Month: May 2003

The Post’s Terry Neal defends newsroom affirmative action, if not the way the Times editors handled Blair. He makes some good points, I think. This debate is long overdue. Pity it took this incident to get it in the mainstream.

The New Republic weighs in:

The policy Howell Raines and other Times executives were administering when they overlooked these things wasn’t affirmative action; it was the fetishization of diversity, which is a complete perversion of affirmative action. And any fetish–any monomaniacal fixation on a single goal, whether the goal is diversity or proper grammar or having a certain type of Danish at editorial meetings–can be exploited by a pathological rogue looking to game the system … As one anonymous Times reporter says in today’s New York Post, “Howell didn’t listen … to anyone about anything.” Howell Raines was apparently practicing a form of authoritarianism that isolated him from his staff and reinforced his personal fixations. And it came back to haunt him.

Yes, the problem isn’t the policy as such. It’s the quixotic, arbitrary, dictatorial way in which the policy was abused.

From Paul Colford at the Daily News:

Meanwhile, staffers buzzed about whether Blair’s relationship with a woman who is a friend of Raines’ wife helped win him favored treatment. Sources said the woman, Zuza Glowacka, has worked in The Times’ photo department. The Times reported Sunday that Blair, when confronted with a charge of plagiarizing a story about a Texas family, was able to describe their house in detail, possibly because he had seen the paper’s “computerized photo archives.” Glowacka, 23, a Polish emigre who could not be reached yesterday, is said to be a friend of Raines’ Polish-born wife, Krystyna Stachowiak, whom the editor married in March. Stachowiak, a former journalist who later worked in public relations, and Glowacka’s mother, journalist Ewa Zadrzynska, were among three people who set up “Poland on the Front Page, 1979-1989,” a media exhibit in Warsaw last fall. Raines said through a spokeswoman last night that he never socialized with Blair.

This story isn’t even close to being through.

They’re bailing after the Iraq war. The problem for Bush and Rove is that, apart from the war, they have nothing to appeal to independent voters on. The tax-cutting and deficit explosion has turned off the fiscal conservatives. And the pandering to the religious right in judicial nominations and the rallying behind Santorum has alienated social liberals and libertarians. In fact, I can’t see any domestic policies designed to appeal to the center-right or middle. The mere mouthing of the phrases “compassion” and “inclusion” won’t hack it. But does Rove have any other suggestions that won’t alienate the theocons?

Jim Sleeper saw this coming. Heather Mac Donald describes the fundamental dilemma the Times found itself in:

Faced with the record of Blair’s monumental malpractice and its own persistent overlooking of that malpractice, the Times had a choice. It could admit that, at least in this case, the paper had indeed relaxed its ordinary standards of excellence to push a black reporter quickly up the ranks. Doing so would undercut its credo that an obsession with diversity never sacrifices quality. But the alternative response to the Blair affair would seem much worse: if race played no role in the Times’s tolerance for Blair’s errors, then presumably other reporters have received similar exemptions from journalistic canons. If management’s treatment of Blair was not preferential, but merely ordinary, we should expect similar devastating exposes of other reporters’ work in the future. In other words: If the Blair fiasco was the product of universally applied Times standards, then the paper has gone to the dogs.

Tell us something we didn’t know, Heather.

RACE OR SUCK-UP? However, I’m inclined to think that blaming all this on affirmative action doesn’t capture what was going on at the Times. It wasn’t hiring Blair that caused the disaster; nor even the way in which his editors supported and helped and monitored him. It was the favoritism and arbitrary management of the Raines regime that put Blair where he shouldn’t have been. Cynthia Cotts is persuasive about this:

One Times veteran suggests Blair received excess favor not so much because he was black, but because he was green. According to this source, Blair is typical of the latest crop of reporters anointed by the Raines administration. “They’re young, they’re energetic, they say the right things, they kiss ass-but they don’t have the skills to do the jobs they’re handed,” says the source. “This kind of favoritism is repulsive to people who have been there awhile.” Other insiders say the Blair case is symptomatic of a deeper issue: The Times newsroom does not operate as a meritocracy. Instead, sources say, Raines and Boyd pick their favorites for whatever reasons and become so invested in showcasing these reporters that they turn a blind eye to their flaws, which are said to range variously from inexperience and laziness to intellectual dishonesty and a high volume of factual errors.

