Hard News (14 page)

“I objected to the general thrust of things, and I told him so,” says Landman. “He didn’t want to hear it. Nor did Gerald. They were losing people, they were killing stories by first-class people. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because all of a sudden all these [writers] lost their journalistic standards. But he didn’t want to hear it. He said I should stop making a big deal out of it, that I was emotionally labile.”

As spring turned into summer, Raines continued to recast the
Times
’s news report to reflect his preoccupations. American journalism has a long, weighty tradition of aiming for objectivity in its news pages. That, of course, is a canard: Every news judgment, every article placement, every lead, reflects snap judgments about what is and isn’t important, what should and shouldn’t be emphasized. Investigative stories are a publication’s way of announcing that there’s an issue that is not receiving the attention or scrutiny an editor or reporter thinks it deserves. In hundreds of small ways, every editor is “guilty” of pushing an agenda; after all, editors are hired at least in part for their news judgments and convictions.

Raines, however, seemed not to be content with using the
Times
’s resources to spotlight specific stories he felt weren’t being covered. Much as he had with campaign finance reform while running the editorial page, Raines wanted to set the national agenda. It was this sense of journalistic activism that critics had worried about even before Raines took over as executive editor. “Every editor and reporter holds private views,” wrote Robert Samuelson in a
Washington Post
column a week before Raines took over the newsroom. “The difference is that Raines’s opinions are now highly public. His [editorial] page . . . was pro-choice, pro–gun control and pro–campaign finance ‘reform.’ . . . Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines’s positions compromise the Times’ ability to act and appear fair-minded.”

By August 2002, media critics and conservative gadflies alike were accusing the
Times
of trying to shape, rather than chronicle, the national debate. In two successive front-page stories, the
Times
wrote about growing Republican dissent over the seemingly inevitable war with Iraq. “Leading Republicans from Congress, the State Department and past administrations have begun to break ranks with President Bush over his administration’s high-profile planning for war with Iraq,” began an August 16 story co-authored by Todd Purdum and Patrick Tyler. “These senior Republicans include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.” The next day, another front-page piece, by Elisabeth Bumiller, noted that President Bush was “listening carefully to a group of Republicans who were warning him against going to war with Iraq. . . . It was the first time Mr. Bush had so directly addressed the growing chorus of concern from Republicans, which now includes former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.”

But Kissinger had never argued against invading Iraq; all he had done was express some realpolitik reservations in an August 11
Washington Post
op-ed piece. In fact, he’d written, “The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action.”

But the damage had been done. On August 18, Charles Krauthammer wrote in
The Washington Post,
“Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,’ has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines’s New York Times.” The
Times
had always been considered liberal, but now it was Raines himself who was being singled out as the source of the
Times
’s bias.

After several days of brutal criticism, the masthead asked David Carr, a
Times
media reporter, to write a story on how the American press was increasingly seen as driving the debate on Iraq. Carr researched the project, reading the clips and making calls, before returning to the paper’s editors. “I had to tell them the media wasn’t driving anything,” Carr says. “It was only us. It was only the
Times.
” In lieu of a story, the
Times
ran an editors’ note on September 4, explaining its mistakes.

“This is certainly a shift from
The New York Times
as ‘the paper of record,’ ” Alex Jones said at the time. “It’s a more activist agenda in terms of policy, especially compared to an administration that’s much more conservative.” It was as if Raines were determined to question the Bush’s administration’s push toward war, even if no one else was doing so. Tradition dictated that the
Times
needed someone in the nation’s elite to voice the sentiments it actually wanted to come out and say on its own. Now, it seemed, when they couldn’t find the right person, they simply wrote the story anyway.

It was Tyler, already seen as Raines’s favorite, whose reputation suffered most. “By this time, there were other reporters in the Washington bureau who were refusing to work with [Tyler] because they didn’t trust his reporting,” says Jill Abramson. Around that time, she ran into Paul Steiger, the managing editor of
The Wall Street Journal
and her old boss. “He said he thought the credibility of the
Times
was suffering because of [the Kissinger story],” Abramson says.

And it wasn’t just biased political stories that the staff felt Raines was hurrying onto the front page. That fall, Raines became convinced that Britney Spears was trying, and failing, to reinvent herself as an adult pop star. The ensuing 1,600-word, Sunday front-page story was yet another embarrassing example of Raines’s certainty that he had his finger on the pulse of American culture. “Ms. Spears,” the piece read, “who made her debut as a wholesome bubblegum star with a penchant for sweetly flashing her belly button, is caught in a vicious conundrum of fame acquired young: the qualities that made her accessible and popular as a teenage star may be precisely the ones choking her career as an adult, leaving her looking like an unseemly parody as she tries to become a grown-up recording artist.” In November 2003, Spears’s fourth album,
In the Zone,
hit number one its first week on the charts, making Spears the first woman ever to have four consecutive number-one records.

“There’s nothing wrong with putting stuff like Britney on the front page,” says Jon Landman. “If she’s on the front page because it’s an interesting story, great. But if she’s there because we’re so eager to show our youthfulness, then that’s a problem. People sense that. They understand what’s going on.”

