Almost everyone at the New York Times hates, simply
hates, executive editor Howell Raines, and morale at the
Times is just awful. Reporters and editors say Raines is
nothing but a big bully. Raines, however, says he’s not that way at
all; it’s more that his “passion comes across as a harshness,” or
that his “intensity gets mistaken for an adversarial or aggressive
instinct” that he really doesn’t possess. Anyway he is sorry about
all the misunderstandings and hurt feelings, and is working hard
now to win the hearts and minds of Times staffers.
Or so says an article in the new issue of the New
Yorker, and while I have not read the article I have read a
story about it. Howard Kurtz
summarized the New Yorker article in his media column
in the Washington Post, and since Kurtz is always reliable
there is no need for any of us now to read the New Yorker.
The big news in the New Yorker, apparently, is that things
were so bad at the Times that Jill Abramson, the
Washington bureau chief, even threatened to quit. It seems she felt
“disrespected.”
Let me put this in some perspective.
There was a morale problem at the Times when I first
went there as a copyboy, and there was a morale problem when I left
years later. Unhappiness was as much a Times tradition as
Bookman italic type. People at the Times were unhappy
because their abilities were unrecognized, or their stories
butchered, or their talents misdirected by the less able. The best
of them, however, were unhappy because the Times was not
as good as it should be. Occasionally this led to broken furniture,
or, more commonly, shouts, screams and drunken binges. At the same
time there was disdain for the editors. Good reporters simply
disliked editors as a matter of course.
But the Times is under a different management now, and
the newsroom ethos has changed. Kurtz writes that, according to the
New Yorker, Washington bureau chief “Abramson was
humiliated by the daily speakerphone conferences with New York,
when editors would give her marching orders instead of asking what
stories the bureau was developing.”
In other words, Abramson’s feelings were hurt, and in attempt to
patch things up, managing editor Gerald Boyd flew to Washington to
have lunch at the bureau. And then, Kurtz writes:
“On a park bench afterwards…Abramson told Boyd she felt
‘disrespected,’ and that if nothing was done she would resign.”
The next day Raines, who says he was surprised to learn she was
uncomfortable with the speakerphone conferences, called Abramson
and told her she was a “star.” Apparently this bucked her up
considerably, for as Kurtz also writes:
“At the next such [speakerphone] session, Abramson asked to
speak first, and when a Manhattan editor interrupted her, she
declared, ‘I’m not finished.’”
Talk about high drama! The “disrespected” Abramson really let
the New York editors have it. She probably said, “I’m not
finished,” in a very icy tone of voice.
On the other hand, this may seem a little bloodless, and
certainly it’s a long way from shouts, screams and drunken binges.
But the Times, as I said, is under a different management
than before — with Raines as executive editor, and Arthur
Sulzberger Jr. as publisher — and there are new rules for personal
and professional behavior. The New Yorker also notes that
Raines delayed and then tried to bury a reporter’s exclusive story
about a New Jersey study that found that blacks were more likely to
speed than other drivers. The study contradicted, of course, the
nonsense routinely found in Times editorials and on the
op-ed page about racial profiling.
Meanwhile I suspect, even if the New Yorker does not,
that at least some of the newsroom disenchantment about Raines has
more to do with his politics than it does with his abrasive style
of management. His politics determines his news judgment. Raines is
an old Southern boy — Alabama, actually — who has spent most of
his professional life proving that, despite his background, he’s
ever so liberal, especially on racial matters. He once wrote about
his days in Washington during the Reagan Administration that
“reporting on Ronald Reagan’s successes in making life harder for
citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy — saddened
me.”
Anyway Raines is now the executive editor of the Times,
and Arthur Jr. loves him, and there you are. Meanwhile the
Times has the resources and talent to do extraordinary
things journalistically, and sometimes it does them. At the same
time, you really can’t take the Times seriously.
