Hard News (25 page)

“A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months,” the main piece began. It went on:

The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper. The reporter, Jayson Blair, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from newspapers and wire services. . . .

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. . . .

The Times inquiry also establishes that various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair’s reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. . . .

The investigation suggests several reasons Mr. Blair’s deceits went undetected for so long: a failure of communication among senior editors; few complaints from the subjects of his articles; his savviness and his ingenious ways of covering his tracks. Most of all, no one saw his carelessness as a sign that he was capable of systematic fraud.

Mr. Blair was just one of about 375 reporters at The Times; his tenure was brief. But the damage he has done to the newspaper and its employees will not completely fade with next week’s editions, or next month’s, or next year’s.

“It’s a huge black eye,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of the newspaper, whose family has owned a controlling interest in The Times for 107 years. “It’s an abrogation of the trust between the newspaper and its readers.”

The piece was an excoriation of the Jayson Blair saga as well as an explanation, but at its heart the
Times
story was a great yarn. It featured massive fraud, a charismatic con man, and a powerful institution brought to its knees. The piece also would serve as a road map for much of what was to come. It flicked at the problems that had arisen since Howell Raines took over the
Times,
touched on Boyd and Blair’s perceived relationship, and addressed the widespread frustration of midlevel editors at the
Times.

Catherine Mathis’s home phone began ringing almost immediately. Reporters from
Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post,
and the
Los Angeles Times
called.
The Wall Street Journal
was doing a story for Monday. The TV networks wanted someone to go on the air. Was there any circumstance under which Howell Raines would resign? Was the
Times
going to cover the story further? Mathis wasn’t sure of the answer to many of the questions she was facing. Like many in the
Times
’s newsroom, she had learned that Howell Raines didn’t much enjoy taking advice from others, nor did he always share his intentions with others. Mathis struggled along the best she could.
^*38
No, she said, Raines wasn’t planning on resigning. And the story would be covered if there were important new developments.

Although Dan Barry and David Barstow had written most of the main story, there was no front-page byline. Instead, the story included a credit box on its inside pages that read, “This article was reported and written by Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan D. Glater, Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg. Research support was provided by Alain Delaqueriere and Carolyn Wilder.” This absence of a byline on the paper’s front page contributed to the sense that the
Times
report was an institutional response to an internal crisis. Unlike, say, David Shaw’s Staples Center report in the
Los Angeles Times,
or the ombudsman’s report in
The Washington Post
following the Janet Cooke fiasco, there was no explanation of how the report evolved or who in the newsroom was allowed to see it before publication.

On Sunday, May 11, the media storm erupted. Many of the major dailies across the country wrote about Blair; many focused on the
Times
’s claim that the Blair scandal was a “low point” in the paper’s 152-year history. That Sunday,
The Denver Post,
the
San Francisco Chronicle,
and
The Tennessean
all ran items on fraudulent Blair stories that they had run after getting them from the
Times
’s newswire. (The coverage was not without its unintentional humor. The
Orlando Sentinel
ran a breathless editorial titled “Squander Credibility and All Is Lost.” Earlier in the paper, the
Sentinel
had run an item on Blair—who had had errors in less than 20 percent of his articles for the
Times
—under this headline: “Most of Reporter’s Articles Had Problems, New York Times Says.”)

By Monday morning, the
Times
’s report and rumors about the mood inside the paper were dominating New York’s media world. Reaction in the newsroom was mixed. Some felt the four-page examination hadn’t attached sufficient blame to Raines and Boyd; others felt the entire exercise had been one of solipsistic overkill; many didn’t know what to think. Outside the
Times,
pundits eagerly tried to poke holes in the
Times
’s account, usually without taking into consideration the reporting team’s assigned mission or its intense time constraints.

Considerable attention was also paid to the role of race in the Jayson Blair affair. Partisans on both sides of the debate immediately began to use the incident to further their agendas, with some African American journalist associations proclaiming Blair’s race had nothing to do with his ascension at the paper, and opponents of affirmative-action programs blaming the entire incident on a misguided effort to diversify. The reality wasn’t so simple. Blair’s career at the
Times
had undeniably been shaped by his race—he’d initially been recruited into a minority internship program—but the vagaries of his career under Howell Raines’s tenure had more to do with the favoritism and factionalism that had gripped the paper.

Whatever people’s reactions, it was clear the story would become the most talked about subject of the day. The
Times
’s report had been published in one of the first truly quiet news cycles since September 11: The attack on Iraq had concluded, the situation on the ground had not yet descended into chaos, and the next year’s presidential campaign had not yet moved into high gear. There was no national drama like the sniper case. Raines, and the
Times,
moved into that vacuum, if only for a week or two. Still, for all the speculative frenzy, there was almost no discussion about whether or not Raines would step down. He was seen as too powerful, his Pulitzer sweep too recent.

On Monday, after being prompted by one of his editors, Howell Raines came by the fourth-floor training room the reporting team had been using as its headquarters and perfunctorily thanked the team for the job they did. Boyd also came by and shook the reporters’ hands. “We were very proud of the piece,” says Liptak. “And at the same time we probably weren’t sufficiently sensitive to the fact that all sorts of people had wanted it to be about Howell, or they wanted it to talk about race—I don’t think they read it for itself.” The team quickly discovered the extent to which their reactions to Blair’s deceptions, and to the newsroom culture that enabled them, were out of sync with the rest of the newsroom; the reporters had had, after all, a full week to make sense of the details in the piece, details their colleagues were just now beginning to process.