A
UGUSTA

As 2002 stretched on, Raines’s
New York Times
was about to show readers and critics alike that it would continue to tell the rest of the country what was and wasn’t newsworthy, regardless of what anyone else felt. On November 25, 2002, the
Times
ran a front-page story headlined “CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta.” It was the thirty-second piece the
Times
had run in less than three months about whether the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, would admit women as members.

The story spanked CBS, which airs the Masters, for “resisting the argument that it can do something to alter the club’s policy,” although it was unclear who—other than the
Times
—was making the argument; as the piece eventually noted, “Public pressure on CBS to take a stand has been glancing.” “[The Augusta coverage] was just shocking. It makes it hard for us to have credibility on other issues,” said a
Times
staffer at the time. “We don’t run articles that just say so-and-so is staying silent. We run articles when something important actually
happens.
” Media coverage of Raines’s Augusta obsession was scathing. Slate’s Mickey Kaus and Jack Shafer rode the story for days, and
The New York Observer
’s Sridhar Pappu added damning dispatches. “Raines is on the verge of a breakthrough reconceptualization of ‘news’ here,” Kaus wrote, “in which ‘news’ comes to mean the failure of any powerful individual or institution to do what Howell Raines wants them to do.” After praising the
Times
for its aggressive coverage of the Bush administration, Shafer wrote, “At some point, saturation coverage of a story begins to raise more questions about the newspaper’s motives than about the story being covered.”

In some ways, the criticism was familiar. “We’re
The New York Times,
” Arthur Sulzberger told me in a 2004 interview. “People are going to hold us to a standard that’s higher than others’. That’s okay. We like to think we hold ourselves to higher standards, too.” Historically, staffers had rallied against any attack on the paper, defending it to their peers and colleagues. This was different—this time reporters within the
Times
’s newsroom were embarrassed as well.

“I remember being surprised by the relentlessness of [the
Times
’s Augusta coverage],” says Daniel Okrent, who was named the
Times
’s first-ever public editor (an ombudsmanlike position) in the fall of 2003. “There are a lot of things to worry about in the world besides whether some millionaire CEO who happens to be a woman gets into the Augusta Golf Club. There was this clear campaign at the
Times
. . . the whole coverage was out of proportion.”

“The Masters story,” says then business editor Glenn Kramon, “was like a crusade. The perception in the newsroom was that it was an agenda that went beyond the bounds.” The outcry over the paper’s Augusta coverage grew much more intense. On Wednesday, December 4, the New York
Daily News
’s media columnist, Paul Colford, reported that the
Times
had spiked two sports columns because they disagreed with the
Times
’s activist position on Augusta. Harvey Araton’s column asked whether there weren’t more important battles to be fighting in regards to discrimination in sports, and Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson’s column disagreed with a
Times
editorial that had called on Tiger Woods to sit out the Masters.

The reaction to Colford’s story was immediate and furious. Online media forums, such as Jim Romenesko’s media blog, overflowed with letters ridiculing the
Times.
In the newsroom, reporters and editors were shell-shocked—usually, rumors of columns being spiked on ideological grounds were just that: rumors. Later on December 4, Gerald Boyd, who had personally spiked one of the columns and was running the newsroom while Raines was away in Paris dealing with the
Times
’s takeover of the
International Herald Tribune,
wrote a staffwide memo that only made the situation worse. It was at once long-winded and unsatisfying, defensive and arrogant. Boyd’s memo read:

Howell and I believe you should know The Times’s response to questions that have been raised by some published reports in recent days about our coverage of the Augusta Golf Club story and our handling of sports columns on the subject.

First, we are proud of our leadership in covering this story. Our sports staff, with help from many desks, is doing exactly what some “accuse” us of doing: asking questions that no other organization is raising, and pressing energetically for the answers our readers want.

Augusta’s restricted membership policies have been legitimate news for decades. With the ascendance of Tiger Woods and the campaign by the National Council of Women’s Organizations, the club has become an inescapable story.

The decisions faced by CBS, a leading network that is a 46-year Masters partner of the club, are a significant part of the story. There is only one word for our vigor in pursuing a story—whether in Afghanistan or Augusta.

Call it journalism.

Columnists in the news pages hold a special place at The Times. Each has wide latitude to speak with an individual point of view, always informed by diligent reporting and intelligent reasoning. In the sports pages, columnists have unique license to go beyond analytical writing and—still informed by their reporting—engage in robust argument, even express personal opinions on any side of an issue, within the bounds of sport, broadly defined.

Still, these columns are not on the Op-Ed page, and all newsroom writers are subject to our standards of tone, taste and relevance to the subject at hand. We are an edited newspaper: that is one of our strengths, and we believe our staff takes pride in it.

Recently we spiked two sports columns that touched on the Augusta issue. We were not concerned with which “side” the writers were on. A well-reported, well-reasoned column can come down on any side, with our welcome.

One of the columns focused centrally on disputing The Times’s editorials about Augusta. Part of our strict separation between the news and editorial pages entails not attacking each other. Intramural quarreling of that kind is unseemly and self-absorbed. Discussion of editorials may arise when we report on an issue; fair enough. But we do not think they should be the issue.