Hard News (24 page)

Jon, I haven’t seen the English language paper in months, and suddenly I was reading this one. It was a jolt. I know that people who put this thing out everyday [
sic
] probably take it for granted, but it was a moment of discovery for my translator and rediscovery for me, and it’s incredible how just this one day of production made a lot of us over here feel pretty fucking good.

Chivers sent the e-mail during a particularly bleak period for
Times
staffers. Landman forwarded the e-mail to Howell Raines, and the two men decided to print up T-shirts for the metro staff, with
ZORA
!
ZORA
!
on the front and
SO MUCH
!
SO MUCH
! on the back.

By Thursday, May 8, the Blair team had been working around the clock for four days. The fourth-floor room they were working in was unventilated. “My shirt was getting rancid. My teammates were complaining,” says Barstow. After printing up the
ZORA
!
ZORA
!
shirts, Landman had given one to Barstow, which he stowed away in his desk. On Thursday, desperate for some clean clothes, Barstow walked down to his regular desk, got the shirt out of his drawer, and put it on. But the newsroom had by that time become so divided and suspicious that even Barstow’s change of clothes was seen as a significant, cloaked message. “I’m walking through the newsroom, and I’m starting to get this weird vibe,” Barstow says. “At that point so much of the staff was convinced of this Landman-versus-Howell thing that some people interpreted my wearing the shirt as my giving a shout-out to the Landman faction.” That day, he and Dan Barry went to a Gap store in Times Square to buy fresh clothes for their Friday interview with Raines.

The reporting team wasn’t getting much sleep, and the pressure to produce a story was mounting. On Thursday night, May 8, the reporters met in the page-one conference room to map out their assignment. It was still somehow supposed to come in somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 words. Instead of quibbling over word counts, Glenn Kramon told the reporters to just write as much as they felt was needed. If the story deserved the space, Kramon said, it would get it. Time, too, was becoming an issue. The reporters knew that Raines was hoping to get the story into Sunday’s paper, which meant they’d need to produce a draft by Friday night. Because the
Times
produces a bulldog edition of its Sunday edition that’s available on New York City newsstands on Saturday evening, they’d lose almost a full day of reporting time.

Dan Barry and David Barstow both live in suburban New Jersey, but for most of that week they remained in Times Square. One night, they caught a catnap for a couple of hours in a small windowless reception area to one side of the elevator bank on the third floor. Even when they tried to grab some sleep in a hotel, they were stymied. On Friday morning, Dan Barry wrote until almost 4:00 a.m. and then was going to trudge over to a recently opened Westin hotel on Forty-third Street. When he got to the
Times
’s lobby, he couldn’t leave because the floor was being waxed. Finally, he was allowed to tiptoe out and walked the half block west to the hotel. “I get to the front desk, and the guy says he can’t check me in right away because the computers were down. So I just sat there, just so tired, until after five in the morning. And then finally they let me in, and I slept for an hour and a half and came back to the office.” The Westin had recently introduced a new feature, the Heavenly Bed. It included a custom-designed pillow-top mattress, three sheets, and a down blanket. Even though—or maybe because—Barry slept in his for only ninety minutes, he said it more than lived up to its billing.

Dan Barry and David Barstow delivered a preliminary draft of the story on Friday morning, May 9. At 9:00 a.m., they were due for their final interview with Howell Raines. It would be the last time they would talk to him before they filed their story the next day. “We did not look like two professionals in the mother ship,” says Barry. “I’m completely unshaven,” says Barstow. “We looked like two hungover, mangy dogs.”

By then, Raines’s demeanor had changed. Earlier in the week, he had been comfortable with the explanation that Jayson Blair was a sociopathic reporter who would have been impossible to catch under any circumstances. By Friday, as the team’s understanding of the situation grew, Raines’s own self-confidence had waned. Yes, Blair was a sociopath. But there had been ample warnings, and at times Raines and Boyd seemed pointedly to ignore those warnings because of their disdain for the editors who were doing the warning. Raines was taking dozens of media calls a day, and on some level he must have realized that he was fighting for his job. At 9:00 a.m., when Barry and Barstow showed up at his door, he had still not said whether or not he’d edit the final piece.

“At that point in time, given how tired we were, I felt like I just found my foundation in the core principles of journalism,” Barstow says. “We were blocking and tackling, reverting to the basic essence of who you are when you go in to talk to a powerful person.” Barry agrees. “There was little sense of us talking to our superior,” he says. “All three of us had our game faces on.”

The two reporters each had his own legal pad on which he’d listed topics to address. How well did Raines know Jayson Blair? What was Raines’s connection to Blair’s girlfriend, Zuza Glowacka? How had Raines responded to complaints from the federal prosecutor about Blair’s sniper coverage? Had Raines ever seen Blair’s personnel files? Had he been aware of his problems on the metro staff? Had he seen the infamous Landman e-mail? Had he signed off on Blair’s promotion to the national staff?

“He did all the things you typically see in those kinds of interviews,” says Barstow. “Sometimes he used Rumsfeldian intimidation. Sometimes it was Clintonian hairsplitting.” Raines had his own written notes, and he referred to them frequently. “This,” Barry says, “could not have been fun for him.”

The interview lasted nearly three hours. At the end, Barry and Barstow told the executive editor of
The New York Times
the extent of Blair’s deception—that of the seventy-three stories Blair had written between October 2002 and May 2003, at least thirty-six had substantial problems. “He was floored,” Barry says. “He didn’t know that.”

