Clocking in at a novella-length 21,000 words (a thousand for every month he served as New York Times executive editor), Howell Raines’s expose in the current Atlantic Monthly demonstrates that, in his own way, he’s as self-infatuated as Jayson Blair.
Hitting newsstands this week, “My Times” is a litany of complaints, spared only from dullness by the undeniable color of Raines’s pungent style–and his apparent eagerness to burn every bridge leading back to 43rd street. He hits at the “calcified front page” he inherited and even attacks the “sometimes mindless job guarantees” of the paper’s union, a crack sure to lose Raines whatever rank-and-file affection he retains in his old newsroom.
The recurring theme is that of Raines being constantly flummoxed by the paper’s balky bureaucracy and the colleagues who lack his courage and vision. He trashes the paper sufficiently hard to make even its enemies blanch: “I thought the paper was becoming duller, slower, and more uneven in quality with every passing day…. Key sections, including Arts & Leisure, had gone from predictable to dull to stultifying…. Our coverage of culture, entertainment, style, and travel was in fact a shambles–underfunded, unimaginative, and devoid of any unifying editorial sensibility…. We had installed a new Sports editor and charged him with making us competitive with Sports Illustrated and USA Today, and with quietly searching for more provocative-columnists.”
The very idea of Raines looking for more provocative sports columnists is laughable, considering the way he and managing editor Gerald Boyd slammed columnists Harvey Araton and Dave Anderson for actually daring to be “provocative” by rebelling against the paper’s editorial-page line on Augusta National.
In a notorious October 2002 editorial, the Times had suggested Tiger Woods boycott the Masters golf tournament to protest host club Augusta National’s male-only membership. Later, Boyd spiked an Araton column that went against the editorial line. In explanation, Boyd wrote an infamous memo saying that Araton’s “logic did not meet our standards.”
In an interview for Alan Shipnuck’s new book, The Battle for Augusta National, Raines explains he was away on business at the time and that the Araton spike was managing editor Gerald Boyd’s fault, er, decision. Yet when a Dave Anderson column also criticized the paper’s editorial line, Raines delivered the spike himself. Raines doesn’t breathe a word about Augusta or the spikes in “My Times.”
Raines also goes after bloggers, a libertarian-leaning group in which his old-fashioned liberal activism proved unpopular: “The Times’s image as a bastion of quality had become even more important as tabloid television, Britain’s declining newspaper values, and the unsourced ranting of Internet bloggers polluted the journalistic mainstream of the United States.”
More surprisingly, he also attacks (who knew?) Times conservatives: “Another disturbing development, for which I was unprepared, was that a small enclave of neoconservative editors was making accusations of ‘political correctness’ in order to block stories or slant them against minorities and traditional social welfare programs.”
Such talk undermines the denial Raines made at an awards ceremony in February of 2003: “We must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise in disinformation of alarming proportions.”
Naturally, Jayson Blair wasn’t his fault either–even though Raines had praised Blair’s hiring in front of the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001. Instead, he blames Times metro editor Jon Landman for not copying him on the prescient memo in which Landman warned: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for The Times. Right now. “
Raines huffs: “I do feel that had I been in the bureaucratic loop on the memo, the Jayson Blair story would have ended there.” Perhaps Landman knew Raines had praised Blair in public and was reluctant to come out against the newsroom autocrat?
One of the few times Raines faults himself is when he fails to fully appreciate the spinelessness of others: “It pains me to think that I didn’t do enough to buck [Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger] up. Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Arthur is his own man, and a different man from his father. Punch [Sulzberger] in his prime would never have thrown over one of his executive editors under the pressure of employees who didn’t like the editor personally or who disagreed with a legitimate strategy for reinvigorating the Times’s journalism…. I didn’t bother to check his emotional temperature often enough.”
Raines’s healthy ego quickly recovers from being kicked off the Times. Suddenly, he’s focusing on higher things, dismissing the significance of daily journalism in favor of the truth and beauty of his true calling, literature: “I do not miss the daily grind of newspapering or the ephemeral nature of newspaper writing. Since I was twelve or so, my strongest interest has been in literature, and I’ll be turning in that direction during the extra years I’ve secured by getting fired.”
The world of literature may be enriched by Raines. But as “My Times” makes clear, the New York Times is better off without him.
–Clay Waters is director of “Times Watch,” a project of the Media Research Center.