Hard News (13 page)

Rick Bragg, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere. Copy editors were again explicitly instructed to lay off his work, and Raines gave the general impression that his stories, no matter their topic, were invariably destined for page one. In fact, of the twenty-three stories Bragg filed in the first six months of 2002—for an average of less than one story a week—fourteen ran on the front page. “Florida Town Finds Satan an Offense Unto It,” was the headline for one Bragg front-page dispatch; “Key West Is Tiring of Chickens in Road,” read another. In Salt Lake City, where Raines dispatched Bragg to write about the 2002 Winter Olympics, Bragg had boasted to other
Times
writers about his relationship with the paper’s executive editor; at one lavish dinner, he insisted on picking up the check, explaining, “Howell won’t mind.”

It’s easy to see why the unabashedly literary, confident Bragg appealed so strongly to Raines, a man who still hoped one day to be known as a great novelist. The author’s bio in Raines’s 1977 novel,
Whiskey Man,
reads, “Howell Raines grew up among great storytellers from the hill countries of northern Alabama,” just the kind of self-conscious detail Bragg favored in his writings. In many ways
Whiskey Man,
which centered on a young man living in Prohibition-era Alabama, struggling to break free from his Scripture-quoting father while falling under the influence of a bootlegger named Bluenose, was filled with the kind of down-home flourishes that Bragg used to strong effect in his newspaper work.

As Howell Raines continued to indulge his favorites, he also maintained his dismissive attitude toward those whose opinions and perspectives differed from his own. Investigative editor Stephen Engelberg, who had clashed with Raines over the September 11 coverage, was beginning to find the
Times
’s new order unbearable. By the spring of 2002, he had become quite vocal in his dissatisfaction with Howell Raines. Raines, Engelberg wrote later in a March 2004 article for Portland’s
The Oregonian,
was a “boss from hell” and had made the atmosphere at the paper “ugly.” He disagreed, too, with the quick turnaround Raines was demanding for full-page stories on the hot topic of the week, whether it was the Olympic ice-skating scandals or the controversies in the Catholic Church. On November 1, 2001, after polishing off two successive, Raines-assigned 3,500- and 4,000-word stories, Engelberg turned to Matthew Purdy, a colleague who was helping to edit the stories. “This can’t work,” Engelberg said. “It will end in tears.” The first piece, an examination of anthrax, actually
had
worked: It was insightful and contained new information. But the second story, about the risks of biological and chemical attacks, was hardly impressive. “It was embarrassingly bad,” says Engelberg. “I went to Gerald and said, ‘Give us one more day and we can do something worthwhile.’ But for Howell, the story was just a means to an end to the buzz it created. What the stories said weren’t important; it was just important that there
were
stories.”

In April 2002, Engelberg quit, leaving his post as head of investigations to take a job managing enterprise reporting at
The Oregonian,
a 350,000-circulation daily. Life at
The Oregonian
has been an adjustment after the
Times.
“I often want a story on international affairs and I can’t get it because we don’t have a foreign staff,” Engelberg says. But
The Oregonian
is one of the strongest regional papers in the country and has long had a reputation for devoting ample resources to big stories. Just as important, Engelberg says, he is happy. “After 9/11, I began thinking, had I been in the World Trade Center, would I have spent my life and time devoted to the people I wanted to be devoted to?” says Engelberg, who has three young daughters. “Thinking about it like that made leaving a pretty easy decision.”

To replace Engelberg, Raines eventually settled on Douglas Frantz, a
Times
reporter who at the time was based in Istanbul. “It was a potentially great job,” Frantz says. “In some ways, it was the job I had spent my entire career getting ready for.” Frantz asked Raines if he’d support larger investigative projects and was answered with an enthusiastic yes. “He made a very persuasive case,” Frantz remembers. “Howell certainly convinced me that he wanted to have an investigative unit that did both the run-and-gun stuff for which the unit had become best known and longer-term, more serious investigations. That was certainly something I was concerned about, like a lot of other people. It’s hard to devote serious resources to other projects when the world is coming down on your shoulders, but Howell convinced me he really wanted it. He convinced me he fully intended to become known as the greatest editor in the history of
The New York Times.
” On October 1, Frantz became the paper’s new investigative editor.

Upon arriving in New York, Frantz, who had been away from New York for years, was surprised by what he found. “The whole paper was so Howell-driven in every way,” Frantz says. “Nobody wanted to argue with him, nobody wanted to give him any news. Even Gerald. And that was a real problem.”

Frantz also witnessed what he viewed as incredibly dysfunctional management. “I had been on the job for two or three weeks,” Frantz says. “Gerald was one of the people I knew who pushed for me to get the job. He’d asked me in a meeting what I needed in terms of staff. And I said what I really needed was a couple of young guns who would go out and work really hard and do whatever it is I ask of them. We were talking about outside candidates. Gerald said, ‘That sounds good. Get me a list of two to four people and we’ll talk.’

“So a few days later he and I were sitting in Howell’s office and the notion of my hiring outsiders came up again. I told Howell I was putting together a list of possible outside hires. Howell looked at me and said, ‘Who told you you could have outside hires?’ I pointed to Gerald, and he just shook his head. Howell went on to give this long explanation about the economic situation and how tight things were. And the whole time, I was just floored. When we left the meeting, Gerald put his arm across my shoulder and just said, ‘Sorry about that.’ I figured he just didn’t want to have talked out of school.”

Boyd’s refusal to acknowledge what he had said in a private conversation with Frantz was emblematic of everything that was going wrong with the
Times.
Even the second most powerful editor in the newsroom was afraid to contradict Howell Raines. Nor did Boyd seem concerned with the effect of his humiliating reversal on the editor who worked below him.

