Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  “Gerald, I tried to ask,” I said. “I called you a half-dozen times. I left messages with your secretary and with Catherine [Mathis, the Times’s spokeswoman]. If you don’t come to the phone, I need to use the information I have, and you were described by multiple people as having a mentoring relationship with Jayson.”

  Boyd said this was all part of Blair’s con. “Ask anyone,” he said. “I’m a straight shooter. If you have any questions, call.” Our conversation ended genially enough, but Boyd never answered or returned another phone call.

  On Tuesday, May 13, the day before the Times’s town hall meeting, when Newsweek’s top editors gathered to discuss the next week’s issue, there was talk of making the Times story a cover. The other option was a feature on American Idol, which was in the midst of crowning either Clay Aiken or Ruben Studdard as its winner. As the week went on and national attention became more frenzied, it became clear we were going to do the Times, and Jayson Blair, as our cover story.

  It was a sign of how much the scandal had festered in the two weeks since the Blair story broke. At the time, I wrote a weekly online media column for Newsweek, and on May 6, five days after Blair’s resignation, I filed a piece detailing the lack of national press attention bestowed on the opening of the Stax Museum of American Soul in Memphis. My only mention of Blair was a two-paragraph addendum at the end of the story. “Journalism—and the Times—will survive this scandal with their reputations more or less intact,” I had written. “We should all hope Jayson can move on as well.”

  At the time, this seemed like an appropriate response. Now, the story had become all-consuming.

  All week, I had been calling Blair on his cellphone, sometimes two or three times a day. On Thursday, May 15, the day after the town hall meeting and two days before we went to press, I sent Blair an e-mail. He and I had met once before, at an impromptu gathering of journalists at a downtown bar. I had heard that he was struggling to stay sober, and I was sympathetic; I had stopped using drugs and alcohol six years before, when I was in my mid-twenties. When the Times report first hit, people close to Blair had said they were worried about his mental state. I wrote to Blair:

  First off, I’m glad to hear you’re doing as well as possible. I mean that sincerely, and apart from any work related reasons I have for getting in touch. I know that’s the standard line—hope you’re doing well, blah blah, and now for the pitch. But it’s true.

  Separate from that, I’m working on a story about you and the Times. It’ll likely be our cover this week; right now it’s going to be a 9-page package.

  A large part of it is going to deal with you, and your history and work trajectory. Obviously right now the only people I’m able to really talk to are outsiders. There are many virtues of talking to a newsweekly, but there are many virtues of talking to anyplace, really, and many reasons not to talk, also. I just wanted to make sure I got in touch.

  If I don’t hear from you, and I have specific questions, I’ll at least send an email. And if you want to talk on or off the record, let me know, by calling here, or my cell or my home.

  Later that afternoon, Blair e-mailed me back, initiating a background dialogue he and I would maintain for the next several days. At the time, Blair told me I was the only journalist he was speaking with. We had several hour-long conversations and exchanged many e-mails. Blair seemed to alternate between grappling with a numbing realization of what he had done and delighting, with a sort of manic glee, in the attention he was getting. On Friday afternoon, he arranged for Ed Keating, a former Times photographer,*42 to meet him and Zuza Glowacka in downtown Manhattan so they could pose for the Newsweek story. In between shots, Blair would e-mail me from a public computer at a Kinko’s copy shop or call me on his cellphone. He posed for Keating as a tough guy, cigarette to his lips, eyes slightly narrowed, enjoying the theatrics of the shoot.

  On Saturday, Blair called to say he was ready to say something on the record. He had released only a couple of rote comments, and, he said, he’d give me his word that this would be the only thing he’d say to any print reporters. He read out his statement:

  I can’t say anything other than the fact that I feel a range of emotions including guilt, shame, sadness, betrayal, freedom and appreciation for those who have stood by me, been tough on me, and have taken the time to understand that there is a deeper story and not to believe everything they read in the newspapers.

  “That’s good, right?” Blair asked when he was done. “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, right?” He cackled and got off the phone.

  My editor, Tom Watson, and I worked on the 4,500-word story until midnight that night. I’d been covering the Times for two years, since Raines was named executive editor of the paper, and I had deep sources, institutional knowledge, and half a dozen Newsweek reporters helping me gather anecdotes. My “nut graf,” the summary of the story, read:

  This is the story of two men’s rise. Howell Raines, the swaggering, smooth-talking Southerner, had transformed the culture of the staid New York Times since stepping into the paper’s top editorial position in September 2001—elevating the chosen few, pushing his staff with an unrelenting ferocity and, in his first three months on the job, leading the paper to an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes, six of them for the paper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks. Jayson Blair, an awkward, overbearing, chain-smoking cub reporter, seemed to intuitively understand this, and was gaming his way to the upper echelon of Times reporters—his personal life unraveling even as he was handed ever more prominent and pressure-packed assignments by supervisors who warned him sternly about his problems while continuing to cheer him on. . . . Raines’s fondness for anointing young reporters as future stars put the two on a collision course—which destroyed one man’s career, seriously sullied the other’s and severely tarnished the reputation of an American institution in the process.

