Gray Lady Down (6 page)

And so, writing about
Goodnight and Good Luck
in his 2006 Oscar predictions column, David Carr called the film “A well crafted look at a time in American history when anything less than complete fealty to the republic was seen as treason, which sounds familiar to some movie goers.” In a review of
Sophie Stoll
(2006), a World War II German period film about the fate of civil liberties under the Nazis, Stephen Holden said, “It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?” Holden also hailed Oliver Stone’s documentary about Hugo Chavez (2010) for depicting the anti-American Venezuelan dictator as “a rough-hewn but good-hearted man of the people whose bullheaded determination is softened by a sense of humor.” The television critic Anita Gates lauded a British show called
Cracker
for providing “the punch of confirmation that much of the rest of the world may indeed despise the United States for what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.” The choreographer Bill T. Jones’ performance piece
Blind Date
(2005) was praised by Ginia Bellafante for questioning “the expediency of war,” for reflecting on “limited opportunities for the urban poor,” and for remarking on “the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.”

The biggest erosion of the wall between news and opinion, however, came in the elevation of Howell Raines to the position of executive editor in 2001. The
Times
now practically dropped the pretense of objective reporting altogether, opting for crusading zeal and advocacy on a level heretofore unseen in the paper. Besides bringing dogmatic political opinions to the job, Raines blurred the line between news and opinion by putting editorial department staff into key newsroom positions. For example, he made the columnist Frank Rich an associate editor, with responsibilities for cultural coverage. Rich had been moved from the op-ed page to the Sunday Arts section, then back to the op-ed page on Sundays with a much bigger platform—usually at least half a
page. What the new position meant was that Rich was not only opining on various subjects linking culture and politics, but also determining how the
Times
was covering arts and culture.

Robert Samuelson of
Newsweek
commented on the changes that came to the
Times
with Howell Raines’ promotion:

Sulzberger tried to dismiss such concerns. “A great journalist knows the difference between those two roles. Howell is certainly a great journalist,” he insisted. But as Raines’ tenure proceeded, it would become abundantly clear that Samuelson’s prediction was right.

A
be Rosenthal’s funeral in 2006 became an occasion for nostalgia over the death of the
Times’
golden days, a recessional for the paper’s transition from the voice of America to an increasingly self-righteous, and politically correct, left-liberal publication. It also became a moment for pause when the effects of young Arthur’s fifteen-year reign could be evaluated.

It was not a pretty picture. In a relatively few years, a paper that had been known as the gold standard of American journalism had been tarnished by a string of embarrassing incidents, casting it in the harshest of spotlights, putting its credibility and even its patriotism on the line. Its newsroom had been accused of
hypocrisy, corruption, ineptitude, ethical misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, credulousness and, most seriously, ideological bias. The business side was equally under siege, and its board—stacked with Sulzbergers—had presided over a plummeting of stock value to half what it had been in 2002, with advertising revenues in free fall. This steady parade of embarrassing lowlights, where the
Times
had become the focus of the news instead of merely the bearer of it, had revealed cracks in its foundations and made it a target for public anger and derision—as well as a possible candidate for a corporate takeover.

Every time one of these incidents occurred, the
Times
and its partisan defenders—led by Arthur Jr. himself—had tried to depict it as an isolated case, refusing to acknowledge any pattern. But in aggregate these regularly occurring scandals and other expressions of journalistic dysfunction paint a damning portrait of an institution stumbling through chaos of its own making. As
Vanity Fair’
s Michael Wolff would write in May 2008, “The ever growing list of its own journalistic missteps, blunders, and offenses threatens to become one of the things the
Times
most stands for: putting its foot in it. And the expectation, both within the
Times
and among those who obsessively watch it, is that there is always some further black eye, calumny, screw-up, or remarkable instance of tone-deafness on the horizon.”

The list of major stumbles on the
Times’
downward path reads like a bill of particulars against the Sulzberger Jr. years, a chronicle of decline unparalleled in modern American media history.

 

The Blair Affair.
It began in the spring of 2003 with revelations that one of the paper’s rising African American reporters, Jayson Blair, had plagiarized and fabricated material in scores of articles over a four-year period, including such high-profile stories as the Washington D.C. sniper case in 2002, and U.S. casualties from the first months of the Iraq War in 2003. It ended when Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who had pledged in the pages of his own paper that there would be no newsroom scapegoats, fired his close friend and handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines, as well as the
managing editor, Gerald Boyd, the highest-ranking black ever in the newsroom. Facing a staff rebellion, public humiliation and a charge of bureaucratic disarray, Sulzberger admitted that the plagiarism scandal was “the low point in the paper’s 150 year history.”

The depressing story was told in the
Times’
own 14,000-word reconstruction of the Blair fiasco, headlined “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception.” This inquiry declared that Blair had “violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth.” It said that 36 of 73 articles Blair had written since he started to get national reporting assignments in October of the previous year had serious problems.

Blair, who had been at the
Times
for almost five years and had racked up an inordinate record of “corrections,” had used his cell phone, his laptop and access to databases, particularly photo databases, to “blur his true whereabouts” as he “fabricated comments,” “concocted scenes,” “lifted details from other newspapers and wire services” and “selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen something” in order to write falsely about some of the most “emotionally charged moments in recent history.” While Blair created the impression that he was emailing his editors from the field, on key stories he was sending these transmissions from his Brooklyn apartment or from another floor in the
Times
building. The report admitted that one of Blair’s biggest “scoops” on the D.C. sniper case, which involved a local police station confession by John Allen Muhammad that was allegedly cut short by turf-conscious U.S. attorneys, had five anonymous sources—all fake. Law-enforcement beat reporters in the Washington bureau had complained, but were ignored.

