Hard News (27 page)

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 more, 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.

T
HE
F
ALLOUT

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.

“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.”