  The piece broke news about Blair’s history of cocaine and alcohol abuse and was critical of both Raines and Blair. The Newsweek story also made clear, in ways it would have been impossible for the Times to do, the extent to which people in the newsroom felt that Raines had created the problems that were engulfing the paper. “There was all this cordwood lying around,” I quoted one reporter as saying, referring to the anger and frustration at Raines’s leadership, “and then along came the spark.”

  The story was posted online on Sunday morning, May 18. The next day, the piece hit newsstands, with a full-page cover shot of Blair sucking on a cigarette. Blair, I found out later from a friend who lived in the area, went from newsstand to newsstand in Park Slope, Brooklyn, stocking up on copies of the issue—mementos of his moment of infamy.

  It’s safe to say that Howell Raines was not nearly as excited about his time in the spotlight. I made a perfunctory call to Raines, although I suspected he wouldn’t answer. I also called Catherine Mathis and was prepared for her to be angry with the extent to which I had laid the Blair fiasco, and the anger in the Times’s newsroom, at Raines’s feet. To my surprise, Mathis said the story was fair.

  I knew then that Howell Raines was truly in serious danger of losing his job.

  —————

  AFTER MY STORY was published, Blair agreed to speak with Sridhar Pappu, then The New York Observer’s media writer, whose 3,400-word article appeared on Wednesday, May 21. Blair used the opportunity to lash out at the Times, insult editors by name, and laugh at the paper’s troubles—all of it entirely on the record. “I don’t understand why I am the bumbling affirmative action hire when [former New Republic writer] Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid,” Blair told Pappu. “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.”

  On Tuesday, May 20, the same day Pappu’s interview was posted on the Observer’s website, Howell Raines sent out a memo in which he publicly repudiated many of the newsroom changes he had instituted during the past year. Earlier that day, Raines and Boyd had met with the paper’s masthead and department heads. Du
ring the meeting, many of the frustrations that had been brewing under the surface boiled over, and Raines capitulated across the board. Raines would, he wrote, “push authority on news coverage and staff assignments down to the department heads.” The desk heads, not the masthead, “are the managers who will have the first and most direct responsibility for running their departments and shaping their reports.” Department heads would “get heard more consistently in our hiring process.” Finally, Raines announced, Arthur Sulzberger had agreed to hire twenty new people for the newsroom. “This,” Raines wrote, “is a direct response to what so many of you said so eloquently about your work loads in last week’s [town hall] meeting.”

  Raines had come into his job loudly denouncing the bottom-up management of his predecessor. He’d argued that the “silo management” that was created when desk heads were given autonomy was ruining the Times. And he had told Ken Auletta that he refused to be “rattled by the friction of the moment.” “You have to set your sights on a beacon that is a journalistic ideal,” Raines had said. “It’s important not to get knocked off course by those winds of criticism.” Now, Raines was being knocked dramatically off course.

  But the Times’s—and Raines’s—saga wasn’t over yet. An ongoing internal investigation, started by an anonymous complaint a week earlier, had uncovered at least one egregious offense by Rick Bragg, one of Raines’s favorite writers on the paper. The previous June, Bragg had used an uncredited, unpaid stringer for what was essentially a puff feature on oyster fishermen in the Florida Panhandle.

  The story, published on the front page of the Times on June 15, 2002, was titled “An Oyster and a Way of Life, Both at Risk.” The lead read:

  The anchor is made from the crankshaft of a junked car, the hull is stained with bottom muck, but the big Johnson outboard motor is brand new. Chugging softly, it pushes the narrow oyster boat over Apalachicola Bay, gently intruding on the white egrets that slip like paper airplanes just overhead, and the jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water.

  The piece was infused with the kind of “being there” touches Raines looked for from Bragg. He described a fisherman “rhythmically stabbing at the soft sand.” He wrote about the disappearing mores of the Panhandle fishermen: “More and more, life here feels temporary. The water will change. The oystermen cannot control that, although some of them are trying.” The piece ended on this grace note: “The people have a toughness in them here. They can bear almost anything. It is only the bay that is fragile.” It was one of only three stories Bragg would write in June 2002, a time when the rest of the staff was being pushed to file three and four times per week.*43

  As it turns out, Bragg hadn’t even done the reporting for his story. Instead, he had dispatched J. Wes Yoder, a young reporter who served as a kind of personal stringer for Bragg, to Florida to do the on-the-ground research. Yoder had spent four nights in Apalachicola, Florida, interviewing fishermen and taking notes on the river before giving his notes to Bragg. Before he filed his story, Bragg flew down to Apalachicola, got off the plane, wandered around for a couple of hours, and flew back home. In Times parlance, this was referred to as the “toe-touch” dateline: A reporter would do research and interviews on the phone or rely on stringers’ notes and then fly in to a city just so the story could begin with the requisite indication that it had been written from the pertinent locale. Toe-touch datelines had become increasingly popular as Raines pushed his staff to cover more and more ground. Never, however, were they used on puff feature stories. On May 23, the Times ran an editors’ note on the almost year-old story:

  An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola.

