Gray Lady and a Greek tragedy

There are certain iconic institutions in our society that appear so renowned, powerful, influential and durable that we permit ourselves to become fascinated by them and pulled into their field of gravity. Whether it is because we love and respect or deride and hate them, whether we take heart in their success or bask in the chance for schadenfreude offered by their failure, the trials and tribulations of these institutions and the larger-than-life leaders who run them have long been the irresistible stuff of great storytelling.

Seth Mnookin, a former Newsweek media critic and Brill’s Content political reporter, views the New York Times as such an institution, in a league with Harvard University and the New York Yankees. And as a self-confessed media junkie, he has been drawn to the Times as the figurative center of the media universe. His “Hard News” is the latest in a long line of books that bespeak this enduring enthrallment with the fate of the Gray Lady of the press.

Using an absorbing and well-researched narrative style, Mnookin chronicles the series of tectonic episodes that have in recent years sent shock waves through the paper. While he catalogs fraudulent reportage, sloppy use of sources, egomania, mismanagement and good intentions gone awry that are by now well-known, he never allows bad news to lessen his unspoken custodial concern for this irreplaceable American institution. His subtext seems to be: The Times is one of the most important nongovernmental institutions in this country and I do, indeed, have a great and riveting story to tell about its fall from grace. But don’t get me wrong! I’m not telling this story in the hopes of sinking the paper but of fortifying it against such failures in the future.

As if a Greek tragedy were unfolding, the story begins with the epic deeds of a brilliant but tragic hero, Executive Editor Howell Raines. After his paper wins seven Pulitzer Prizes in the wake of 9/11, it is plagued by disclosures of serial disgraces: the Augusta National Golf Club column debacle, Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, Judith Miller’s distorted reporting on weapons of mass destruction. It ends with the fallen hero’s bitter exile. As told by Mnookin, this is a cautionary but mesmerizing tale of a talented, visionary leader who through the collective success of his paper’s staff comes to believe in his omnipotence and invincibility, only to be brought down by hubris.

How it came to pass that so many staff members ended up so alienated from this impatient man who was so determined to leave his mark on media history by saving the New York Times from itself and the ash heap of the marketplace and history is the real story line of this book. It was one thing for a new editor to want to establish a kind of corporate/authoritarian rule that would jolt this venerable, if sometimes staid, newspaper into the fast lane of the 21st century. But it was quite another for him to forget that real leadership involves leading other people, not simply charging off on one’s own willful way and expecting them to follow.

It was in this growing atmosphere of alienation that the perverse Jayson Blair was allowed to matriculate from intern to full-time staff reporter. As Mnookin asserts, Raines ended up creating “a culture in which a sociopath like Jayson Blair was allowed to thrive.”

“[T]here had been ample warnings,” writes Mnookin of Blair’s rise, but “at times Raines and [Managing Editor Gerald] Boyd seemed pointedly to ignore those warnings because of their disdain for the editors who were doing the warning.”

The paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., or “Young Arthur,” as the 53-year-old scion of the Sulzberger family is known, had been seduced by Raines’ go-go energy, his overweening confidence and his unwavering conviction that the only way to save the paper was by refusing to yield to compromise. In fact, during the 21 months of his rule, Raines and Sulzberger acted almost as if they were in a corporate buddy film, egging each other on toward what they viewed as a competitive and challenging, but invigorating, future. Especially for Raines, cautionary advice, criticism and questions were all too often viewed as unpardonable defenses of the low-metabolism ancien regime, and thus as insubordination.

“The longer the questions went on,” Mnookin writes, “the more evident it became that the Jayson Blair controversy -- at least for the men and women of the New York Times -- wasn’t about Jayson Blair at all. It was about Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and the staff was virtually united in its frustration and anger.”

For the two of them, bold leadership became both an aphrodisiac and a necessary element to success. But, as Mnookin told Forbes magazine, instead of success, this road led to “systemic breakdowns

As monstrous a journalistic aberration as Blair turned out to be, Mnookin still sees him as only one of many precipitating causes of Raines’ downfall.

The story of this fall does not hinge on one perfect storm, but on a series of relentless squalls that battered his reign and the paper, until, like a delegitimized authoritarian government, “the people” -- in this case, the staff reporters and editors -- were finally incited to open rebellion.

By then, even Sulzberger was forced to admit: “We were caught with our pants down.”

During one masthead meeting in the 14th-floor executive dining hall, Mnookin recounts how Raines, taking umbrage as staff criticism began to pour out, petulantly started to leave the room. “Howell, Howell, come back,” a startled and somewhat desperate Sulzberger called after him. “Nobody hates you. We really value you. But I think a lot of people are angry at you right now.”

Why were they so angry? Raines did not seem to understand that, unlike a corporation or an army, where command and control exercised by a chief executive or general might work, a newspaper is a more collaborative, organic institution filled with highly individualistic and opinionated people whose job it is to express themselves. Raines was never quite able to connect his theory to the paper’s practice.

But, according to Mnookin, Raines had another even more tragic flaw, a trait that he ironically shared with his nemesis, Jayson Blair. As different as they were, both men had visionary ways of creating virtual forms of themselves that existed more in their own minds than in reality. Indeed, in his postscript, Mnookin concludes that “both shared a need to create overly ambitious narratives from the raw material of their lives .... The disconnect between Raines’s and Blair’s self-conceptions and their realities gave them permission, in a sense, to smooth the path to distortion and fabrication in the outside world as well. Jayson Blair saw himself as terminally unique. It was okay, then, if he chose to make up stories about the world he was ostensibly covering. Raines, meanwhile, had imagined himself as a desperately needed savior. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap for him to imagine similarly mythic struggles taking place both within the Times’s newsroom and in the actual news itself.”

With such a cascade of flaws and failures being revealed, the press has recently taken an awful drubbing. In this it shares a certain dispiriting fraternity with other iconic American institutions: our presidency, many of our corporations, the Roman Catholic Church and parts of our military. When such institutions run off the rails, the challenge is to honestly analyze the failure and correct the flaw so that the institution can regain legitimacy and trust. But as Howell Raines’ experience bears testament, this is easier said than done. *