Another episode that occurred in February 2003 further alienated Frantz. At an editors’ meeting, Frantz and national editor Jim Roberts pitched a story about the space-shuttle disaster. According to a story that later ran in
The Wall Street Journal,
Boyd dismissed the idea, saying he had read a similar story that morning in
USA Today.
But when Frantz handed Boyd a copy of
USA Today
to show the story hadn’t been in the paper, Boyd became furious.

“You shouldn’t humiliate the managing editor,” Boyd snapped at Frantz. He then handed Frantz a quarter and told him to go call Dean Baquet. The next month, Frantz did just that, quitting the
Times
to work for Baquet at the
Los Angeles Times.
His term as investigative editor lasted less than six months.

“Gerald is a very likable if unpredictable fellow,” says Frantz. “You never know what’s going to come out of his mouth and how he intends some of his digs. But he has a real good heart. But by that point, I’d come to the conclusion that Howell Raines was not somebody I wanted to work for. I found he took a point of view on a story and pushed that point of view as hard as he could. And too many reporters and editors were willing to fold in the face of his pressure.”

After Frantz left, Raines and Boyd pushed for investigative reporter Tim Golden to accept a reassignment to a daily news beat. Instead, Golden quit as well, but not before, according to several people at the
Times,
having a one-on-one conversation with Arthur Sulzberger about the discord that was spreading in the
Times
’s newsroom.

Raines had alienated another important desk, and more and more staffers were considering leaving the paper. “Everybody started to get calls,” says Jon Landman, the metro editor at the time. “And some of the people who stayed, it had nothing to do with professional satisfaction. It had to do with things like ‘I’ve got to pay for college education. I’ve got to pay the rent.’ ”

T
HE
D
AILY
R
EPORT

Throughout the first half of 2002, it was easy for Raines’s supporters—and Raines himself—to dismiss the newsroom’s unhappiness as mere whining. After all, Raines’s methods seemed to result in the sorts of accolades dreamed of by publishers and editors alike: April 2002 brought the paper’s unprecedented Pulitzer haul. But even when the breakneck pace of the news slowed, Raines kept riding his staff. Indeed, in his 2004
Atlantic
piece, Raines wrote how he hoped to practice newsroom management by systematically exhausting some of his correspondents—as if they were racehorses or mules. “One person quits—sometimes in response to stepped-up metabolism—and another can be hired,” he wrote. “Inevitably, removing underperformers created newsroom grumbling. But I felt that if we could all stand being rode hard and put up wet until the end of 2003, an entire new cast of editors would be in charge at the lagging departments, and we could all begin to get some rest.”

Some members of the masthead tried to warn Raines off this tactic. Many of the correspondents and editors being lost were a far cry from being “underperformers.” But Raines kept isolating himself, and even top managers began to conclude that he perceived any advice, regardless of its origins, to be the result of jealousy and ill will.

Had the problem been only Raines’s increasingly bitter fights with some of the paper’s editors and reporters, he might have been able to march onward with at least the passive support of most of the staff. The
Times,
after all, is a great, lumbering institution, one that trudges forward on its own momentum, regardless of management intrigue. But as the year wore on, the newsroom began to feel that Raines was forcing bad journalism into the paper. The staff began to view him as an editor concerned at least as much with burnishing his own image as with putting out a great newspaper. The feeling intensified after Raines began forcing his beloved “all-known-thought” pieces into the paper whether they were worthwhile or not; after all, he was the editor who had pioneered the genre.

“These [all-known thoughts] were often a repetitive thing,” says Soma Golden Behr. “We may have already done fifty stories on this subject. So we’d summarize those fifty, plus add in one other fact. If you’re a regular reader, you wonder why you should bother with the story. And if you do bother, you get pissed off. It’s three thousand words, it takes you half of Sunday to read, and for what?”

One example of Raines’s obsession with making a big splash regardless of whether or not the news warranted it was an April 21, 2002, front-page story warning of the dire economic impact of a recent drought in the Northeast. “If the drought drags on,” read the 1,700-word story, “possible delays in linking new housing or businesses to overburdened water systems could cause economic setbacks. . . . The potential for damage to the economy is considerable. . . . Restrictions on water use could hurt small businesses, forcing car washes, for example, to cut back their hours. . . . Some tourists might alter their vacations, avoiding the Northeast and its hotels.” Rarely had conditional clauses gotten such a robust workout on the front page of the
Times.
Worst of all, the report contained this caveat: “So far, the economic damage has only been spotty and minor.”

“He decided we were undercovering [the drought],” says Jon Landman. “We were not undercovering it. We were covering it appropriately. We were not saying the world was going to end. And he wanted it to be faster, more, bigger. And he commissioned that piece that was an embarrassment.

“He gave the impression it wasn’t about journalism, it was about making a statement. When the making of a statement doesn’t coincide with good journalism, you have a real problem.”

By this point, Landman was another one of the paper’s desk editors feeling increasingly alienated and frustrated by Howell Raines. “I worked for him in Washington,” says Landman. “I learned a lot. I was excited that he was going to be editor. But this was not the same guy that I had known. . . . In Washington I found him to be an excellent listener, a guy with a genuinely deep interest in the things we were covering. He really enjoyed the back-and-forth of it.” Once Raines took over as executive editor, Landman says, something changed. Raines, who maintained that he thought the metro section was one of the strongest in the paper, kept killing stories for no apparent reason; at other times, he’d give orders with little regard to reality.