Month: June 2003

A reader writes:

I’ll tell you a story of: Howell Raines
How everyone knew: He’ll Now Arise
Before the scandals: He is All Owner
But while in power: Ran Whole Lies

Honest reporters think: He’s Orwellian
In news, there was: Nowhere as Ill
Blair was simply: A Swollen Hire
Contributing to the: Sewer on a Hill

The internet blogs: Learn Who Lies
How fired reporters: He Reallows In
Just honest mistakes: He Will Reason
Now all media is doubted: Hell, a Sore Win

(From one John Addis. Okay. That’s enough anagrams – ed.)

“Please, please no more links to the Alterman blog. I feel like I’ve had an enema with a roto-rooter. I feel like my teeth were just cleaned by Uday Hussein. That’s the worst bit of bad writing married to self-absorption I’ve endured since the junior high poetry book. Please. I’ll pay you. Never again.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Money quote from the LA Times:

[I]n the end, it was the new world of Web sites, blogs, online editions and e-mails – not Raines – that set the pace of his exit.

Adapt or die.And here’s what Alex Jones told the Newshour:

I think there’s one other element that is worth noting. I think this story has been kept alive, in many ways, by the Internet, I think in the world that journalists occupy especially this story has just kept on and on.

Exactly.

THE PERILS OF DIVERSITY: Also from the Jim Lehrer show:

ALEX JONES: And I think these two firings – not two firings, these two resignations, these two… this dramatic gesture that has been made by Howell Raines and Gerald Jordan…
TERENCE SMITH: Gerald Boyd…
ALEX JONES: …I mean, Gerald Boyd.. is something that has a great symbolic power, and I’m hoping that that is going to say that this is a, you know, a ship that is too important to not do the painful thing when it’s required.

Gerald Boyd. Michael Jordan. Michael Boyd. Gerald Jordan. Hard to keep all those black guys straight sometimes, isn’t it?

He’s Orwellian. Uh oh. What have I started?

The arrest and now apparent disappearance of the rightful Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is the latest sign of the depravity of the military dictatorship that is still ruining Burma. The Washington Post this morning rightly urges that the Congress and the president make a stink about this. Mitch McConnell and the irrepressible John McCain are supporting strong economic sanctions – which, in this case, would directly hurt the business cronies of the junta that control much of the economy. The president should take note and urge passage of the bill and do what he can to urge Japan in particular to halt its odious appeasement of the thugs in Rangoon. I feel particularly strongly about this, as one of the relatively few Westerners who managed to get into Burma over a decade ago just before the revolution. It was a heart-breaking visit. The decay and despair of a proud and beautiful nation were emblems to me of what dictatorship does to the human soul. When you see what this country once was, its poignant and stunning religiosity, its ethnic variety, its gentle culture, and you see how it has been trashed by careless, callous generals, you get a lesson in how destructive authoritarian politics can be.

“Has not the time come to change our strategy?-What I think the rest of the world is waiting for – indeed hoping for – is some positive sign that the civilised powers are going to uphold the standards of international behaviour set by their forbears; that they are going to do so in the most systematic, relentless and comprehensive manner, and if necessary – while they still possess it – with overwhelming force. All over our tormented planet, there are millions of decent, peaceable and intelligent men and women of all religions, complexions, and races, who are praying that the resources of civilisation are not, indeed, exhausted – and that the Brezhnevs and the Amins, the Ghadaffis-and the Maos, the Arafats and the O-Sadists will not be allowed to take over the earth.” – Paul Johnson, quoted in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “A Dangerous Place,” his memoir about the United Nations.

Howell Raines: Ran Whole Lies. (With thanks to a reader with too much time on his hands.)

THE FAMILY DID IT: According to the New York Observer, Howell Raines was despatched by a combination of forces: rebellion at the Washington bureau; the views of Arthur Sulzberger Sr, and Pinch-rival, Michael Golden; the New York newsroom; and the Times board. In a chilling sentence, Sridhar Pappu writes, “In the past few weeks, members of the Sulzberger family were calling Times staffers, hoping to gauge the gravity of the situation there, and to assess the staff’s faith both in Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Mr. Raines.” It may have come down to Arthur Sulzberger Jr’s recognition that if he didn’t despatch Raines and Boyd, the board might think of despatching him. Every day that the crisis continued, the brand suffered. The critical issue wasn’t the Jayson Blair debacle. It was the fact that Raines couldn’t win back the confidence of the news room afterwards. “Howell ruled by fear,” said one source to the Observer. “And when he wasn’t strong enough to rule by fear anymore, he couldn’t rule.” Like all dictators, his fall was sudden, swift and complete.

THE INTERNET DID IT: But something else played a part. Only, say, five years ago, the editors of the New York Times had much more power than they have today. If they screwed up, no one would notice much. A small correction would be buried days, sometimes weeks, later. They could spin stories with gentle liberal bias and only a few eyes would roll. Certainly no critical mass of protest could manage to foment reform at the paper. And the kind of deference that always existed toward the Times, and the secretive, Vatican-like mystique of its inner workings kept criticism at bay. But the Internet changed all that. Suddenly, criticism could be voiced in a way that the editors of the Times simply couldn’t ignore. Blogs – originally smartertimes.com, then this blog, kausfiles.com and then Timeswatch.com and dozens and dozens of others – began noting errors and bias on a daily, even hourly basis. The blogosphere in general created a growing chorus of criticism that helped create public awareness of exactly what Raines was up to. Uber-bloggers like Drudge were able to take that to the mainstream media; and reporter-bloggers like Seth Mnookin picked up the baton. This media foodchain forced transparency on one of the most secretive and self-protective of institutions. It pulled the curtain back on the man behind the curtain. We did what journalists are supposed to do – and we did it to journalism itself.

