The Dish

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”?

Josh Marshall has the goods.

Howie Kurtz focuses on the critical issue this morning:

The most difficult exchanges came when the metro desk’s Sexton asked why no action was taken after the strong challenges to Blair’s reporting in the sniper case – including from the paper’s own Washington bureau. The U.S. attorney in Maryland disputed a Blair article that said suspect John Muhammad’s interrogation was cut short just as he was about to confess, and a Fairfax County prosecutor called a news conference to denounce a second piece as “dead wrong.” Raines and his team “did nothing” to verify “the authenticity or quality of his reporting,” Sexton said. Why, he asked, did no senior editor demand to know the identities of Blair’s unnamed sources? Raines said it was his failure not to ask about the sources. He said he had “a political reporter’s DNA,” not “a police reporter’s DNA.” But he also said that after examining Blair’s story and a Washington Post account, he believed the story about the truncated interrogation was at least partially true.

Is there a company on the planet where an executive who had made such a decision would still be in place? If an Enron executive had made a similar decision, do you think Raines would be calling for him to stay in place? (My favorite Raines line: “Don’t demagogue me.” And if Ken Lay had said that?)

“Think of [the New York Times’ affirmative action program] in a nonracial context: Suppose the owner of a big company sends his kid to learn the business and tells low-level managers to treat him just like anyone else. The managers curry favor with the boss by reporting that his son is doing great and is a natural genius for this business. So the kid keeps getting praised and promoted, until one day he is actually put in charge of something he has no ability to run. That is cruel. And it’s the story of Pinch Sulzberger, isn’t it?” – Ann Coulter.

THE RAINES REGIME: Don’t buy the “I’m a humble new man” spiel of yesterday. While Raines was spinning his way out of real responsibility for the Blair mess, the Boston Globe (owned by Sulzberger) was spiking a column critical of the Times. Dictators don’t reform. They have to be deposed.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The issue in advancing newsroom diversity is that you have to get people into gate-keeper roles. You have to force your hiring managers to find talent and demand that every pool of applicants for any job includes at least one woman and one minority.” – Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on how he imposes racial preferences in every single job at the paper (except his own), August 8, 2002.

“For years, many governments played down the threats of Islamic revolution, turned a blind eye to international terrorism and accepted the development of weaponry of mass destruction. Indeed, some politicians were happy to go further, collaborating with the self-proclaimed enemies of the West for their own short-term gain – but enough about the French. So deep had the rot set in that the UN security council itself was paralysed… Our own Prime Minister was staunch and our forces were superb. But, above, all, it is President Bush who deserves the credit for victory…There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it.” – Margaret Thatcher, in New York yesterday. God I miss her.

It was, by all accounts, an extraordinary outpouring of anger from the staff of the New York Times at the mercurial, arbitrary and incompetent management of executive editor, Howell Raines. He was asked directly if he would resign. As predicted in this blog, Arthur Sulzberger said he would refuse such a resignation. Since Raines’ policies – “diversity” at all costs and left-liberal spin in every important story – are indeed Sulzberger’s own policies, Raines’ departure would have left Sulzberger badly exposed. The mea culpa from Raines, however, was remarkably candid:

“You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,” Mr. Raines said, ticking off a list he had compiled from his own newsroom interviews in recent days. “You believe the newsroom is too hierarchical, that my ideas get acted on and others get ignored. I heard that you were convinced there’s a star system that singles out my favorites for elevation.” “Fear,” he added, “is a problem to such extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news.”

Then Raines essentially conceded that his own obsession with racial diversity had been a factor in the Jayson Blair affair:

“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts [Blair] appeared to be a promising young minority reporter,” Mr. Raines said. “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.” “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?” he added, a moment later. “Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”

That resolves the question of whether race was a factor. Yes, it was. Of course, the issue was not just the appointment as such, but how information about Blair’s past record had been withheld from his subsequent editors. One brave soul ventured the following:

“I believe that at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom,” said Joe Sexton, a deputy metropolitan editor, according to notes taken by an audience member. “I do not feel a sense of trust and reassurance that judgments are properly made.” “People feel less led than bullied,” he added.

The ruling triumvirate deserve credit for opening themselves up to this onslaught from within, and for publishing it, but it seems they had little choice. Their strategy is a smart one: by complete candor and remorse, they hope to stave off the obvious response to a failure of this magnitude: their own departures from the scene. Whether this gambit will work is now up to the Times’ board, shareholders, and staff. I have a feeling this story is not over yet.

My review of Sidney Blumenthal’s epic on the Clinton presidency (yes, I read 800 pages and wrote the piece in two days) is now up at the New York Observer. I’ve always liked Sid, but the book is unbelievable. I hope he forgives me for an honest review.

