NEW YORK TIMES OR MINISTRY OF TRUTH? -- Say Bye-bye, Howell Raines!

NEW YORK TIMES OR MINISTRY OF TRUTH?
-- Say Bye-bye, Howell Raines! ...

May 31, 2003: Yesterday's New York Times had a piece buried on its back pages which tells us that Rick Bragg, one of Howell Raines' hottest correspondents, Pulitzer Prize winner, and teacher's pet, has resigned because it was revealed last week that he submitted stories written by (or largely researched by) others, and represented them as his work alone. He was suspended with pay last week, pending an investigation; and when the Washington Post interviewed him, he told them that dang blast it everybody does it, what I done. Besides, boo hoo, I have diabetes.

Whereupon the whole Times National Desk, and dozens of outraged correspondents, rose up in arms and shot off outraged e-mails to each other -- especially crabby old Peter Kilborn who says Times reporters are noble and pure and good and true and hardworking and Rick Bragg is the only rotten apple in the barrel.

As you would expect, what the Times printed yesterday was the children's version of the story and of Peter Kilborn's e-mail. If you want the x-rated version, click on the Newsweek Web exclusive by Seth Mnookin.

It is not hard to see -- reading the lines and what's between them -- that the reason for the outrage is not that Bragg degraded the Times standards, but that his shady practices were tolerated and rewarded -- just as with Jayson Blair -- by the big boss Howell Raines. Prejudice and favoritism in the newsroom:

Kilborn's e-mail also touched on a number of other long-simmering complaints about the culture at the Times. Within minutes of being sent to about 20 other national correspondents and two editors, replies started to come in. Tim Egan wrote, "Glad to hear you say what I have been feeling". The problem is we've had a two-tier system that has allowed Bragg to carve out one system for him, (cutting corners, using a huge stringer network, telling people he can't be edited) and another for everyone else". What will come of this infighting, cannibalism, and soul-searching? Hopefully, we'll go back to valuing what we have: people who care about the drift of this country, and are given the time and respect to tell it right."

Come again? What was that you said, Tim Egan? "Hopefully, we'll go back to valuing what we have: people who care about the drift of this country, and who are given the time and respect to tell it right."

Sometimes in moments of high passion, bits of the unvarnished truth slip out.

"The drift of this country"? What can he possibly mean by that?

Is there any doubt that what he means is the drift towards conservatism. In otherwords, the people of this country have been rethinking their views about a number of things and now have values which are different from the values of the New York Times -- a definite no-no. And we Times reporters must all work together and "tell it right," which naturally means tell it left.

Simply put, what Tim Egan means is that it is his mission to change the minds of the people not by telling the straight facts and letting the people decide what the facts mean, but by "telling it right." And since the Times, or rather Howell Raines and Pinch Sulzberger alone, knows what is correct, the facts have to be screened, selected, polished, spun, and nuanced in order to print -- "all the news that fits, we print."

How do they do that without lying or grossly distorting? It's called nuanced reporting and editing...

Liberals are fuming with the NY Times in general and Raines in particular.

From PBS “Newshour”:

MARVIN KALB[ senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. ]: I have the feeling that The New York Times right now is like part of a government caught with its hand in the cookie jar. The New York Times in a sense has done something wrong, it is very large, it is very important to the nation, to the world, as a matter of fact.
And it is trying to come back, and the way it's coming back, it seems to me, doesn't measure up to what The Times ought to be; there are no firings, nobody resigns. It's like the government in that sense.

TERENCE SMITH [PBS]: John Temple, when it comes to anonymous sources, you've introduced some changes at your newspaper on that. Tell us about that.
JOHN TEMPLE [ editor and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News]: Yes, I have. I was concerned after the appearance of the four-page spread in The Times explaining the Jayson Blair case, and I called The Times -- as The Rocky Mountain News subscribes to The New York Times news service, and has the right to print any of the material in The New York Times -- and I wanted a clarification on The Times' policy on anonymous sources.
And ultimately the policy as it was conveyed to me was there is no formal policy. And I found that to be of tremendous concern, because I had done the same thing with the Associated Press that day.
And so effective that day, on Monday, we introduced a policy that any New York Times story using anonymous sources must be approved by the managing editor or the editor, and that is the same policy we have for our own stories. So in other words, we're putting The Times' stories through our own filter, the exact same filter, and asking ourselves whether we should run this story, and in fact we have rejected already one page-one story that The Times offered and did run on their page one.
TERENCE SMITH: So as a subscriber to that service, John Temple, I gather, you're taking a more skeptical or questioning look at The New York Times product that is coming in to your office?
JOHN TEMPLE: That's correct, because I asked The Times news service -- I said it would be my request that you acknowledge in the copy that you have verified the sources and that the editors at the paper know who the sources are and have decided, thus have decided it's worth publishing. But that's not The Times' approach, and my worry is that if The Times isn't going to do that, then I have evaluate it on a case by case basis.
And when you get an entire story based on anonymous sources that's inflammatory, for example, a story saying that U.S. officials are saying they're going to shoot looters on sight, where they have quotes that there's no attribution in the entire story, I felt uncomfortable with that story and I did not feel it was necessary to run it without knowing more, and I waited and did not run that story.
TERENCE SMITH: And that story was later clarified?
JOHN TEMPLE: That story, well, I don't really know what it was.
The Associated Press moved a story the following day, essentially refuting the story where... quoting officials by name saying that story was not correct. At least that's my understanding. I think we would have known it was correct if people had been shot. I mean, you would think that if we have a new policy that we're going to shoot looters to send a message, we would have seen that, and we have not.

Amazing what occurred, isn't it? The Times once was a crusading Christian newspaper--one which fought abortion and exposed corruption in city politics. When Congress passed an income tax in 1894, the New York Times called it "a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and Socialistic scheme . . . the most unreasoning and most un-American movement in the politics of the last quarter century." When SCOTUS knocked down the law the next year, the Times predicted "neither the Democratic nor the Republican party will ever attempt to revive the corpse that the Supreme Court buried yesterday." When, in 1909, congress sent a constitutional amendment allowing an income tax to the states, the New York Times declared, "When men get the habit of helping themselves to the property of others they are not easily cured of it."

Even as late as 1917, the New York Times was serious about exposing subversives:

"Anarchists Awed By Police Clubs"
New York Times, June 5, 1917

"Meeting of Reds Traps Slackers"
New York Times, June 12, 1917

"Emma Goldman and A. Berkman Behind the Bars"
New York Times, June 16, 1917

Wasn't too long, though, before the New York Times was covering up for communists:

"Russians Hungry, but not Starving. Kremlin's 'Doom' Denied"
New York Times, March 31st 1933

Do you have more information on the publisher being forced out for supporting a Democrat? First I have heard of that.

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