Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  Raines asked whether it was too late, whether the toothpaste could be put back in the tube.

  “I don’t know,” Barstow said.

  After about forty-five minutes, Raines said he had to attend to something. Barstow left. Twenty minutes later, Raines called Barstow back into his office.

  “What are my strengths?” Raines asked. “What do people like about me?”

  Barstow told Raines he was a great journalist. He reminded Raines of the blistering, emotional editorial he had written when Robert McNamara had published his memoir. “You have a voice, and people need to hear that voice now,” Barstow said.

  “I like the guy,” Barstow says. “I like his passion for journalism. I like his balls, I like his guts. And I liked the basic idea of going like hell after the big stories. . . . What I was saying was not said to stick it to him, it was said because I wanted to see him survive. To do that, he needed good information, and I didn’t think he was getting it. And if this pissed him off or if he took offense, I didn’t give a fuck.”

  That afternoon, at 2:31 p.m., Raines sent out another staffwide e-mail message:

  As mentioned in yesterday’s memo, I have spent much of the last two days conferring with the reporters and editors who wrote the story on Jayson Blair in the Sunday paper. Their advice and those of some of our senior reporters made it clear that we need a meeting of our entire staff, rather than the series of smaller meetings announced yesterday. With apologies for the lateness of this message, I am canceling the meetings we had scheduled for this afternoon. Arthur, Gerald and I have decided to have a town hall meeting tomorrow at a time and place to be announced as soon as a venue is secured.

  Writing about this period of time for The Atlantic, Raines said he knew, following the publication of the May 11 report, that he would probably lose his job. “I knew at that point,” he wrote of his reaction after initially reading the piece, “that I was unlikely to survive.”*39 If this was true, it wasn’t the impression he was giving any of the people he was speaking with, and his frenzied activity over the next several weeks did not feel to anyone who encountered him like that of a man resigned to his fate.

  A FATEFUL GATHERING

  The town hall meeting on Wednesday, May 14, 2003, was another in a long series of unprecedented events for The New York Times. Because the meeting was scheduled so hastily and on a Wednesday—the traditional day for matinee performances—the company wasn’t able to secure one of the Broadway theaters it usually borrowed for companywide gatherings. Instead, the Times rented out the Loews Cineplex Astor Plaza movie theater (bumping the afternoon showing of the John Cusack–Ray Liotta thriller Identity), located at 1515 Broadway, around the corner from the paper’s headquarters. Unlike theaters, movie houses don’t have stage entrances, and Arthur Sulzberger, Howell Raines, and Gerald Boyd were forced to endure what became a sort of perp walk for photographers and TV crews, as they came in through the theater’s front door. All three men smiled grimly for the cameras. Boyd, wearing a dark suit and tie, looked uncomfortable and stiff—“like an undertaker,” one Times executive quipped. Raines and Sulzberger, both of whom were tieless, strove for a common touch.

  Here, finally, was the irresistible visual that television had been lacking. Up to this point, TV news reports on the scandal tended to feature a single stock photo of Blair, recycled footage of Sulzberger and Raines, or still shots of the Times’s May 11 front page to illustrate the story. Now there was a farcical mob scene to record. By 2:00 p.m., a half hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin, the sidewalk in front of the theater was jammed with dozens of reporters, photographers, and news cameras. Two pairs of uniformed security guards manned the theater’s front doors, checking employees’ identification badges as they entered—every Times employee was invited, and the paper’s dozens of bureaus listened in by speakerphone. Sheila Sharkey, a tourist from Northern Ireland, walked over to check out the scrum as she was making her way through Times Square. “You’re kidding,” she said when told what was going on. “These aren’t movie stars?” A protester wearing a mask of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf—the Iraqi information minister known as “Baghdad Bob”—held up a sign that read FORMER NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER WILL LIE FOR FOOD. “Hi, my name is Howell, and I’m a liar,” he chanted as each new wave of employees marched by. As if all this weren’t humiliating enough, the day before, the Times had confirmed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York had requested details about Blair’s deceptions to determine whether “[Jayson Blair’s] reporting conduct violated the law.”

