Posted on 06/11/2003 3:09:08 AM PDT by Liz
The decision last week by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to ask for the resignation of executive editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal will likely go down as one of the larger mistakes in The Times’ history.
Mr. Raines’ acquiescence in his own departure was likewise a hasty move which will bring little benefit to himself or the newspaper he ran for nearly two years. That a man so utterly devoid of ethics as Jayson Blair was allowed to operate and prosper at The Times is shocking, and cause for severe internal examination.
But it does not follow that an editor of Mr. Raines’ superb talents should be cast out simply to make some starchy statement about The Times’ nobility to the wider world, or to appease Times staffers who disliked Mr. Raines’ reportedly brusque management style.
Leadership at a great newspaper is not something that should be handed to pleasant company clerks. Mr. Raines may have ruffled feathers inside The Times, particularly at its Washington, D.C., bureau.
But he also won a record seven Pulitzer Prizes in his first year as executive editor and, all in all, did a magnificent job. Frankly, a newspaper’s most important clients are its readers, not its employees. The Times’ readers did suffer a monstrous deception at the hands of Mr. Blair, but they benefited far more from Mr. Raines’ intelligence and instincts.
There was no need to smear the whole paper with Mr. Blair’s acts of journalistic vandalism; readers largely accepted The Times’ lengthy analysis and apology. Mr. Raines reportedly drove his reporters hard—but is that any surprise, given that on his watch the United States suffered the worst terrorist attack in history and subsequently waged two major wars? Mr. Raines simply made sure that The Times was equal to the historic moments that were so rapidly unfolding. What more could a publisher ask from an editor?
But the Sulzbergers lacked the courage of their convictions. Rather than stand behind their editor, they caved in to pressure from the staff, and in so doing they have undermined whoever comes in to take Mr. Raines’ place.
The Times has employed editors far less popular than Mr. Raines—and if those editors didn’t win any popularity contests, they nevertheless became great editors because the Sulzbergers made sure everyone knew that they enjoyed the family’s full support.
This time, the Sulzbergers fed Mr. Raines to the wolves of West 43rd Street. The paper will, of course, survive. But its foundation has been shaken—and not by the likes of Jayson Blair.
"I just like the tribal culture of a newsroom"Source:New Yorker"Franklin D. Roosevelt had brought electric lights and the best crappie fishing in the world."
"The populist side of me is very much about my identification with the culture of a newsroom"
"Hunt big game, not rabbits."
"I always thought that if you covered politics twenty or thirty years you ought to learn something."
"I was reminded today of the words of Mississippi's greatest moral philosopher, Dizzy Dean, who said, 'It ain't braggin' if you really done it!' Ladies and gentlemen of the New York Times, you've really done it!"
"If I'm in a gunfight, I don't want to die with any bullets in my pistol. I want to shoot every one."
"I'm not rattled by the friction of the moment."
"The caricature of me that I see in some of these accounts is completely unrecognizable to me. And therefore not particularly disturbing."
Fine, then. You hire the guy.
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