Meanwhile, there are signs of a mutiny at the paper over the subtle but effective white-wash the paper published on Sunday:

“People felt that management had not been held accountable enough, and the story downplayed their culpability,” said the reporter, who singled out Raines’ high-handed management style as a key to why Blair survived at the paper for so long. “Howell didn’t listen … to anyone about anything.” Another staffer said “heads should roll … it happened on their watch and because of their watch.”

Amen.

It’s been something of a relief – although a somewhat strained one – to have redirected attention for a couple of weeks to domestic issues. The culture wars, journalistic scandals, and gambling moralists are all good, distracting copy. But the broader war continues. It’s clear now that we have seriously under-estimated the difficulties of imposing order on post-totalitarian Iraq. The shake-up in leadership there suggests at least that Washington is aware of the problem. But some of the damage has already been done. It’s hard to read stories about continued looting in Baghdad or dangerous chaos in the hinterlands, without wondering if the administration is as committed to the difficult task of reconstruction as they need to be. The real worry, it seems to me, is that some WMDs may have been transported out of Iraq, may be in the hands of terrorists, or simply on the market. We have thousands of gallons of anthrax still unaccounted for. This doesn’t retroactively invalidate the war. Such dangers would have existed – and would have been even more dangerous – if Saddam were still in power. But it does mean we cannot afford any lapse in vigilance. The papers don’t tell us who was responsible for last night’s bombings in Saudi Arabia, but we can be sure they aren’t friends of the United States. Islamist anti-semitism has not abated; in Britain, it may be capturing a new generation of young immigrants. That’s why it’s still critical to focus on the terror threat, to push reform further in the Middle East, to give the road-map a serious try, and to tighten our own homeland defenses. The list is long. Our attention span needs to be long as well.

THE WOLF GETS IT: Wolfowitz is reassuring today. No lack of focus or of realism there.

Finally, Boyd, Sulzberger and Raines realize that they haven’t actually taken full responsibility for the Blair debacle. The denial that their diversity mania had anything to do with it is not encouraging. I’d also be more confident about their “internal investigation” if they could get the spelling right in their staff email. Meanwhile, Blair’s old journalism school dean corrects the record with regard to what the Times knew about Blair when they hired him:

The first regards the paper’s assertion that “everyone assumed he had graduated” when Jayson was offered a full-time job. Jayson was not close to graduating when he received his Times internship, and, like all employers we deal with, the paper would have been aware of his academic standing. I can’t say what the paper’s editors assumed, much less what Jayson told them, when they invited him aboard full-time. Needless to say, neither the Times nor Jayson consulted the school over the offer. It’s not surprising that he took it; I would have too. But had we been asked, we would have recommended – to both Jayson and the Times – that he obtain his degree first.

But no-one asked, did they?

POSEUR ALERT: “I am writing now on a morning saturated with a fog that seems manufactured by the river just down the street. The fog swells, expands, shrinks, thickens. It conceals everything. It’s a good morning to put out a bowl of milk for Maya, my imaginary cat. I invented Maya a few years ago because, first of all, I had just been divorced, and two months of “dating” had convinced me that, to paraphrase a Russian proverb, half an imaginary loaf is better than no loaf at all. Also, I operate in complete solitude most of the time, and I am allergic to real cats. Truth to tell, I like the idea of a cat more than the actual feline entity. The cool aloof self-sufficiency of cats gets to me. They’re like those cool beautiful aloof self-sufficient women a fellow who operates in complete solitude encounters when he steps out into the world. He projects all sorts of longing onto them, and then, having eroticized reality into a vapor, is nearly undone by his own fabrications. Poor fellow! Poor cool beautiful aloof woman!” – Lee Siegel, swelling, expanding, shrinking and thickening, at Slate.

An array of damning details is emerging. More, no doubt, will come. From the L.A. Times:

By the Times’ account, Boyd was head of a committee that recommended Blair be hired, despite the reservations of other editors. Boyd, along with Raines, pushed the inexperienced reporter with a poor record onto the prestigious national staff. What the Times does not note is that in 2001 it was the tyro Blair who nominated Boyd for the National Assn. of Black Journalists’ journalist of the year award for his role in producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “How Race Is Lived in America.” When Boyd subsequently was promoted to managing editor, according to sources at the Times, Blair was selected to write the announcement for the paper’s in-house newsletter.