At the same time, the team was wondering about their futures. Says Barstow, “We were all half waiting for the time when we’d be told, ‘We really need a seasoned journalist to lead the resurrection in the Westchester Weekly section. That’s really the paper’s highest priority right now, and you’re our guy. And by the way, you start on Monday.’ ” Raines was, after all, known to hold grudges. “We were sort of wondering,” says Liptak, “who was going to end up at large-type weekly.”

Barstow remembered all too well what happened to Tim Golden, a onetime investigative reporter who butted heads with Raines: One day, Golden came in to work and was told he would be reassigned to the
Times
’s website. Instead, he quit. And, of course, Kevin Sack’s byline was no longer appearing in the
Times.

Before they could get too nervous about their futures, however, Raines said he wanted to meet with the five reporters individually. Adam Liptak went first. Did Liptak, Raines asked, have anything else he wanted to talk about? Liptak started talking about how closer monitoring of the paper’s expense reports could not only help keep track of reporters but might also give a sense of whether or not a particular story was worth the expenditure. Raines’s eyes glazed over.

Then Liptak said that Raines needed to address his troops. Raines said that he’d be doing that in the coming days. “I’ve made the decision as a leader that the best way I can manage this is in small groups,” he said. Liptak cut him off. “I remember feeling a little surprised at myself that I had the nerve to say this to him. He can be a scary man,” Liptak says. “I said, ‘No, Howell, you need to get out there in front of everybody.’ He just said he had made his decision.”

That afternoon, Raines called Joyce Purnick, Clyde Haberman, and Floyd Norris, three of the newsroom’s most senior members, and asked to meet them for dinner so they could discuss the mood at the paper. Purnick wrote the paper’s “Metro Matters” column. She had served as the paper’s metro editor before Landman and was married to Max Frankel, a former
Times
executive editor. Like Purnick, Haberman has also worked at the
Times
for a quarter century, most recently as the author of “NYC,” one of the paper’s biweekly metro columns. Norris had spent the least amount of time on the paper—he’d been at the
Times
for fourteen years and was the paper’s marquee business columnist. Norris and Purnick had both worked with Raines on the editorial board, and Haberman and Raines had known each other since the 1970s, when they both covered the Carter campaign, Haberman for the
New York Post,
Raines for the
St. Petersburg Times.

That afternoon, Norris walked around the newsroom talking to reporters. “I thought I should get some feel for what the newsroom attitude was,” Norris says. “I was surprised. People had read some of the preexisting critiques of the Raines management into that piece—that he played favorites or didn’t pay sufficient attention to his subordinates.”

Norris was doing just the kind of pulse taking that Raines, the lifelong political reporter, seldom did as executive editor. During his time on the editorial board, Raines made a point of keeping in contact with members of the newsroom, asking key people to lunch once or twice a year. Once he got to the newsroom, Raines generally stayed secluded in his corner office. “There’s a famous line attributed to Jack Kennedy, that the White House is not a good place to make new friends,” Norris says. “It occurred to me that that was also an issue for executive editors.” “Howell never worked the room,” says Haberman. “And he was starting without any roots.”

Before he left for dinner, Raines sent out an e-mail to the paper’s staff. It was more than two pages long and single-spaced. “I have not written or spoken directly to you in the last week because I wanted our reporting and editing team to have the time and freedom to do this valuable work,” Raines wrote. He then announced the formation of a committee to examine the Jayson Blair fiasco and recommend changes, to be led by Al Siegal. “It will shape its own agenda,” Raines wrote, and Siegal himself would choose the members.

Raines also said he wanted to talk to his staff. “I will try to meet with every interested member of the newsroom staff, in groups of several dozen at a time, on the 11th floor. The collective wisdom of these groups helped prepare me for the enormous challenges of my first 18 months on the job. Now I ask you for the same kind of input and support as we repair the damage inflicted on us and broaden our goals for the future.”

That night, Raines and the three columnists went to Esca, a seafood restaurant on Forty-third Street, two blocks west of the Times building
.
It was one of Raines’s regular spots, and the chef came over to greet the group. But it was not a happy meal. “We hit [Raines] pretty squarely with a bill of particulars,” Haberman says.

The next day, Raines met with David Barstow. Barstow was already upset with Raines’s reaction to the story. “There was a sense that he just didn’t get it,” Barstow says. “Small group meetings are one of the worst forums for candid discussion. They’re designed more for him to talk than listen. This was already crisis management.” Barstow walked into Raines’s office around eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, four days after he and Barry had had their final interview with him.

“His whole demeanor had completely changed,” Barstow says. “He was more slumped in his posture. He just looked rocked.” Raines, Barstow thought, was looking for a way to move forward, but for the first time in his tenure he felt unsure about his footing. “It was upsetting. On the one hand to see him so unsure, and on the other hand he still had to come to grips with what this was. He had to have good information.”

“I wish I had good news for you,” Barstow said. “But I don’t.” Just as he had on Friday, Barstow brought in a yellow legal notepad. This time, he would show Raines what he was writing. The first two words were “losing newsroom.”

Barstow had long admired Raines—both men were veterans of the
St. Petersburg Times,
and when Barstow joined
The New York Times,
Raines invited him to lunch. But now, says Barstow, “too many people were tiptoeing around the guy and not telling him what they really thought. I wanted to walk into his office and hit him over the head with a two-by-four and make him understand what was going on.” Barstow went through his list: People thought Raines was more interested in getting buzz than being right; reporters were convinced good stories were doled out on the basis of personal relationships; senior editors were afraid to speak up. Raines took notes in a black-and-white marble-faced notebook.