UDAY’S BAD DAY: It seems that the $1 billion looted money for Saddam and his family has been recovered. One reason I’m not too gloomy about Iraq is that so many of the worst stories – the looting of the museum, the $1 billion theft – turn out to be much less worrying in retrospect.

Now, here’s a tax bill I could get behind.

WHEN BADGERS ATTACK: Not a Fox special. Yet.

WHO READS BLOGS? Here’s an academic questionnaire designed to answer that question. It takes about 20 minutes.

POSEUR ALERT : “Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th-century diarist, mentions crumpets in his diaries. Crumpets are imported from England by Starck & Sons, a company based in tree-lined Garden City, Long Island. I would stand leaning on my off-white Formica counter and watch, bleary-eyed and depressed, as the large aluminum toaster glowed brighter and brighter like a sunrise in palm-tree-lined Sevilla, where I spent my junior year abroad, and met Carmencita, my first serious girlfriend, whom I have been reluctantly seeing in an addictive, destructive, co-dependent relationship, on and off, for 23 years. And then – zing! – the crumpets would pop up, ready to be eaten.” – Lee Siegel, in a passage he claims to have decided not to publish, in a “matutinal fit of frustration and despair.” The guy is beyond parody.

Al Qaeda’s latest barbarism begins to receive hostile coverage in the Arab press. Get a load of this editorial from the Saudi Arab News:

We have to face up to the fact that we have a terrorist problem here. Last week’s Interior Ministry announcement that 19 Al-Qaeda members, 17 of them Saudis, had planned terrorist attacks in the country and were being hunted was a wake-up call – particularly to those who steadfastly refuse to accept that individual Saudis or Muslims could ever do anything evil, who still cling to the fantasy that Sept. 11 and all the other attacks laid at the doors of terrorists who happen to be Arab or Muslim were in fact the work of the Israelis or the CIA. For too long we have ignored the truth. We did not want to admit that Saudis were involved in Sept. 11. We can no longer ignore that we have a nest of vipers here, hoping that by doing so they will go away. They will not. They are our problem and we all their targets now… There is much in US policy to condemn; there are many aspects of Western society that offend – and where necessary, Arab governments condemn. But anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism for their own sake are crude, ignorant and destructive. They create hate. They must end. Otherwise there will be more barbarities.

Those who said that deposing Saddam would only make the U.S. more isolated in the terror war were wrong.

In case you thought the Blair debacle was the only indicator of the Times’ slide, you obviously haven’t been reading Maureen Dowd. Today featured a classic, well, distortion. Here’s Dowd’s dumb-as-a-post take on Bush’s conduct of the war on terror:

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. “Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated… They’re not a problem anymore.”

Here’s what Bush actually said:

Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.

It’s perfectly clear that the president is referring, sardonically, only to those members of al Qaeda who are “either jailed or dead,” not to the group as a whole. Everything we know about this president tells us that he has always warned of the permanent danger of groups like al Qaeda, has always talked of a long war, and would never say the words that Dowd puts in his mouth. So this is a wilful fabrication. Will they run a correction? Don’t count on it.

BLAIR, GLASS, SHALIT: A perceptive email from John Tabin, whose review of Stephen Glass’s novel can be found here:

You say, “comparing Shalit’s errors to the vast, conscious fraud of the Blair or Glass cases seems to me to be a very big stretch.” Actually, comparing even the Stephen Glass case to Jayson Blair is a stretch– a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for the management, who can just say, “people determined to lie are hard to catch, no matter what your fact-checking system.” The problem with this is that Glass was a lot more careful than Blair about not getting caught. In his book (which I reviewed for TechCentralStation.com Monday), his fictional alter-ego goes to great lengths to thwart the fact-checking system; because he knows how it works, he makes sure never to raise any red flags (faking notes, etc.). That this is true-to-life is corroborated by his 60 Minutes interview, in which he both talked about this and pointed out that, since his sources were fabricated, they never complained.
In contrast, Blair quoted real people, did many more stories (big, important stories, in the case of the sniper investigation), and his editors knew about his problems a long time ago. Unlike Glass, Blair had raised many red flags that were consciously ignored– indeed, he was promoted.
If Blair had been as crafty as Glass, Raines might have been forgiven for overlooking his problems. But he wasn’t that crafty– he was caught, and promoted anyway. I’d say it’s well past time for Pinch to start “demonizing [his] executives.”

Shafer, who’s been spinning for Raines for a year now, needs to face reality. One more addendum: Shafer continues to imply that my criticism of the Raines Times was due to my being fired. That’s the opposite of the truth. My criticisms began when I was still under contract. I felt I owed my blog readers the truth, not my attempt to suck up to the Times’ new management. I was sent veiled warnings to stop the criticism or face the music. I kept criticising. Raines fired me. And the obvious truth is that I was right from the beginning, and saw this problem sooner than most others. Shafer, purportedly a media critic, missed the boat on this huge story. So he’s lashing out at those who didn’t.