Gray Lady Down Page 5
Sulzberger’s tone-deafness and the vote of confidence in Raines left many staffers deflated. One Times reporter told New York magazine that the meeting “only served to make the scandal—and the mockery—to build.” Even late-night comedians like Letterman and Leno got into the act. The old slogan at the Times, “All the news that’s fit to print,” had just been replaced by a new one, Letterman declared: “We make it up.”
As it unfolded, the scandal sorely tested the friendship and ideological affinity between Raines and Sulzberger, as well as Sulzberger’s public pledge that there would be no newsroom scapegoats. The day after members of the influential Washington bureau convinced him that the paper would never recover until the two top editors left, Sulzberger stood in the newsroom and announced that Raines and Boyd would step down. He implied that the departures were voluntary, saying he wanted to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.” In an interview afterward, Sulzberger emphasized that he had not been pressured to fire them, either by the board or by family shareholders. (Within months, Raines would go on television flatly contradicting Sulzberger; according to Raines, after returning from D.C. that day Sulzberger had told him “there was too much blood on the floor” for him to remain.) The headline on the page-one Times story said only: “Times’s 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer’s Fraud.” Like much of what Jayson Blair wrote, the headline that closed the scandalous circle was a lie.
Sulzberger’s Ill-Considered Public Utterances. The countercultural values that Sulzberger likes to flaunt generated notable controversy when he gave a commencement speech at the State University of New York at New Paltz in May 2006. Coming so shortly after Rosenthal’s death and the weeklong celebration of his journalistic values—especially his dedication to keeping the paper “straight”—Sulzberger’s speech attracted wide attention, and was featured on talk radio and cable news across the nation.
The core of the speech was a generational expression of guilt over the horrible condition of the world that the graduates would be entering. When he was a student, Sulzberger said, only slightly tongue in cheek, young people had helped end the war and forced Nixon’s resignation. “We entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that,” Sulzberger said. “So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Critics found the speech a risible compendium of 1960s romanticism, generational vanity and self-conferred moral superiority. It reflected a misunderstood conflation of interest-group politics—illegal aliens, gays, abortion—with “fundamental rights.” Citing the speech’s defeatism and gloom, the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham summarized much of the media reaction when she declared Sulzberger “the most negative media figure” in the country, “the Grim Reaper of American Journalism.” In Sulzberger’s worldview, she said, “it’s not ‘Morning in America,’ it’s evening and there’s no end in sight.”
Weapons of Mass Destruction. Judith Miller’s erroneous reporting on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction led many, especially on the left, to charge that the Times had become a propaganda conduit for the Bush administration. Miller was close to the administration both professionally and personally. She was also close to the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who turned out to be unreliable on many fronts. According to columnist/blogger Arianna Huffington, Miller and others in the media who followed her lead were guilty of “selling a war to the American public based on lies.” Some of Miller’s reporting, even some of her wording, was used by administration officials as they made the prewar rounds on the Sunday talk shows to warn about “mushroom clouds” appearing on the horizon. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, the Times conducted a postmortem, combing through Miller’s reporting; this resulted in mortifying mea culpas in both a special “editor’s note” and an editorial admitting that the paper had been “taken in.”
Plamegate. The Times got its fingers broken again in another fiasco involving Judith Miller. In this instance, the issue was the leaking of a covert CIA operative’s name, Valerie Plame, to the media. Allegedly this was done by high-ranking officials in the Bush White House in retaliation against Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who had disparaged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger. The Times initially editorialized fiercely for a special prosecutor, but quickly changed its tune when that prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, sent a subpoena to Miller. Invoking journalistic confidentiality, Miller refused to name the source who had “outed” Plame to her, and she defied Fitzgerald’s grand jury subpoena, a jailable offense, even though she had written nothing about the case.
Miller’s case became a cause célèbre throughout journalism. To Sulzberger, it was a moral crusade, as he took to the airwaves and had “Free Judy” buttons printed up. After losing in protracted court proceedings, Miller finally went to jail, but after eighty-eight days there she decided to testify. When she named Lewis “Scooter” Libby as her source, many believed that she might have been invoking journalistic privilege to protect someone in the White House who had committed a crime or had been engaged in a vengeance-driven smear campaign against Joe Wilson.
Its credibility once again under attack, Times editors commissioned yet another internal inquiry, and produced a long take-out in late October 2005, which unfortunately for the Times had the same effect as their infamous postmortem on Jayson Blair. It painted an unflattering picture of its own reporter, who had agreed to identify Libby as a “former Hill staffer” to hide his fingerprints on the leak, had “forgotten” a meeting with Libby as well as the notes she took during that meeting, and had written Plame’s name in her notebook as “Valerie Flame.” As the New York Observer characterized the accounts, they told “a tale of a dysfunctional staffer running loose at a dysfunctional institution, with historic consequences.”
Within a week of her release, Miller went from being a Times hero to a pariah. The editor, Bill Keller, the public editor, Byron Calame, and columnist Maureen Dowd all took aim, making it clear that Miller would never return to the Times newsroom. Miller soon engineered a graceful, lucrative exit and announced her “retirement” from the paper, saying, “Arthur was there for me—until he wasn’t.” As Gay Talese, a former Times reporter, said to the New Yorker in reference to Sulzberger Jr.’s handling of Plamegate, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”
NSA Wiretapping. The paper was thrust into a defensive position once again by a December 2005 story about the National Security Agency’s warrantless and possibly illegal wiretapping of international communications between people on U.S. soil and people abroad who were suspected of ties to terrorism. The sources for the story, by the Washington bureau reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were “nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.” They had talked to the Times “because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”
But the NSA story raised the issue of exposing national secrets during wartime. President Bush called the front-page report a “shameful act.” Others accused the Times of treason. The story got Washington so steamed it almost scuttled the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act.
