Hard News (35 page)

In the end, this is what makes the
Times
’s recent saga so sad. What might have happened, what might have been avoided, had Sulzberger not chosen Raines?

P
OSTSCRIPT

The two men whose names became synonymous with the tumult at
The New York Times
were, not surprisingly, the men whose lives were most affected by the events in 2003. And while they appeared to be as different as two men can be—Howell Raines was a white, successful writer and editor fast approaching the end of his career; Jayson Blair was a black, mildly talented reporter just starting his—both shared a need to create overly ambitious narratives from the raw material of their lives.

We all do this to some extent—the human mind seeks a narrative everywhere—but when the stories these men told about themselves turned out to be greater and grander than anything they were capable of, they fell. The disconnect between Raines’s and Blair’s self-conceptions and their realities gave them permission, in a sense, to smooth the path to distortion and fabrication in the outside world as well. Jayson Blair saw himself as terminally unique. It was okay, then, if he chose to make up stories about the world he was ostensibly covering. Raines, meanwhile, had imagined himself as a desperately needed savior. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap for him to imagine similarly mythic struggles taking place both within the
Times
’s newsroom and in the actual news itself.

In the spring of 2004, both Raines and Blair, unwilling to let the drama they had set in motion move on while they were offstage, tried to muscle their way back into the spotlight. On March 6, Jayson Blair published
Burning Down My Masters’ House,
a book that was advertised as a memoir. A month later, Howell Raines made an epic return to print with a twenty-one-thousand-word cover story in
The Atlantic
titled “My Times.”
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Blair’s book was published by the obscure California-based New Millennium Audio—best known for its quickie books about the O. J. Simpson trial—which is run by an unctuous character named Michael Viner. After New York publishing houses passed on Blair’s proposal, Viner agreed in September 2003 (in the same week his company filed for bankruptcy) to publish it.
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Blair, Viner said, had an important story to share. What’s more, he stressed that the book would be scrupulously fact-checked.

For several weeks before its publication, Blair’s manuscript was the subject of intense speculation within the
Times
’s newsroom. Outside media interest was high as well; everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk to the man who had shaken the
Times
to its core and necessitated its very public regime change. Katie Couric arranged to interview Blair for an hour-long special on
Dateline NBC.
Blair would also be featured on the
Today
show;
Hardball,
Chris Matthews’s CNBC shout-fest;
The O’Reilly Factor,
Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show; and CNN’s
Larry King Live. Times
reporters braced themselves for the second Blair media frenzy in less than a year.

But the book’s actual release was a massive letdown. Blair, who was a skilled enough liar to fool his editors at the
Times
for months on end, had difficulty sustaining even the semblance of a cohesive narrative, either in his book or on the air.
Burning Down My Masters’ House,
rather than being an honest and nuanced discussion of the
Times
’s culture or his own deceit (or even race, despite the inflammatory title), was notable mainly for its sloppiness and continued fabrications. A supposedly verbatim conversation with his girlfriend changes from the book’s first pages to its last pages, as does the day of the week the conversation supposedly took place. At one point in the book, Blair talks about how he wanted nothing more than to get off of the sniper case; later, he claims his only goal was to stay
on
the case.

Other times, he seems to make things up entirely. He wrote that Gerald Boyd’s mother had died “after a long struggle with drugs.” “It shaped much of who he was,” Blair wrote, “and I was well aware from my interactions with him . . . of his emotional detachment.” Odessa Thomas Boyd actually died at age twenty-nine of sickle-cell anemia. “It is unconscionable that a journalist would write something so hurtful,” Boyd wrote in a newspaper column shortly after Blair’s book was published. “The truth is that my mother did not drink or smoke, and she certainly never used drugs.”

Blair also wrote about how he avoided reading the
Times
for much of Sunday, May 11, the day the paper’s report about his deceptions ran on the front page. That night, Blair writes, he went out for a dinner of “barbeque chicken sandwiches with sweet plantains on the side.” In the middle of the meal, he headed outside for a smoke. “I walked over to a nearby deli and looked at the front page of the Sunday
Times,
” he wrote. “I looked at the top of the story and noticed the names on the byline. . . . I did not have to look past the bylines to know that very few stones had been left unturned, but I took a deep breath and started reading the story.” There were, of course, no bylines on the front page of the
Times
’s story about Blair; the authors’ names, along with the names of two researchers, were buried deep inside the paper. Less than a year after being drummed out of journalism for making up facts about other people’s lives, Blair had resorted to fabricating the circumstances of his own emotional responses.

By the time the book was published, Blair seemed unable to keep track of his own deceptions. In Katie Couric’s
Dateline
interview, she stumped him with a question about his own memoir. Couric asked Blair about a conversation with an army staff sergeant he admits in the book to fabricating. “The—I—I’m not sure—actually—one second. I am not sure about that one,” Blair answered. Couric paused to allow Blair to page through the book he had just finished writing. “Yeah,” Blair said finally.

“Yeah?” Couric asked.

“I remember it,” Blair replied.

The book, despite an overwhelming amount of press, sold miserably. As of May 19, BookScan, a company that tracks book sales, reported that Blair’s book had sold only 3,300 copies. (This figure does not include book club sales or copies sold at Wal-Mart.) To earn back his reported $150,000 advance, Blair would have had to sell over 40,000 copies of his book. By April, Blair’s book tour had been canceled. On April 28, a one-line announcement on his eponymous website read, “Jayson Blair is on hiatus from speaking until this fall. A schedule will be posted shortly.”

