Hard News (34 page)

There was good reason for leaving out these explanations. The
Times
’s flawed Iraq reporting was often directly the result of the manner in which Howell Raines ran
The New York Times,
and Bill Keller took over the paper determined to spend his first year healing the newsroom instead of reminding it of its recent trauma. But the insistent chorus of internal and external criticism—most persistently and eloquently from Slate’s Jack Shafer and Michael Massing in
The New York Review of Books
—made ignoring the past impossible. In his column, Okrent cataloged those aspects of the
Times
’s culture that contributed to the paper’s failure, listing a “hunger for scoops”; a culture in which flashy, front-page stories were prized; a tendency for “hit and run” journalism whereby skeptical follow-ups were rarely assigned; and an ethos in which prized sources were coddled.

After each clause, Okrent could have added “by Howell Raines.” Notably, Raines had treated Miller—like Patrick Tyler and Rick Bragg—like a star. At one point soon after September 11, he personally instructed her to go out and “win a Pulitzer.” What’s more, Raines had effectively chased investigative editor Stephen Engelberg out of the paper; Engelberg, who had co-authored a book on biological warfare with Miller, was known as the one editor who had the knowledge and background to rein Miller in when she became excitedly insistent about whatever latest supposed scoop had been leaked to her. With Engelberg gone, Raines implicitly and explicitly instructed his staff to get her stories prominently into the paper. In addition, according to half a dozen sources within the
Times,
Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn’t editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs, something he was especially intent on conveying after the beating the paper took for both its Augusta reporting and its flawed coverage of Kissinger’s position on an invasion of Iraq. “My sense was that Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the warmongering out of Washington,” former investigative editor Doug Frantz wrote in an e-mail to me. Frantz, who personally edited some of Miller’s stories, went on to write, “He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration’s position on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of Al Qaeda. Because of that, Judy Miller’s reporting was encouraged by other senior editors at the newspaper, sometimes over the objections of other editors.”

S
ULZBERGER’S
C
HALLENGES

Today, eleven floors above the newsroom, Arthur Sulzberger is moving forward with his plans for the New York Times Company, insisting 2003’s turmoil has changed neither his nor his paper’s long-term goals. “It’s postponed things,” he says, “because we were caught up in our own underwear, so to speak, for a while. . . . But the plans have not changed.”

Still, questions about Sulzberger himself persist. “The
Times
couldn’t exist without the Sulzbergers,” says James Goodale, a former
Times
executive vice president. “But at some point you have to wonder if the bloodline thins.” “It’s the question many people on the staff have been asking,” says Jack Rosenthal. “Was [Raines] a bet that went wrong, or was it a reflection [of] Arthur’s lack of skill in picking people or in recognizing faults in people he picked?”

Shortly after he forced out Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, Sulzberger—who had initially refused to accept any responsibility in the
Times
’s May 11 account of the Blair affair, saying, “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher”—finally shouldered some of the blame for the meltdown at his family’s newspaper. He told the Siegal committee that he “should have been listening harder to what was happening in the newsroom. I blame myself for that.” While Sulzberger apparently never lost the support of the company’s board of directors, family members made it clear they were none too happy with the way in which their newspaper’s reputation was being sullied. Ultimately, it was the very business executives Raines had so deliberately courted who told Sulzberger the time had come to cut Raines loose.

When Arthur Sulzberger selected Howell Raines to be the sixth executive editor of
The New York Times,
his decision was, to be sure, based partially upon Raines’s perceived journalistic and leadership skills. Perhaps even more important was Raines’s desire to update significantly the content and operations of the
Times
and his adherence to Sulzberger’s fervent belief that the
Times
needed to transform itself from being solely a newspaper to being a multimedia content provider. There were certainly aspects of Raines’s sales pitch that made good business sense, such as his promised revamping of the paper’s culture section, which was a huge—and editorially neglected—source of advertising revenue.

But Raines—who had spent years flattering Sulzberger
^*50
—ultimately had an appeal beyond his promised impact on the bottom line. Both Raines and Sulzberger have said that Raines was hired to serve as a “change agent.” In this way, Raines can be seen as a defining appointment for Sulzberger, especially coming on the heels of his occasionally frustrating relationship with Joe Lelyveld, the man Sulzberger felt he had little choice but to appoint in the early 1990s. Unlike Lelyveld, who had at times found the manner in which Sulzberger wanted to achieve his goals—concerning diversity or the
Times
’s foray into the Internet or the company’s flirtations with television—either simplistic or headstrong, Raines had for years been an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of Sulzberger’s plans. In choosing Raines to be his executive editor, Sulzberger found himself an employee who shared not only his vision but also some of Sulzberger’s complicated reactions to the paper itself. For his part, Raines needed to see the future of the
Times
as distinctly different from its past in order to create a self-fulfilling narrative in which he played the part of an almost mythical hero, riding in to save a fading institution from obsolescence.

—————

S
ULZBERGER HAS LONG BEEN
dismissive of those who try to ascribe Oedipal motivations to his leadership of the
Times,
but his selection of Howell Raines, coupled with his almost religious devotion to having a plan of attack for confronting the future, can be seen at least partially as a reaction against his father.
^*51
But if Punch Sulzberger wasn’t always aggressive about the company’s strategic development, he did viscerally recognize that the source of the
Times
’s strength and power stemmed from the fact that its employees—and he counted himself as one—viewed the institution as working toward a greater good, a higher purpose, that outstripped the worldly aspirations of any one person. Sulzberger Jr., in contrast, seems more intent on trying to prove the
Times
can reinvent itself as the dominant media company in a new era.