  No outside reporters were allowed in the Loews theater that day, and the Times brass stressed that the forum should be considered a private affair. Even Jacques Steinberg, who would write an account of the meeting for the next day’s Times, was forced to remain outside the theater along with the rest of the media reporters covering the event. (Lorne Manly, who would edit Steinberg’s piece, was allowed inside.) But the traditional solicitude the Times’s employees felt about the paper—or at least their usual fear of openly defying their bosses’ wishes—had disappeared. Times reporters, including one former metro editor, furiously scribbled notes, not only to relay to Steinberg but also for media reporters around the country. At least one person tape-recorded the meeting. Al Siegal, a symbol of the Times establishment if there ever was one, took care to sit next to a young African American reporter. “I wanted to show solidarity with a class of people in the newsroom who had real reason to be concerned about their career prospects,” he says. The meeting had been called to clear the air about the deceptions of Jayson Blair, but the presence of Raines, Boyd, and Sulzberger onstage, facing more than five hundred of the paper’s employees, created an us-versus-them atmosphere.

  For years, Sulzberger had been criticized for failing to convey an appropriate level of seriousness and gravitas in just these types of large employee forums. A decade earlier, onstage at another companywide meeting, he had told a forty-year-old employee who was concerned about the company’s 401(k) plan, “You’re too young to be worried about that,” a comment that did nothing to placate the anxious employee but did advance the notion that Sulzberger was cut off from both his employees and the real world. From the onset of the May 14 meeting, the staff was both restless and craving reassurance: It wouldn’t take much to tip them in either direction. Sulzberger, who for years had struggled to make his jokes seem funny without veering into the nasty or inappropriate, didn’t get off to an auspicious start. He began the meeting by taking a small stuffed moose out of a bag and tossing it over to Raines, who seemed embarrassed by his boss’s awkward gesture. The moose, Sulzberger explained, was an old Times symbol, signifying a commitment to talking about the obvious, and obviously uncomfortable, issues on the table. Then Sulzberger summed up his feelings about the past several weeks. “If we had done this right, we wouldn’t be here today,” he said. “We didn’t do this right. We regret that deeply. It sucks.” The stuffed moose, coupled with what many saw as Sulzberger’s inappropriately breezy tone, didn’t make anybody feel better. “He’s leading the newspaper,” one editor later recalled. “We deal in words. We’re professionals. And the best he can come up with is, ‘It sucks’? Well, he’s right: He sucked.”

  When it was Raines’s turn to speak, he did his best to push the discussion beyond the turmoil of the past two weeks. “I’ve received a lot of advice on what to say to you today, all of it well intended,” Raines said. “The best came from reporters who told me to speak to you from my heart. So the first thing I’m going to tell you is that I’m here to listen to your anger, wherever it’s directed. To tell you that I know our institution has been damaged, that I accept my responsibility for it and I intend to fix it.”

  Raines went on to tick off what David Barstow, Clyde Haberman, Joyce Purnick, and Floyd Norris had told him over the past two days. “You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,” he said. “I heard that you were convinced there’s a star system that singles out my f
avorites for elevation. Fear is a problem to such an extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news.” Raines also talked about diversity. “Where I come from, when it comes to principles on race, you have to pick a ditch to die in. And let it come rough or smooth, you’ll find me in the trenches for justice.” Jayson Blair, Raines said, seemed to be a promising young minority reporter. “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my own heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”*40

  Raines was trying to defuse the criticism that he was already hearing, criticism that Jayson Blair was favored because he was a sycophant or because Raines and Boyd had been trying to stick it to Jon Landman and Jill Abramson by championing a young reporter they didn’t trust. But in trying to do that, Raines made some of the paper’s black staffers feel as if they had all been unfairly placed under a cloud of suspicion—as if they, too, were the beneficiaries of a privileged white man’s guilt. Gerald Boyd, the man Raines had so proudly appointed as the highest-ranking African American on the paper’s editorial staff, seemed particularly uncomfortable in his seat on the stage.

