In dissecting scandal, not quite all the news

George Moore, the grand Irish writer, described the novels of his contemporary Henry James this way: “Right in front of you, bang, nothing happens.”

I give the first George Moore nonfiction award to Seth Mnookin.

“Hard News,” his book about the Jayson Blair scandal that destroyed the careers of the top two editors at the New York Times, has no news that should get you running to the bookstore. Media aficionados will get some inside baseball from reporters talking to reporters and editors talking about editors. Other than that, any good rewrite man could have turned this one out over a holiday weekend.

The reason: Mnookin chose to go prospecting for gold at a mine long since picked clean by everybody with or without an ax to grind, including Mnookin, when he was a media critic at Newsweek.

The only thing hard about “Hard News” is how hard the author worked. He conducted more than 100 interviews and ended up discovering that ousted Executive Editor Howell Raines was a jerk.

Mnookin leads us to believe he thought that going in. Raines didn’t answer his e-mails, wouldn’t be interviewed, refused to shake his hand. But even if Mnookin took no offense, his laying the entire blame on Raines reflected the virtually unanimous view of Times reporters and editors, not to mention the outside media.

The only man who didn’t agree, who continued to back Raines, was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher. Indeed, Raines would have prevailed had he not agreed to a mass meeting of reporters and editors at a Times Square movie house soon after the scandal broke, a meeting in which the staff was invited to have its go at Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd.

By then, the paper had published its four-page indictment of Blair, opening on the front page, charging the young black reporter with everything but crimes against humanity. Blair had written stories from places he had never been, made up interviews with people he had never met and plagiarized to a fare-thee-well.

“The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” announced the paper in its mea culpa on May 11, 2003.

I smile at this, remembering an old newspaperman I knew when I was breaking into this lovely racket 40 years ago.

He always put on a sour face when somebody would sidle up to him and proclaim that a story was “the greatest” or “the worst.”

“Compared to what?” he’d ask.

Jayson Blair, con man supreme, never hurt anybody with his phony stories. Nobody died, nobody was libeled, nobody was framed.

Compared to what? How about the Holocaust? The Times did not cover the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, grandfather of the current publisher, censored the worst massacre in history, lest the readers of the Times consider it a “Jewish paper.” (Years later, by way of apology, the Times published an extended account of the matter by retired editor Max Frankel.)

Compared to what? Walter Duranty in the Times promoted Stalin. (The paper now calls his reporting “discredited.”) Herbert Mathews made Fidel Castro into an “agrarian reformer.”

During the blacklisting of Hollywood writers and actors, the Times remained silent. When its own reporters and editors took the 1st Amendment before congressional committees, the paper disappeared them. Those who took the 5th were fired.

Mnookin never mentions any of this. Is it fair for me to take him to task for these omissions? Yes, because Mnookin and his publisher ask for it. Check the subtitle: “The Scandals at The New York Times

He gives only one page to the Wen Ho Lee case, where under Joe Lelyveld’s editorship, the paper wrongly accused Lee of being a Chinese nuclear spy. Judith Miller’s reportage that helped convince the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is treated here as an afterthought.

Meeting meltdown

Raines thought the movie house meeting could save him. This was crazy. I worked for Abe Rosenthal for five years. He was a great editor. But if for any reason the staff was allowed to go at him, he’d have been toast in a hurry.

As with every top editor I ever worked under -- exception: Arthur Gelb, a true genius in dealing with reporters -- and I worked for plenty of them, at the New York Post, the Daily News, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.

Why? Because at least 75% of reporters and editors believe they’re unappreciated, that “favorites” keep getting the prime assignments, that too often they’re relegated to scut work when they know they are studs. This is particularly true at the Times, when just to get there means you’re creme de la creme, as you’re told the day you’re hired.

Soon enough, most of them discover it ain’t necessarily so, they’re not so cherse as they thought, that there are only a limited number of great assignments.

The test was track record, whether they were self-starters, had the nose for news and could produce.

But Sulzberger, a New Age publisher if there ever was one, made “diversity” a fundamental goal for the paper. And this set the stage for Blair.

I met him at Gallagher’s Steak House in Manhattan a year before he got caught. The kid was a charmer, told me I was a legend, his hero. After the meeting, I called Joan Nassivera, a metro editor at the New York Times. “Is he real?” She said, “I know, but his copy -- we got trouble ahead.” This was spring 2002, and at that very time, Jon Landman, then the metropolitan editor, had warned in an e-mail to newsroom administrators: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

But Landman never told this to Howell Raines.

Here, then, Mnookin had the chance to break hard news. Why didn’t Landman do what any top editor would do, anywhere, anytime? Can anybody imagine Arthur Gelb keeping this news from Abe Rosenthal?

If there was a key man in that city room, it was Landman, perhaps the only editor who had no fear of Raines.

Indeed, Mnookin quotes Raines as saying that Landman was his problem: “This is about one man trying to destroy me for the last two years, and that man is Jon Landman.”

Mnookin leaves it at that. He never asks Landman why he sent that e-mail to a bureaucrat instead of Raines. Or finds why Raines never fired him.

Right in front of you, bang, nothing happens.

*

Sidney Zion is the author of many books, including the novel “Markers,” and is a columnist for the New York Daily News.