GETTING THERE FIRST: It’s worth reviewing that the blogosphere was there before the mainstream media caught on and long before the Jayson Blair revelation. First, blogs revealed how many of the NYT’s polls were skewed in the way they presented or spun data. They exposed the anti-Bush fervor of the Enron coverage. Then they broadcast the revelation of how Paul Krugman had once had lucrative former ties with Enron. We exposed blatant lies on the front-page – from allegedly soaring temperatures in Alaska to the fabricated cooptation of Henry Kissinger into the anti-war camp in August 2002. The process was relentless. In the end, even fabulist Maureen Dowd couldn’t get away with doctoring quotes from the president to make a partisan point because a relatively little known blogger caught her, and passed it on. And in all this, we were helped by hundreds of readers who found errors and bias where others didn’t – meta-bloggers, if you will. A reader put it extremely well in this email:

Without the internet, Jayson Blair could not have copied stories from faraway papers while holed up in his crummy Brooklyn apartment. Without the internet, those of us at our desks in the Midwest could not have read Rick Bragg’s outrageous resignation speech in Howard Kurtz’s column in the Washington Post. Without the internet, NYT reporters could not have responded publicly to Bragg’s assertions in their postings on the Romenesko column at Poynter.org. Without the internet, NYT stringers, past and present, could not have responded to those postings with their fruitless pleas for recognition from byline reporters and 43rd Street editors. No part of the byline or attribution scandal would have become public. Without the internet, the chatter on this topic and others would have died down to a dull roar that Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd and Arthur Sulzberger could possibly have ignored for weeks until it subsided, with the collusion of the rest of the (equally guilty) elite media in New York. Now in newspaper journalism, as in so many other traditional industries (real estate, banking, computers, retail sales, airlines, travel, etc.), we see that the internet strips away discretion, power and secrecy. It is very hard to withstand the forced transparency induced by this new technology. It is truly an engine of transformation in our economy and in the way we think and respond to information, and it can bring powerful institutions to their knees.

Exactly. First Lott. Then Raines. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This really shouldn’t be a sign of a revolution, but it is. In any other business, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd would have resigned weeks ago. And a few years ago, they would have been able to ride out the storm, using the Times’ enormous media power to protect themselves. But the Internet has changed things. It means that the errors and biases of the new NYT could be exposed not just once but dozens and dozens of times. It means that huge and powerful institutions such as the New York Times cannot get away with anything any more. The deference is over; and the truth will out. And this is what this campaign was all about. It wasn’t personal pique. I started to criticize the drift of the Raines Times months before he decided to purge anyone at the Times who dissented from his politics and his personal agendas. It was about stopping a hugely important media institution from becoming completely captive to the elite left and a mercurial, power-crazy Southern liberal. Of course, that battle isn’t over. But the massive power-grab that Raines attempted was foiled in the end. And Lelyveld is the perfect interim choice. This is good news – for the media, the Times, above all for the blogosphere, which played a critical part in keeping this story alive – and lethal.

I felt I was out on a limb a little when I predicted that president Bush’s main focus after Iraq would be the Israeli-Palestinian question. But I simply went by what this president actually said, which is often a good indicator of what he will actually do. The key to understanding Bush, I think, is the fact that both Powell and Rumsfeld are confidants. Bush is smart enough to know that the combination is better than either one alone – that another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace without desposing Saddam would have been pointless; but that not having a bash after deposing Saddam would be a foolishly wasted opportunity. It still may not work out. But the president deserves credit for trying – and, pace his critics on right and left, for getting the timing right.

One reason I find some of the grand-standing over WMDs increasingly preposterous is that it comes from people who really want to avoid the obvious: more and more it’s clear that the liberation of Iraq was a moral obligation under any circumstances. People say to this argument that if we depose one dictator for these kinds of abuses, where will we stop? But the truth is: very few dictators have resorted to imprisonment or mass killing of children. Saddam’s evil was on a world-historical scale. Ending it was one of the most prgressive things the United States and Britain and their allies have ever done.

THE END OF INFANTICIDE II: I can certainly respect those who do not believe that a first trimester fetus is essentially a human person. But I cannot respect those who are morally untroubled by the hideous procedure of partial birth abortion. In fact I’d go further: one measure of how some pro-choice activists have lost their way is their refusal to see that some restrictions on abortion are indistinguishable from a total restriction on all abortion; and that there is a moral issue here. By the third trimester on, there is an unmistakable human being at stake – visually, intuitively, morally. The awful way in which that human being has its life extinguished in very late term abortions simply shouldn’t be a part of any civilized society. Yes, I know my own abortion position – that it should be legal in the first trimester only – lacks complete moral and political coherence. But it’s a result of trying to balance in my own mind my personal view that all abortion is wrong and my understanding that in a liberal democracy, others sincerely disagree; and in many cases, such disagreement also involves such an intimate decision on the part of a woman that I feel the state is unqualified to intervene. That’s where I am – and where I suspect a lot of people are: uncomfortable, anguished, conflicted. But I see no reason to feel such conflicts about partial birth procedures. If the pro-choice movement eagerly agreed to outlaw these more horrific operations, they would surely have more credibility in arguing for retaining legal abortion in earlier stages. But they won’t, because ideology is trumping reason here. It shouldn’t. The passage of this law represents a huge step forward for humane medicine, whatever your ultimate position on the abortion matter in more general terms.

TICK, TOCK, ARTHUR: Mickey has the odds of Howell Raines’ departure at 70 percent. The arrival of the Howell-o-meter itself pushes the odds to 75 percent.