The fibbing problem at the New York Times extends even
to its firing of Howell Raines. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger
couldn’t even report that event honestly and accurately. He led the
public to believe Raines fell on his sword. Raines told Charlie
Rose that he wanted to keep wielding it. Will the Times
run a correction? An honest correction would read: “Our publisher
did not passively accept Howell Raines’s resignation, as he
previously suggested when he said, ‘With great sadness, I agreed
with [Raines’s] decision.’ Sulzberger demanded it, as Howell Raines
made clear in an interview with Charlie Rose.”
Raines’s gaseous
interview with Rose was at least useful in exposing this
Sulzberger deception. If you cut through his convoluted,
passive-aggressive babble, Raines basically said that his rattled
and spineless boss showed him the door. Sulzberger couldn’t “calm”
the newsroom down unless the great visionary, so threatening to the
slackers and mediocrities in the office, departed. Raines amusingly
alternated between praising his “talented” staff and implying they
were losers unable to recognize his genius. A genius, one part W.
B. Yeats, one part Dale Carnegie, was in their midst and these
hacks didn’t even realize it. Had he stayed, the Times’s
circulation might have topped off at 80 million. Oh well, now
Raines says he can apply himself to literary late-blooming, and
with his fondness for phrases like “competitive metabolism” and
“management systems” who can deny him this dream?
It was fun to watch Raines bully Charlie Rose while discussing
his problem with bullying. Rose abased himself very nicely. Rose
didn’t even trouble himself to ask Raines about the obvious racial
favoritism that led to the indulgence of his pet hoaxer. Not to
mention Jayson Blair and affirmative action in a one-hour interview
is quite a feat for a journalist. Raines did refer to Blair as a
“land mine,” a passive metaphor that basically absolves him of all
responsibility. That Raines planted this land mine himself of
course didn’t come up. Raines had previously said that his
Alabama-bred white guilt contributed to the slack given Blair. But
in the interview with Rose he made it sound like the problem was
due to creaky “management systems,” too deep and mysterious for
Raines to explain in a mere hour.
It will take a blue-ribbon commission to find out why New
York Times editors can’t hit the send button on their e-mail.
Raines had no idea of Blair’s “accuracy problem.” Sure, the
information was an e-mail away, but the Times’s
inscrutable bureaucracy hid it from Raines’s eager eyes, you
understand
What a dogged newsman and investigator. Too bad Raines couldn’t
“rush to meet the news” in his own newsroom.
Obviously Raines’s problem was not bureaucracy but bias. He
didn’t care to hear information inimical to his liberal plans for
the paper. Blinding bias remains the basic cause of the crisis. But
Sulzberger, showing that he has learned nothing from the
Blair/Raines fiasco, has selected another unfair and unbalanced
liberal to edit the paper. Bill Keller — author of such objective
statements as “Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the
Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power” —
will get to select the stories on the front page. Eric Alterman
must not have been available.
Since Sulzberger is determined to turn the Times into a
daily Democratic Party press release, Keller should do just fine.
His contempt for conservatives and Catholics may even surpass
Raines’s. Keller has allowed himself a few swings at Pope John Paul
II’s “reactionary” career: “he has replicated something very like
the old Communist Party in his church…The Catholic Church has
not, over the centuries, been a stronghold of small-c catholic
values, which my dictionary defines as ‘broad in sympathies,
tastes, or understanding; liberal’…Probably no institution
run by a fraternity of aging celibates was going to reconcile
easily with a movement that embraced the equality of women,
abortion on demand and gay rights.”
Sulzberger’s next deception will be to tell his readers that
Keller was the most evenhanded newsman he could find.
