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Former New
York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, who resigned in the wake of the Jayson
Blair plagiarism scandal, has written a 23-page confessional in the month's edition
of the Atlantic.
Raines,
who had a 25-year run with the Times, took the helm Sept. 5, 2001, just six days
before Sept. 11. His tenure as editor, which was pockmarked with accusations that
he was too aggressive, ended abruptly after the paper published a four-page spread
on the reportorial falsifications of staff writer Jayson Blair. In
his extensive piece, Raines reconstructs his long career with the paper, detailing
his relationships with previous editors and explaining his attempts to control
what he called the paper's "culture of complaint." He describes a newspaper
riven by a divide of effort, where many of the paper's journalists slip into an
apathy which undermines the Times' ability to stay ahead of the news. "At
the Times," he writes, "as at Harvard, it is hard to get in and almost
impossible to flunk out." Notably
absent from the article is details surrounding the Blair case itself; Raines makes
mention of Blair's case only towards the end of the piece. Most of his time is
spent breaking down what he sees as the nearly intractable problems with the Times
newsroom. Raines
slams the Times' powerful writer's guild, which, he says, encourages a climate
of indifference within the paper. "On
a newsroom floor with 1,200 employees and an even larger, militantly pro-Guild
support staff, where the company is the daddy and the union is the mommy, no one
is supposed to speak publicly about the attitudes of entitlement and smug complacency
that pervade the paper." "Clubabble
underachievers," he adds, "are usually given sinecures rather than encouraged
to leave." He
calls attention to what he sees as one of the paper's biggest challenges —
to eradicate the idea that the Times can afford to be lazy in covering breaking
stories because its eventual article will be better. To
survive, he argues, the Times must shed its "Victorian affectation"
and "New York parochialism, to eschew a "glide path towards irrelevance." Occasionally,
Raines apologizes for being too heavy-handed with the staff. After Sept. 11, he
says, staffers responded with incredible energy and focus. But Raines wanted more,
driving through his long-planned revamp of the inside sections. "After
the monumental accomplishments of covering 9/11," he writes, "I did
not allow the staff enough breathing space before declaring … we were launching
a year-long effort to upgrade the quality of our weaker sections. "Was
I in too much of a hurry and overly reliant on my competitive instincts? Yes.
Did I pay too little attention to the oldest cliché of Times management
00 that when an executive editor sneezes, everyone else gets pneumonia? Absolutely." As
such, he notes, "When Jayson Blair's violations became public, I had no reservoir
of good will on which to draw." Raines
accepts responsibility for the failings of Jayson Blair, though he remarks that
he might have taken less heat had the article enumerating Blair's mistakes included
mention of the fact that word of Blair's errors never reached his desk. A memo
circulated a year before the scandal broke, he says, said that Blair should not
be allowed to continue with the Times. Raines says it reached the desk of the
managing editor, Gerald Boyd, but not his own. In
the article, Raines explains that the two cultures at the Times, one of "achievement"
and the other of "complaint," allows newcomers to climb the Times ladder
very quickly. Though he doesn't make the assertion directly, he infers that this
may have led to Blair's final demise. Raines
notes that the Times' chief correspondent in Iraq, Dexter Filkins, had only been
with the paper one year. He also details his quick ascendance within the Times'
hierarchy. The
most damaging fallout of the Blair scandal, he writes, was not the termination
of his or Boyd's careers, but instead the "derailment of the managerial reformation
for which we were laying the tracks." As
a business, he asserts, the Times is in trouble. Circulation for both the daily
and Sunday editions have slipped to about 1.1 million and 1.6 million respectively,
and the paper is losing touch with its chief demographic: the affluent and well-educated. "A
Times marketing survey in 1990 showed that there were more than 40 million 'like-minded
nonreaders' in the country — a group defined by people who ought to read
the Times but didn't," he pens. "In
short," he continues, "the Times was going after the smartest and most
affluent people in the United States, and finding, at best, only a fortieth of
them." To
combat this, Raines took on a revamp of the inside sections, installing new editors
in Arts & Leisure, the Week in Review, Book Review, Science and Travel. He
maintains that these sections improved dramatically under his watch. He also dispatched
more Times photographers to war zones, netting the paper additional Pulitzers. But
despite his attempts to improve the paper, Raines centers on a statement issued
by the commission which investigated Jayson Blair. "The
report shows an institution in denial," he says.
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