From the indomitable Seth Mnookin:

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.

From the Mickster, describing how Raines’ reporter shortage (which made it useful to assign Blair to the sniper story) contributed structurally to the problem:

Here are some people who have left (whether or not they were pushed): Kevin Sack, Sam Howe Verhovek, Evelyn Nieves, Carey Goldberg. James Sterngold, and Blaine Harden…. As a result, confronted with two journalistic wars (in Iraq, and the streets around Washington, D.C.) Raines, like Donald Rumsfeld, discovered he didn’t have enough troops!

Actually, I think the church metaphor is better. When you have a shortage of priests (because of your own policies), you tend to overlook the failings of the few you still have. Mickey argues that the “NYT story itself makes out a prima facie case of editorial negligence against Raines.” I’d agree. That’s why I don’t agree with Mickey that Raines’ job is not in jeopardy. Like Cardinal Law, Raines only has to please one man – the NYT’s Pope. But also like Cardinal Law, if the clergy really feel that this has destroyed their credibility, won’t they demand a clean break? Or put another way: wouldn’t it be truly odd if what the NYT itself describes as its worst moment in 152 years didn’t result in someone in authority taking real responsibility?

“I think the direct case against Raines in the Jayson Blair episode is even stronger than the one you make.-This isn’t about an abstract system failure. I don’t even think motivations are the issue.-It’s about specific, arrogant, arbitrary acts by Times executives that defied the Times’ own internal controls.
Up to the moment Blair was transferred to the National Desk, it looks like all the normal Times internal systems were working – problems with the otherwise-promising Blair had been identified, he had been counseled and kept on a short leash, and having completed “probation” he was being transferred to the Sports desk where he could at least do no harm.-
-Then suddenly – and even the Times’ self-examination makes this seem like a kind of immaculate conception – Blair is lifted out of the Sports desk and thrust into the sniper story. You’ve got the money quote in your post:-It’s Raines’ decision to be the angel for Blair’s career, and it’s Raines’ decision, scandalously, to deceive his staff and not tell Blair’s-new editor, Roberts, about his past problems.-That’s not a “contributing factor,” that’s the unambiguous cause of the problem.
-I almost don’t care-what Raines’ policies or intentions were.-There’s no reason why affirmative action can’t coexist with performance accountability, and in fact exactly that seemed to be the “normal” system at the Times.-What happened was a product of-Raines’ personality and decisionmaking style – arbitrary, unaccountable, with a dose of almost feudal personal favoritism.-It’s classic, dysfunctional, management-by-whim. This is squarely Raines’ screw up as an executive.” That nails it, I think. I think we can measure the future credibility of the Times by whether Howell Raines remains as executive editor. More feedback on the Letters Page.

Yesterday was the first time most New York Times readers will have realized the full extent of the damage that Jayson Blair and his enablers at the very top of the New York Times have done to the newspaper. To their credit, the Times’ editors have laid out the full scope of deceit and incompetence that allowed what they call this 152-year low-point to happen. But their own account is also devastating – not about the ingenious lies and fraud of Jayson Blair – but about how the New York Times is currently run and edited. What seems obvious is that Blair wasn’t that enterprising or clever; his lies were easily checked; the travel receipts he submitted were proof enough of his deception; his own editors were aware of the problems and told management; there were plenty of complaints from readers; and so on. The scandal, in other words, isn’t what an overwhelmed, twenty-something young reporter succeeded in getting away with. The scandal is how he wasn’t stopped, and despite crystal-clear warnings, was actually promoted at the behest of the highest authorities in the place: Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines. They weren’t just AWOL for this calamity; they compounded and magnified it, by promoting Blair again and again, despite their own editors’ ferocious objections and a fast-accumulating record of inaccuracy and deception.

CARDINAL HOWELL: Here’s the Times’ summary of what went wrong:

Some reporters and administrators did not tell editors about Mr. Blair’s erratic behavior. Editors did not seek or heed the warnings of other editors about his reporting. Five years’ worth of information about Mr. Blair was available in one building, yet no one put it together to determine whether he should be put under intense pressure and assigned to cover high-profile national events.