Today, Bill Keller is moving forward with some of the innovations Sulzberger and Raines had talked about three long years ago, most notably the much-discussed revamping of the paper’s culture coverage. But the outlook for Sulzberger’s business plans is more mixed.

One of Arthur Sulzberger’s favorite sayings is attributed to Dwight Eisenhower: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything.” It’s the planning of the
Times
’s executive team—Sulzberger; Russ Lewis, the company’s CEO; and Janet Robinson, the chief operating officer and executive vice president—that has positioned the
Times
as the country’s leading national paper. This was done in large part in the mid-1990s, as the
Times
worked its jujitsu on the paper’s ad and circulation strategies, moves that enabled the paper to sell itself as a truly national product. Previously, the emphasis of ad salespeople at the
Times
had been the New York metro edition; the national edition was an add-on. “That was backwards,” says Robinson. “What we should have been saying was, ‘Buy the entire distribution of
The New York Times,
and if indeed you would like to advertise just in the New York region, you can choose to appear in the metro section [which is distributed only in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut].” So Robinson instructed the
Times
’s ad sales staff to do just that. By 2004, nearly 90 percent of the paper’s advertising ran in all editions of the paper.

“We’ve moved to the point where now we are the national newspaper for a whole stratum of the American population,” says Russ Lewis, who will step down as the Times Company’s CEO in late 2004, to be replaced by Robinson. “It could have been
The Washington Post.
It could have been the
Los Angeles Times.
But it isn’t. It’s us.”

Indeed, while convincing advertisers to buy national runs, the
Times
has been continuing to aggressively increase the number of markets in which home delivery is available on a day-of-publication basis. By doing this, the
Times
has managed to buck current business trends: Virtually every paper in the country is facing shrinking circulation.

Then, too, there’s the
International Herald Tribune
—what has basically become the foreign edition of the
Times,
following the Times Company’s 2002 buyout of the
Washington Post
’s interest in the paper—as an engine of overseas growth. The
IHT,
Sulzberger says, will be a major focus of the Times Company, as will aggressive expansion into television and the Internet. “We can now go to an advertiser and say, ‘Okay, we became national, now we’re becoming global,’ ” says Sulzberger. “And most of these companies are global. We can offer them thought leaders in Europe and Asia [through the
IHT
], and we can offer them thought leaders in the U.S. with a single buy. That’s one of the great opportunities now that we have one hundred percent control [of the
International Herald Tribune
].”

But the
Times
’s takeover of the
International Herald Tribune
can also be seen in a less rosy light. Peter Goldmark, who had been the chairman and CEO of the
IHT
since 1998, had for years been telling executives at both the
Times
and
The Washington Post
that they needed to explore different ownership options. By keeping the
IHT
as a quasi-independent entity, he argued, the papers were ignoring what could be the
IHT
’s greatest strength: its ability to sell global ad buys to businesses looking to pitch their products to an elite audience on both sides of the Atlantic. But when Sulzberger told
Post
executives they needed to either sell the
IHT
to the
Times
outright or have the
Times
drop out of the joint agreement and start an international paper of its own, he not only angered the Graham family, owners of
The Washington Post,
but shut the door on the possibility of maintaining a joint editorial operation while giving the
Times
control of the
IHT
’s management—and ad sales. “That was no one’s finest hour,” says Goldmark.

What’s more, the
Times
appeared not to have a plan for what to do with the
IHT
once it gained control of the paper. It was unclear the extent to which operations were going to be run out of New York or who, exactly, would lead the Paris-based broadsheet. Even the name of the paper was undecided, as the company debated whether to rename the property as the international edition of
The New York Times
or keep its current moniker. Sulzberger says all that uncertainty is an example of being willing to remain flexible under changing circumstances and cites readership studies that showed a preference for keeping the paper’s current name. But outside observers say it seemed more as though the Times Company suddenly had a new toy it had no idea what to do with. “It was amateur hour,” says a Wall Street analyst who covers the
Times
and the newspaper industry. “Regardless of whether it ends up being a good long-term strategic decision, the way that thing was handled didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in anyone.”

“These are our bets,” says Sulzberger. “They’re well-placed bets. But you know what? If the worst were to happen and they didn’t work out, it wouldn’t kill us. We’d move on. Because we have the resources to do that. So we pick the bets that, in our heart of hearts, we think are going to work. And we go with it.” Russ Lewis is similarly confident. “When people look at the
IHT,
or at Discovery Times [television] and say, ‘What the hell are they doing that for?’—well, those same people were saying that about our national edition. There’ve always been naysayers,” he says.

Sulzberger, of course, deserves credit for helping to steer the
Times
through its last decade of growth and dominance. He also deserves credit for swallowing his personal pride in June 2003 and forcing Howell Raines to step down. But if, as he says, planning is everything, then his track record is clearly mixed. Considering Raines’s well-documented managerial problems, Sulzberger could have and should have found some way to institute checks on Raines’s autocratic tendencies; indeed, for a person who began his tenure as a publisher preaching a need to eliminate overly hierarchical management systems, his blind faith in Raines now seems outright bizarre. When, throughout 2002, there were innumerable signs that the newsroom and newspaper were spinning out of control—when, indeed, people inside and outside the
Times
came to him to tell him about the dangerous level of dysfunction gripping the paper—Sulzberger should have moved decisively.