  In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder.

  The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.

  The editors’ note wasn’t entirely fair: Bragg had long pushed for his stringers to get credit for their work; what’s more, it was virtually unheard-of for stringers to get bylines. Still, the note caused much snickering in the Times’s newsroom, where Bragg, who boasted about how he operated by a different set of rules from everyone else’s, was widely reviled. For years, reporters had been keeping track of their favorite Bragg corrections. One infamous story about a small-town Alabama newspaper couple who exposed corruption by a county sheriff was riddled with errors. Bragg wrote that the sheriff’s prison sentence was twenty-seven years; it was actually twenty-seven months. The editor who was profiled was fifty-nine, not in his “late 40’s.” The circulation of the paper in question was 7,125, not 6,000. And the newspaper’s investigation—the heart of Bragg’s piece—was published after the sheriff had repaid county money to buy his daughter an all-terrain vehicle, not before. Another Bragg story lamenting the fact that only two Las Vegas casinos still featured showgirls had later necessitated a correction that noted that, in fact, there were other casinos that continued to feature showgirls.

  Later that Friday, May 23, Times sources confirmed that Bragg had been suspended from the paper for two weeks. Bragg, however, wasn’t going to go down without a fight. On Monday, he gave an interview to The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. “Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants,” Bragg told Kurtz. In between quoting his own work by heart and saying he was “too mad to whine” about his suspension, Bragg said he had twice tried to quit the paper—once after a disagreement with an editor over a story—and both times Raines had intervened personally.*44

  Kurtz had been at Los Angeles International Airport on Memorial Day when he got Bragg’s call. Kurtz had gotten married the day before and was flying back to Washington that day. “I didn’t even have a pad with me,” Kurtz says. “I’m scribbling on pieces of paper like a madman, and now my wife comes by and says they’re starting to board the plane.” On the plane, Kurtz wrote out the piece in longhand and then called from an in-flight phone and dictated it to an editor at the Post’s office.

  Because Kurtz was writing from the air, he didn’t call anyone at the Times for comment on Bragg’s claims that other Times reporters relied on stringers and clerks to gather color for feature stories. Times reporters do use stringers, but the unwritten rule was that reporting help was used in situations in which a correspondent was unable to get to the scene himself, such as breaking news stories or trend pieces that relied on anecdotes from around the country. It was rare, if not unheard-of, to have stringers do the majority of reporting for color features. None of this explanation made it into Kurtz’s piece.

  As soon as the Post story was published, the Times’s national correspondents waited for someone to defend their reporting methods. No one did. “I told Howell that day that he should issue something to rebut [Bragg’s accusations],” says Floyd Norris. “He said he was thinking about it.” Part of the problem was that Bragg had repeatedly told Raines that because of his ongoing health problems, he was unable to do the type of travel required for his job. Raines had assured his star reporter time and again they’d find a way to work it out. “At that point,” says Norris, “I think Howell had gone from a forceful leader who relied upon his own opinions to a man who was hesitant to take decisive action.”

  On Wednesday, May 28, the paper’s reporters took matters into their own hands. That morning, Peter Kilborn, a national correspondent based in Washington, sent an e-mail to more than a dozen national staffers and the section’s two top editors. “Bragg’s comments in defense of his reportorial routines are outrageous,” he wrote. “I hope there is some wa
y that we as correspondents, alone or with the support of the desk, can get the word out there, within The Times and outside, that we do not operate that way. Blair lies, cheats, and steals. We don’t. Bragg says he works in a poisonous atmosphere. He’s the poison.” Within minutes, the e-mail had been forwarded to me.

  “I was really offended,” Kilborn said that day. “I bust my ass chasing facts and I go to weird places I’ve never been and I have to root around to get the story. The whole idea [of using stringers to do the bulk of the reporting] is anathema to decent journalism.”

  In his e-mail, Kilborn also voiced some of the resentment at Raines. “In the last couple of years, especially, I’ve bitched about being pushed into corner-cutting jams,” he wrote. “However intense the heat recently because of understaffing and demands to produce, we don’t take short cuts, and we don’t fake it.”

  “We’ve been understaffed on the national desk,” Kilborn said to me. “That means everybody’s got to work harder and faster when there are important developments. And there’s Bragg sitting in New Orleans and doing dick, not getting out of town. I certainly resented it.”

  Within minutes, other correspondents began responding to Kilborn’s message. “The problem is we’ve had a two-tier system that has allowed Bragg to carve out one system for him (cutting corners, using a huge stringer network, telling people he can’t be edited) and another for everyone else,” wrote national correspondent Timothy Egan. “Also, it’s long been an open joke among national staffers that anything Bragg wrote . . . gets on page one, automatically, while everyone else has to earn their way out front.” Todd Purdum, based in Washington, added, “Rick Bragg’s method is not typical. It’s aberrant and repellent. Some of our colleagues have known this for years. Now the world knows it, and we’re all the poorer.”