assignment reporter. Barry is a whippet-thin, aggressive reporter who cut his teeth at The Providence Journal, where he shared a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize for investigative projects. He grew up on Long Island, and the past several years had been overwhelming: He’d been diagnosed with cancer, had gone through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and had
written a memoir titled Pull Me Up. Barry can be overbearing, and he rubs some people the wrong way. Even Blair, who made a point of befriending as many people as he could, was intimidated by Barry; after Barry was warned about Blair’s supposed after-hours snooping in the Times’s offices, the two reporters didn’t speak for more than a year. But after Blair’s story on Reverend Sloan, Barry had sent Blair a congratulatory note. “It was a good story,” Barry says. “I told him so.” Blair so disbelieved that he would ever get a congratulatory note from Barry, he thought someone had hacked into the reporter’s computer and sent him the e-mail as a joke.

  By the time Barry’s name was put forward, he was already at home in New Jersey. Before Barry made up his mind, he called Jon Landman, the paper’s metro editor, on his cellphone. Landman was at Yankee Stadium for the first game of a three-game series with the Oakland A’s. “I hadn’t had the assignment explained to me by Glenn or anyone else,” Barry says. “I basically just wanted to know what the deal was. It sounded like kind of an internal affairs thing—like the assignment would involve going around and pulling people aside, including our superiors. And I wanted to be assured that this was going to be an endeavor of integrity.”

  “Anytime you’re doing a project that might end up casting a really bad light on the people who run the joint . . . these issues come up,” says Landman. “By that time, things were pretty poisonous. But I told him to do it. I thought it would be good for the paper. And I didn’t think anyone would let the process be corrupted.” At 11:30 that night, Dan Barry called back to the Times newsroom with the following message: “I’m in.” The final team was in place.

  ONE WEEK IN MAY

  On Saturday, May 3, Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan Glater, Glenn Kramon, Adam Liptak, Lorne Manly, and Jacques Steinberg met in their quarters on the eleventh floor of The New York Times to discuss their assignment. The marching orders were vague. The team was told to root out Blair’s errors and correct the record. At that point, they still weren’t sure if that meant they would be writing a story and supplying a list of corrections or just focusing on the errors. Jayson Blair had worked at the Times for four years. Were they expected to look at all his stories? Only the ones from the previous year? “We had no idea how deep this went,” says Barstow, who had flown back the night before from Portland. “It was literally a reporting problem: How do you begin? How do you attack the story? So we decided to focus first on the work he did on the national staff. That’s a more manageable series of time”—about six months—“and it was logical to us that if he was going to pull any funny business, it would be easier to do on a longer leash.”