Touching on the combustible issue of racial preferences as a factor in Blair’s rise, the report explained that he had joined the
Times
through a minority-only internship and then was promoted to full-time reporter in January 2001, and that his immediate supervisor, Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor, objected but ultimately deferred to the paper’s “commitment to diversity.” Landman did
warn his higher-ups that editors had to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times,” but that memo had little effect. Although the
Times
denied any connection between Blair and the broader issue of affirmative action, such a conclusion was hard to get around. The recently retired
Times
columnist William Safire said, “Apparently, this 27-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious black journalist to succeed.”

As part of its lacerating self-inquiry, the paper held a special off-site “town meeting” of newsroom employees to address the worsening staff morale and many still-unanswered questions. Hundreds of
Times
newsroom personnel filed down the sidewalk into a rented Broadway movie theater in what one tabloid reporter standing next to me on-scene called “the world’s longest perp walk.” Nearby, a prankster costumed as “Baghdad Bob,” the infamously prevaricating former spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Information, held up a sign that said “New York Times Reporter: Will Lie for Food.”

The meeting, which Raines would later call “a disaster,” began with an odd statement from Arthur Jr.: “If we had done this [handling the Blair fiasco] right, we would not be here today. We didn’t do this right. We regret that deeply. It sucks.” From here, the meeting quickly degenerated into tense, angry, profanity-laced accusations. Raines and his deputies, one editor charged, had lost “the confidence of much of the newsroom.”

To the surprise of many, Raines admitted that Blair had been a beneficiary of racial favoritism. “Where I come from, when it comes to principles on race, you have to pick a ditch to die in,” Raines intoned in his best Southern drawl. “And let it come rough or smooth, you’ll find me in the trenches for justice. Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously,” he continued. “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 heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.” Raines also said he had no intention of stepping down voluntarily. To which Sulzberger chimed, “If he were to offer his resignation, I would not accept it.”

Sulzberger’s tone-deafness and the vote of confidence in Raines left many staffers deflated. One
Times
reporter told
New York
magazine that the meeting “only served to make the scandal—and the mockery—to build.” Even late-night comedians like Letterman and Leno got into the act. The old slogan at the
Times,
“All the news that’s fit to print,” had just been replaced by a new one, Letterman declared: “We make it up.”

As it unfolded, the scandal sorely tested the friendship and ideological affinity between Raines and Sulzberger, as well as Sulzberger’s public pledge that there would be no newsroom scapegoats. The day after members of the influential Washington bureau convinced him that the paper would never recover until the two top editors left, Sulzberger stood in the newsroom and announced that Raines and Boyd would step down. He implied that the departures were voluntary, saying he wanted to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.” In an interview afterward, Sulzberger emphasized that he had not been pressured to fire them, either by the board or by family shareholders. (Within months, Raines would go on television flatly contradicting Sulzberger; according to Raines, after returning from D.C. that day Sulzberger had told him “there was too much blood on the floor” for him to remain.) The headline on the page-one
Times
story said only: “Times’s 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer’s Fraud.” Like much of what Jayson Blair wrote, the headline that closed the scandalous circle was a lie.

 

Sulzberger’s Ill-Considered Public Utterances.
The countercultural values that Sulzberger likes to flaunt generated notable controversy when he gave a commencement speech at the State University of New York at New Paltz in May 2006. Coming so shortly after Rosenthal’s death and the weeklong celebration of his journalistic values—especially his dedication to keeping the paper “straight”—Sulzberger’s speech attracted wide attention, and was featured on talk radio and cable news across the nation.

The core of the speech was a generational expression of guilt over the horrible condition of the world that the graduates would
be entering. When he was a student, Sulzberger said, only slightly tongue in cheek, young people had helped end the war and forced Nixon’s resignation. “We entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that,” Sulzberger said. “So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

Critics found the speech a risible compendium of 1960s romanticism, generational vanity and self-conferred moral superiority. It reflected a misunderstood conflation of interest-group politics—illegal aliens, gays, abortion—with “fundamental rights.” Citing the speech’s defeatism and gloom, the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham summarized much of the media reaction when she declared Sulzberger “the most negative media figure” in the country, “the Grim Reaper of American Journalism.” In Sulzberger’s worldview, she said, “it’s not ‘Morning in America,’ it’s evening and there’s no end in sight.”

 

Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Judith Miller’s erroneous reporting on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction led many, especially on the left, to charge that the
Times
had become a propaganda conduit for the Bush administration. Miller was close to the administration both professionally and personally. She was also close to the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who turned out to be unreliable on many fronts. According to columnist/blogger Arianna Huffington, Miller and others in the media who followed her lead were guilty of “selling a war to the American public based on lies.” Some of Miller’s reporting, even some of her wording, was used by administration officials as they made the prewar rounds on the Sunday talk shows to warn about “mushroom clouds” appearing on the horizon. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, the
Times
conducted a postmortem, combing through Miller’s reporting; this resulted in mortifying
mea culpas
in both a special “editor’s note” and an editorial admitting that the paper had been “taken in.”