  When it was his turn to talk, Boyd was defensive. Echoing a theme he had returned to time and again in the past two weeks, he stressed his lack of involvement with Jayson Blair’s career. “Did I pat him on the back?” Boyd asked. “Did I say, ‘Hang in there’? Yes, but I did that with everybody.” Boyd again refused to accept responsibility for appointing Jayson Blair to the sniper team. Finally, Raines stepped in and said that as executive editor, he accepted the ultimate responsibility for Blair.

  The public crow eating continued. Landman, Raines said, had been “right all along” about Blair. Boyd admitted he had never told national editor Jim Roberts about Blair’s warnings or track record.

  Then the questions began. It quickly became clear that a year and a half’s worth of anger and resentment was about to come pouring out. Alex Berenson, a business reporter, stood up and asked what he’d ask any other leader in that situation: Would Raines resign? It was an obvious question, but a shocking one all the same. “My plan is to have this job and perform it with every fiber in my body,” Raines said, “as long as [Sulzberger]” will allow it. The publisher jumped in: “If he were to offer his resignation, I would not accept it.”

  Shaila Dewan, a woman on the paper’s metro staff, spoke up. “I’ve been at the Times for three years,” she said. “I was hired the same year as Jayson. And my grief over this situation has only shown me how much I have invested in this institution.” Then Dewan lit into the paper’s leaders. “I have heard no comment on the message inherent in this saga for young reporters. The message is that we would do better to spend our time nominating editors for national awards and chatting about basketball than doing our work. And since we’re all being so honest”—here Dewan alluded to Marc Santora, a rookie reporter who had been stationed in Iraq after a stint as Maureen Dowd’s assistant—“I’ll go ahead and say that some of us might have surmised that we would have been smarter to pursue a job as a columnist’s assistant than spending our time getting newsroom experience.”

  Dewan wasn’t finished. “For women, the message is particularly surreal. Apparently it is possible to assemble a team of eight Times staffers to investigate Jayson Blair, and report their findings to the executive editor, and have it consist of all men. And that is not the first time such a team has been assembled in my brief tenure at the Times. Were there no hungry reporters without Jayson Blair’s record who could have been steered to the understaffed national desk [to cover the sniper shootings]? What will you do to restore faith that there is at least a modicum of fairness in the advancement process at the Times?”

  The longer the questions went on, the more evident it became that the Jayson Blair controversy—at least for the men and women of The New York Times—wasn’t about Jayson Blair at all. It was about Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and the staff was virtually united in its frustration and anger. At one point, Jon Landman clarified something about his now infamous “stop Jayson” memo. He was roundly applauded.

  The afternoon’s most galvanizing moment came when Joe Sexton, one of Landman’s deputy editors, stood to speak. “I believe at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom,” Sexton said. “I do not feel a sense of trust and reassurance that judgments are properly made. People feel less led than bullied.” Sexton went on to ask Raines why no one had asked about Blair’s sources on the sniper stories. At one point, Sexton, who has a notoriously foul mouth, swore.

  At that, Raines, who had been so careful to remain calm, erupted. “Don’t demagogue me,” he shouted, and reprimanded Sexton for cursing in a public forum. And with that, any small steps toward conciliation Raines had managed to make were erased. “It felt like everything up to that was just a show,” a reporter said later that day. “And here was the real Howell once again.” Raines, perhaps realizing his mistake, quickly apologized for “acting prickly,” explaining, “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  More than two hours after it began, the meeting broke up and hundreds of Times staffers made their way back across Broadway. The meeting, almost everyone agreed later, had been an ill-conceived nightmare. “When I was suggesting he talk to the staff, I assumed he would do it in the newsroom,” says Barstow. “I wasn’t suggesting a movie theater.” Even Punch Sulzberger told friends that the meeting had likely been a mistake, creating an opening for more staff unrest and critical outside coverage.