Actually, the Times’ own reporting shows that’s not entirely true. When you read the full account, it’s clear that many people not only connected the dots but put their concerns in writing – at almost every step of the way in Blair’s swift and short career. When the Metro editor can write an email that says it’s time to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right Now,” over a year ago, it’s inconceivable that the reporter in question should subsequently be assigned to a major role in a “flood the zone” story like the Washington sniper case. Yet that is precisely what happened. In fact, after dozens of warnings, counseling leaves and alarm bells, Howell Raines even sends Blair an email congratulating him for “great shoe-leather reporting” – for work that turns out to have been riddled with errors and fabrications! How could that happen? How does a rookie reporter, with Blair’s record, get assigned a major role in such a story, produce a front-page scoop instantly, and never have an editor ask him who his sources are? When the scoop is immediately denied, trashed and rebutted, why does it take months for this to be investigated? How does a reporter whose former editor had written a memo demanding that he be removed from writing for the Times altogether get reassigned without his subsequent editor being informed of his record? Forget the affirmative action dimension. This is just recklessly bad management. It reminds me of the Catholic Church reassigning priests to new parishes without telling the parishioners of the priest’s past. It smacks of a newsroom in which everyone is running scared of the big guy’s favorite new hire, and so no one is able to stop a disaster from happening until it’s too late. Ultimately, this scandal cannot be fobbed off on a twentysomething kid, however outrageous his sins. The New York Times’ reputation is not the responsibility of new hires in their twenties. It’s the responsibility of the editors, just as the responsibility for bad priests lies ultimately with the cardinals and bishops who hire them. In this instance, Raines is the Times’ Cardinal Law. His imperial meddling, diversity obsessions, and mercurial management style all made Blair possible.

THE RACIAL FACTOR: Raines’ rationale for not restraining, firing or disciplining Blair over a period of months is particularly revealing:

The sniper attacks in suburban Washington dominated the nation’s newspapers last October. “This was a ‘flood the zone’ story,” Mr. Roberts, the national editor, recalled, invoking the phrase that has come to embody the paper’s aggressive approach to covering major news events under Mr. Raines, its executive editor. Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, the managing editor, quickly increased the size of the team to eight reporters, Mr. Blair among them. “This guy’s hungry,” Mr. Raines said last week, recalling why he and Mr. Boyd picked Mr. Blair. Both editors said the seeming improvement in Mr. Blair’s accuracy last summer demonstrated that he was ready to help cover a complicated, high-profile assignment. But they did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair’s reporting. “That discussion did not happen,” Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair’s performance had improved, and because “we do not stigmatize people for seeking help.”

Stigmatize? Apart from the loopy idea that telling editors of a reporter’s track-record is somehow “stigmatizing,” am I the only person that sees a racial dimension to that word? It’s almost an admission that any criticism of a black staffer is somehow racially stigmatizing. When you hear words like that, you get a glimpse of what it’s like to live in the p.c. newsroom. Offending minority journalists is more of a no-no than allowing the paper’s reputation to hit a 152-year low. I’d go further and argue that the refusal to hold black reporters or gay reporters or any reporters to the highest possible standards is itself evidence of prejudice and condescension. Did it do Blair any good to get this kind of pampering?

NO SCAPEGOATS: But most astonishing is Arthur Sulzberger’s response to this:

“Maybe this crystallizes a little that we can find better ways to build lines of communication across what is, to be fair, a massive newsroom,” said Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher. But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair,” he said. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives – either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”

Scapegoats? Sulzberger is confusing two separate things. A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for something he is not responsible for. What we need in this case is accountability for what went so terribly wrong. That’s not demonizing. It’s called taking responsibility. If something like this happened in government or a major corporation, do you think the Times would editorialize that no-one in the bureaucratic hierarchy should be held responsible? Of course not. They’d be clamoring for resignations. Yes, Blair is ultimately responsible. No editor can be held responsible for calculated deceit by a reporter-gone-bad. But an editor can be held responsible if the problems are exposed, and he doesn’t take appropriate action swiftly or fails subsequently to monitor such a reporter very closely. These several pages of explanation and self-examination are honorable in themselves – but not if they’re a means to escape executive responsibility rather than face up to it. The only way the Times can regain its credibility with its readers is if the editor or editors responsible for the critical decisions that made this calamity possible are required to step down.

BONUS ANTI-TIMES ITEM
!: The pro-democracy opposition in Iran is outraged that the Times picked an apologist for the Islamic dictatorship to provide an op-ed on Iraq.