In mid-March, word leaked out that
The Atlantic
was publishing a lengthy cover story by Raines. The piece, released to the press on March 24, was a seemingly unending excoriation of the
Times.
“My intention here is to perform a final service for the newspaper that I worked for and loved for twenty-five years, by revealing the real struggle that was going on behind the scenes at the
Times
as the Blair scandal played out,” Raines wrote early on in the piece. Instead, he sprayed blame like machine-gun fire. Lelyveld, the man who bookended Raines’s tenure, came in for the harshest criticism: His paper was dull, Raines wrote, and his leadership uninspired. Raines compared Arthur Sulzberger to Wile E. Coyote and portrayed him as weak, immature, and dishonest. Raines went on a lengthy rant about Arthur Gelb, the paper’s former managing editor and one of Raines’s onetime mentors at the paper; Raines’s bile was occasioned by some moderate criticism he had received in the pages of Gelb’s recently published memoir,
City Room.
(Raines wrote in his piece that Gelb called him up, sputtering with criticism over Raines’s decision to run the May 11 report on Blair. Gelb says he doesn’t remember any such incident.)

Curiously, Raines also got a number of facts wrong. He wrote he had met with the “seven” reporters responsible for the
Times
’s Blair report before deciding to hold the May 14 town hall meeting; in fact, only five reporters were assigned to the project, and he hadn’t met with even all of them by that date.

Elsewhere, Raines wrote that he learned of Blair’s substance abuse issues “around the end of 2002” and that he viewed Blair’s apparent recovery as one reason to give him a chance on the sniper team: “I passed Jayson’s desk often after his return, and I saw in him a level of vitality and social engagement that I took to be evidence of recovery,” he wrote. But in September 2002, Blair was transferred from the paper’s metro department—where his desk was close to the front of the newsroom, situated where Raines would need to pass it en route to and from the elevator—to the sports department, located on the fourth floor. What’s more, Raines simultaneously maintains that Gerald Boyd did tell him about Blair’s substance abuse problems but that Boyd did not tell him about Blair’s performance issues, a rendering that strains credulity.

Indeed, Raines’s entire account—which, due to its being mainly a personal account, was not fact-checked in
The Atlantic
’s normal manner—is peppered with inaccurate details and faulty recollections. While boasting about the extent to which he revitalized the paper’s culture department, he carried on about how the
Times,
under his leadership, had “beaten New York’s hip publications to the punch with a lead story on the rock group White Stripes.” The
Times
had, in fact, run an early feature story on the band, but in August 2001, the month
before
Raines took over, in the final days of Joe Lelyveld’s regime. It’s true, also, that under Raines Arts & Leisure had run a lead story on the band, but that was in April 2003, after it had crossed over to become a mainstream phenomenon. (Jon Pareles, who has been the chief rock critic for the
Times
since the late 1980s, wrote the April 2003 piece.) In this instance, Raines’s factual error didn’t show a will to deceive so much as a determined blindness to accomplishments that predated his tenure. It was unquestionably true that the paper’s cultural coverage was in need of revitalization. It was also true that Raines was an energetic champion of this reworking. Finally, it was true that things weren’t as bad as he made them out to be and that he didn’t make as much of a difference as he would like to think.

Raines’s essay severed most of the few remaining ties he might have had with his former colleagues.
Times
employees e-mailed to one another the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (“has a grandiose sense of self importance”; “is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance”; “believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique”; “requires excessive admiration”), and once silent allies felt newly burned. Some of Raines’s former colleagues and friends in the Washington bureau referred to the
Atlantic
essay as “The Passion of the Howell,” a reference to Mel Gibson’s sadistic Crucifixion epic.

The same afternoon Raines’s piece was released to the press, editorial-page editor Gail Collins sent me an unsolicited e-mail. “I bet you’re getting lots and lots of input right now,” wrote Collins, who had been hired by Raines and was one of his staunchest defenders throughout the spring. “One part of Howell’s piece that particularly bothered me was his insinuation that the business side could have taken a bigger hit in expense-cutting to protect the newsroom. In fact, the business side has consistently taken the hit in order to protect the editorial product.” Collins, who had had lunch every Wednesday with Sulzberger, Janet Robinson, and Raines, went on to recount a meeting that occurred soon after September 11. “Janet Robinson was giving us all the bad financial news, the result of the combination of our ad base downtown and the national economic slump,” Collins wrote. “Then Howell said something along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry to hear that because we need another bullet-proof jeep for Afghanistan,’ and he went on listing the other stuff he wanted to do to support the coverage overseas. Janet cut him off and said: ‘Don’t even think about it. We’ll find the money. What you’re doing now is the reason we all work here. Spend whatever you need to.’ And Arthur nodded.”

Even those journalists Raines tried to compliment sought to distance themselves from his revisionist history. In his article, Raines had compared his approach to that of Marty Baron, prompting Baron to send a letter to the
Atlantic:
“Having never worked for or with [Raines], I can’t speak from experience about his approach to managing a news staff. I imagine our styles differ quite a bit. My model (and mentor) is his predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, who is deplorably mistreated and inaccurately portrayed in Raines’s assessment of
The New York Times.
”

Raines’s
Atlantic
article was, many felt, the final insult. But this time, the employees of the
Times
could choose to ignore Howell Raines’s bluster. Overwhelmingly, they did.

Raines’s piece even had the effect of turning Gerald Boyd into a sympathetic character. Raines condescended to Boyd in the essay, both by saying his appointment was one prompted by the need to test Boyd’s mettle and in simply ignoring his accomplishments. Not long after Raines’s piece was published, Bill Keller invited Gerald Boyd into the
Times
newsroom for the paper’s annual Pulitzer celebration. He was given one of the biggest ovations of the afternoon.
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