  That night, Howell Raines walked out into the newsroom as the evening coffee cart was being pushed around. For one of the first times in his tenure, he was walking the floor, but it was clear that perfunctory meanderings through the newsroom weren’t going to heal the rift. The next day’s local newspapers featured descriptions of the staff meeting and Raines’s apparent effort to appear more accessible, as well as what seemed to be the staff consensus: Howell Raines was failing.

  Jack Rosenthal, Raines’s predecessor as editorial-page editor and the current head of the Times Company’s charitable foundation, says the staff united against Raines in that meeting. “The fascinating thing,” Rosenthal says, “is when the hard questions were asked of Raines, like ‘Will you resign?’ the room exploded with applause. What the applause said to me was this staff wants to protect people for exposing themselves to danger. They were saying, ‘We’re one.’ ”

  “It only became scary to me at the staff meeting,” says Al Siegal. “The sense of a pure, deep dysfunction, with a level of personal animus that was getting in the way of our journalism, became clear there. And I still haven’t quite recovered. The depth of the pessimism, the depth of the anger, was just unbelievable.”

  Even readers were lining up to take their whacks. On Friday, the Times ran a letter from Francis W. Rodgers from Rensselaer, New York. “Closing The Times’s ‘town-hall-style’ meeting to news coverage was ironic,” Rodgers wrote. “The newspaper now joins those who were urged by The Times to be more open; remember Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy meetings and the final Senate deliberations on the Clinton impeachment. . . . Publication of a transcript of the meeting would have been appropriate.”

  Indeed, so intense was the furor over Raines that even Jayson Blair had been consigned to a supporting role. Blair spent the day of the meeting conferring with his literary agent, trying to figure out if there was a way to monetize his newly found infamy. He seemed oblivious to the pain his actions had caused his former colleagues. At 9:45 that night, he sent out an e-mail to people in his computer’s address book, including a number of Times staffers. “hey folks,” Blair wrote, “this is my new email address. feel free to forward it to anyone who asks to reach me. spread the word to those who still care that i am holding up as well as possible and love so many of you. I [sic] time will come for mo
re, but it’s not here yet. all the best, jayson.”

  The next weeks brought no relief for the Times. On Thursday, May 15, a Times spokeswoman grudgingly acknowledged that the paper was looking into other reporters after questions had been raised about their reporting. The Drudge Report briefly posted an item listing Rick Bragg as one of the writers being investigated and then just as quickly took it down.

  THE FALLOUT

  For media critics as well as the Times’s admirers (and enemies), the scandal was nothing short of mesmerizing; I certainly found myself transfixed. I had spent the previous year working as the media writer for Newsweek as well as helping to write and occasionally edit the magazine’s national affairs section. Newsweek’s deadlines are on Saturday evening, and after the Times’s four-page report was released on the afternoon of Saturday, May 10, we scrambled to crash two pages into that week’s magazine. Both Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had turned down repeated interview requests all week.

  Toward the end of the story, I wrote about Boyd’s relationship with Jayson Blair:

  Blair’s close mentoring relationship with Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who is also black, was not explored in depth in the paper. Blair wrote Boyd’s biographical sketch in the Times’s internal newsletter when Boyd was named managing editor. Blair was known to brag about his close personal relationships with both Boyd and Raines, and the young writer frequently took cigarette breaks with Boyd.

  On Monday, Boyd called me and Mark Whitaker, Newsweek’s editor. In his conversation with me, Boyd, his deep voice steady, acknowledged that Blair had nominated him for a National Association of Black Journalists Journalist of the Year Award, an honor that Boyd had won, and also said that Blair had, in fact, written a page-long profile of him for the Times’s in-house newsletter.*41 (Howell Raines’s bio was written by Maureen Dowd, once one of Raines’s closest friends on the paper’s staff.) But, Boyd said, he had never had a close mentoring relationship—or any kind of relationship—with Jayson Blair. If I had only bothered to ask, he said, he would have told me this himself. I took notes on the conversation, because I knew it was likely the only chance I’d get to speak with Boyd.