As dismaying as the investigation was for the team, they appreciated a good story and were proud of their work. “In the piece, we were already heading in the direction of this being a low point in the 152-year history of the paper, and this was our scoop,” Barry says. “We didn’t want [Raines] to deliver it to our competitors.” The reporters knew when the news broke that Blair had falsified dozens of stories, it would become one of the biggest journalistic scandals ever. They also felt sure that the fiercely competitive Raines would protect the scoop for the paper he ran, even if it was a personally painful exclusive. “We’re walking out the door,” Barry says, “and we tell him we’d hope he’d keep it to himself. He assured us that he would keep this as a
Times
exclusive. Then we shook hands and walked back up to the fourth floor.”

Raines had also finally agreed not to read the report unless there was a last-minute need. Sulzberger, too, had called Siegal to ask if there was any reason he needed to see the piece before publication.

“Clearly, if you’re putting a story in the paper that bears upon the organization being dysfunctional and is going to reflect badly on its top leadership, a case can be made that the publisher should see it ahead of time, or the executive editor, or both,” Siegal says. “But given the climate of opinion and morale in this newsroom, I think they saw value in being able to say, ‘Let the chips fall where they may.’ At that time, I was conscious of the nervousness of the reporting team, which had asked me several times and at many stages, ‘Are you sure that what we write is going to go in the paper?’ And I told them, ‘What you write is going to go into the paper if I think it is accurate, responsible, and proportional.’ ”

Siegal asked Craig Whitney and John Geddes, two other assistant managing editors, to read the finished piece with him. They decided that if all three men did not agree unanimously that the report was responsible and complete, they would either get it fixed or go to Raines with their concerns. On Friday night, the three assistant managing editors read a draft of the piece. There were several small holes that needed filling, a handful of explanations still needed. But these were minor issues. “The team immediately agreed [to the fixes],” Siegal says. “There weren’t many problems with the piece.” There was no need, the men decided, for Howell Raines to see it before publication.

—————

T
HAT
F
RIDAY
, M
AY
9, at 6:00 p.m., Raines appeared on PBS’s
NewsHour,
where he spoke with former
Times
correspondent Terence Smith. Raines wore glasses and a striped tie, and he looked puffy and exhausted. He described the formation of the reporting team:

We also told this team that we wanted them to have full access to all executives of the
Times,
including me, and to the information that we possessed. And we also assured them that their findings would go in the paper in an independent way. My plan is to read this story for the first time on Sunday—if they’re able to get it ready in time for Sunday—along with the rest of our readers.

Smith then asked Raines to explain how Blair’s deceptions had been discovered and what else was being done to examine his work. Raines answered:

One of the things that we have asked this reporting group to do is to work through the record. They tell me, in the course of interviewing me today, two of our reporters told me that they had already found 36 instances of fabrication. As I say, we’re committed to fully disclosing every circumstance of this.

On the fourth floor, Jacques Steinberg’s phone rang. It was a colleague from the Washington bureau who said he had no idea there had been so many stories. When Steinberg asked him what he meant, he repeated what Raines had just said on TV. “I said to the other guys, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Howell just went on PBS and gave them the thirty-six number,’ ” Steinberg says.

Barstow and Barry were furious. They flew out the door and bounded down the stairs connecting the third and fourth floors, looking for Raines. They never found him and eventually calmed down. “It was probably good we didn’t find him right then,” says Barstow. “He was exhausted. We were exhausted. For all we know, he just forgot about his promise.”

All that night and into the next morning, the team banged out the final version of their story. They knew many on the paper’s staff were hoping for a takedown of the paper’s leadership. “It was pretty palpable that week that there were a sizable number of people on
The New York Times
that wanted this to be the story of Howell Raines,” Barstow says. “This one incident at long last revealed all the pent-up grievances about Howell’s tenure as executive editor. And it wasn’t that we didn’t feel this was a valid subject of inquiry down the road, but on this story, our assignment was to explain Jayson Blair. And even just writing about how he carried all this out was going to mean we were pushing our six-thousand-word limit [for two of the
Times
’s inside pages]. It was ludicrous to try to attempt to do a broader exposé on Howell Raines and all the crosscurrents of resentments—arguments and counterarguments about fights with other editors and his star system. But that was what a sizable contingent in the newsroom wanted.” Barry agrees. “We weren’t looking to effect regime change,” he says. “And we didn’t harbor any personal animus for Gerald and Howell. In my case, at least, those two men treated me well.”

“We all in some way love the institution,” says Barstow. “It’s a complicated love, but there was a sense that the best service we could do here was use all of our combined skills to do the most complete job we could humanly do.

“I remember thinking before that the great lesson in American history is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. We wanted this work to represent the fullest picture possible. I was astonished at what had happened to [the accounting firm] Arthur Andersen—here’s this great institution, and it is no more because of shredded documents. We wanted to make sure that didn’t happen here.”

T
HE
T
IMES’S
R
EPORT

On Saturday, May 10, Catherine Mathis was at her weekend home in New Jersey. Mathis, the
Times
’s relentlessly cheery spokeswoman, openly admits she has “drunk the Kool-Aid” when it comes to
The New York Times.
Unlike previous
Times
spokespeople, Mathis doesn’t treat media reporters as if they are an annoyance, and she doesn’t act as though she’s doing favors when she parcels out information.

Like the rest of the media world, Mathis was waiting for the
Times
’s story on Jayson Blair to hit. At 1:00 p.m. that Saturday, pieces of the
Times
report began to be posted on the Web. The completed version, posted soon after, clocked in at 7,102 words, or two full pages of the Sunday paper. Two more pages and another 6,439 words were spent correcting errors in Blair’s stories.