Howell Raines has written about journalistic lapses in the past. Here’s his August 13, 1998, jeremiad after the Mike Barnicle affair:
At this newspaper and others, people have been dismissed for making things up. The Times, The Globe and The Washington Post have all given lesser punishments to reporters for failing to attribute material first used in other publications’ news articles. The Globe’s vacillation in a case that combines borrowing and lack of candor with the editors illustrates a general rule. Public respect for newspapering is wounded when rules that would be enforced with doctrinal ferocity among the mass of journalists are lightened for a star who has great value to the paper. The damage is internal as well. It says to young journalists that the contract of trust that we ask them to sign – about what they write and what they tell their editors – is not really absolute or equally enforced.
This brings us to an important point about the sociology of journalism. Mr. Barnicle is an immensely popular figure in Boston and in the journalistic world. In the last few days, he has been the beneficiary of a vigorous public-relations campaign among the profession’s old-boy network. Important broadcast journalists have promoted the idea that Mr. Barnicle was being sacrificed for minor mistakes so that The Globe could get by with firing a black woman. His middle-aged white male colleagues at The Globe have rallied around.
I am haunted by something I know in my bones. If you take Mr. Barnicle out of the picture and imagine instead Ms. Smith being brought up on the charges of using unattributed material and misleading her editors, she would not have such prominent and persistent defenders. That is because Mr. Barnicle, like this writer, is a product of a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own. A great deal of effort has been expended throughout journalism over the past 20 years to make sure the newsroom tribe includes every color, gender and sexual orientation. Long after Mr. Barnicle settles back into his column, the historical bottom line of this event will be that a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist.
You’ll buy my position, of course, only if you believe in strict enforcement of rules about borrowing, lifting and leveling with colleagues, and if you believe, as I do, that if you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper. After all, all the members of this profession know the rules when we sign up. They are rules based on a tradition of trust that cannot be ignored without stirring anxiety in the newsroom and suspicion among the readers.
The critical question, of course, is: why do the firm rules that apply to “leveling with colleagues” not apply to Raines himself? Why, when he has conceded that he is responsible for a fundamental breach in the “tradition of trust,” does he not live by the rules he enforces for others? Is he too benefiting from a “a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own”?
The Dish 