This is tragic. This is silly. This is nuts. 
The Howell Raines downfall turns on a mix-up (inside and out) of molehill and mountain.
The media crisis in the country (and in its greatest print-era newspaper) has next-to-nothing to do with the sins of a pathetic little conman, Jayson Blair.
It doesn’t have much to do, either, with Raines’ management style. He’s a month in the country compared to that volcanic player of favorites, Abe Rosenthal.
The crisis has everything to do with the evidence that more than half of the citizenry came to believe that Saddam Hussein was the author of the World Trade Center attack.
If half of New York believed that that Martha Stewart was the Mets’ shortstop, The Times would not only set us straight, it would inquire how the misconception arose–even ask if their pages had contributed to it.
The crisis in the democratic information business is all about the big media (including the New York Times) staying “on message” with the reckless Bush administration in the long duplicitous runup to war with Iraq. “Inevitable” was the Times’ favorite word about the war, trivializing the largely unreported questions and reservations about the Bush war planning.
The nastier inside crisis at the Times is the unprecedented and truly lethal civil war among the Op-Ed stars: Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman against Tom Friedman and William Safire. Friedman says that bait-and-switch war propaganda from the White House is, in effect, good enough for government work. Paul Krugman says it is “arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra.” Dowd names Safire among the neo-con war groupies. Safire says there was no intelligence failure on the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. These are not reasoned differences; this is editorial and moral chaos.
The style-book crisis at the Times is that the paper hasn’t the vocabulary to tell the people what Colin Powell told his staff (“This is bullshit!”) about the cooked-up panic alarms he was supposed to sell at the United Nations.
The real nightmare for the Times is the plain fact that one-way print-based corporate journalism cannot prevail in a rough-and-ready information game against the interactive, almost-free, global, democratic and instant Internet. For hungry hounds of news and for “the rising generation,” in the late Times saint James Reston’s phrase, the Times will never again be “the paper of record,” as we used to call it, or the first draft of history.
Around the Iraq war and the many dismayed post-mortems–in the dazed, double-speaking minds of Paul Wolfowitz & Co and in the stinking slums of Baghdad today–the New York Times has to confront its rather amazing timidity, shallowness of reporting, thinness of political judgment as the war machinery geared up.
If Howell Raines is to be held responsible for serious lapses, let it be for the Times’ pusillanamity around the unnecessary war that the Bush team slipped past the Congress and the sleeping watchmen in the serious press.
Abe Rosenthal defined his time at the Times helm by publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy-Johnson secret history of the Vietnam War. Max Frankel’s Times chose deliberately to bury the Genifer Flowers story about Bill Clinton, the candidate. But Joe Lelyveld (and Howell Raines, then on the editorial page) went full bore at same story when Clinton and Monica Lewinsky reenacted it at the White House.
The crucible of leadership at the Times, it seems, requires that readiness “without fear or favor” to tell the folks that their government is lying to them–again. Howell Raines will be remembered for missing his opportunity to ferret out more of what we should have known and argued about Bush’s war in Iraq.
Family note: One of my daughters read the Times’ first self-exposing story on Jayson Blair and said: “Amazing! That’s the guy who sub-let my apartment when he was interning at the (Boston) Globe He left me a mess, and an $800 phone bill.” Blair ducked her, of course, but she hounded his parents. “This isn’t fair,” she had told them. “I’m a student, too, trying to making it on my own as much as he is.” They paid her in full, and that was the end of it. It wasn’t about affirmative action, or public moral posturing. It was petty fraud, addressed head on. Our kid puts the Times to shame.
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