The SWIFT Program. According to the same reporters who broke the NSA story, Risen and Lichtblau, the Bush administration’s Treasury Department had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor financial transactions of known and possible international terrorists. There was nothing illegal about the program, known by the acronym SWIFT, and it was highly effective, resulting in arrests of terrorists and the disrupting of terror plots.
The Times’ exposé on SWIFT in June 2006—coming on the heels of the NSA story and a controversial
report about secret “renditions” of terror suspects to third-country locations for interrogation—ignited wide condemnation. While some of the fury was partisan, much of it reflected a broad public exasperation with the paper’s repeated efforts to divulge classified national security secrets and hobble counterterrorism efforts.
Radcliffe Rant. In June 2006, less than a month after Sulzberger’s generational apologia at New Paltz, the Times’ Supreme Court correspondent, Linda Greenhouse, vented her own ideological preoccupations when she received an award from her alma mater, Harvard’s Radcliffe College. During her remarks in front of eight hundred people, Greenhouse described weeping uncontrollably at a recent Simon and Garfield concert, overwhelmed by the realization that the grand promise of the 1960s generation had been unfulfilled, yielding to the corruption and oppression of the current political moment. She then charged that “our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world, the U.S. Congress, whatever.” She also attacked “the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism,” adding, “To say that these last years have been dispiriting is an understatement.” Greenhouse also took a potshot at immigration enforcement, saying that she felt “a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous” fence about to be built on the Mexican border.
Greenhouse took heat from all over, including Times public editors. Byron Calame cited the paper’s ethical guidelines stipulating that reporters and editors who appear on television or radio “should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper.” He continued: “Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.... The merest perception of bias in a reporter’s personal views can plant seeds of doubt that may grow in a reader’s mind to become a major concern about the credibility of the paper.” Daniel Okrent, the former public editor, said he was amazed by Greenhouse’s remarks: “It’s been a basic tenet of journalism . . . that the reporter’s ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views.”
Frauds and Hoaxes. In numerous instances, the Times has allowed itself to be conned or otherwise used as a vehicle by people who wanted to manipulate or defraud its readers. Some of these mortifying hoaxes reflect the volume and velocity of news in the information age, such that inexperienced editors cannot or do not properly analyze it all for authenticity. But veterans have been conned too, largely because they are submerged in a tide of political correctness: in soft-headed idealism, righteous naiveté, and unconscious double standards resulting from the paper’s preoccupation with diversity. The nature of the hoaxes is varied, but most have involved some designated “victim” group—blacks, illegal immigrants, Muslims, the transgendered, military women—as the object of a journalistic sensitivity that often becomes solicitude.
In a March 2006 news feature, Nicholas Confessore described the plight of a Hurricane Katrina victim from Biloxi, Mississippi, who had been stranded by bureaucratic ineptitude in a New York City welfare hotel with four of her children and her oldest son’s fiancée. Although she called FEMA, the Red Cross and the city welfare office, no assistance was forthcoming. Her health had deteriorated, requiring numerous hospital stays. But in reality, the woman was a con artist. She had never lived in Biloxi, did not have custody of her children, was on probation for a check-forging charge, and was under investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. She was arrested shortly after Confessore’s report ran in the paper.
The Times has fallen prey to several literary con jobs as well. A 2004 profile of the cult novelist JT LeRoy said the author had been a cross-dressing hooker who was rescued by a bohemian couple in San Francisco and a prominent psychiatrist. In 2006 it was revealed that JT LeRoy was a publicity invention, and the actual novelist was not a man. Then in 2008 there was the case of Margaret B. Jones and a memoir about a life submerged in the world of guns, crack, gang violence and police brutality in South Central Los Angeles, followed by a scholarship and graduation from the University of Oregon. In fact, Margaret B. Jones was really Margaret Seltzer, who had grown up in a Los Angeles suburb and graduated from a top private school, and got her “experience” of the gang and drug culture from conversations with people in coffee shops.
In a report from Iraq, the Times got snookered by an Iraqi human rights activist who claimed to be the Abu Ghraib detainee infamously photographed standing on a box with wires attached to his body. In fact, he was not that man, but was using the photo on his business card to whip up anger on a publicity tour of the Arab world. Another hoax related to the Iraq War came in a Times Magazine cover story about American servicewomen in Iraq. One of the subjects, a Navy construction worker, claimed to have been raped in Guam while awaiting deployment to Iraq, saying it was the second time she had been raped in the service. She also claimed to be suffering brain damage from an IED in Iraq. In fact, the Navy confirmed that she had never been to Iraq.
Ghosts of Frauds Past. In addition to contemporary hoaxes, there were phantoms of frauds from earlier days, when they were still a rarity, that returned to haunt the Times. One of the most egregious involved Walter Duranty, the paper’s Moscow correspondent for twelve years who won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalin’s Russia. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize Board said that Duranty’s work showed “a profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia” and was consistent with “the best type of foreign correspondence.” His contemporaries in Russia saw differently. According to Malcolm Muggeridge, a British reporter, Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.” In exchange for access to Stalin and material privileges, his critics said, Duranty wrote favorably about Soviet policies of forced collectivization that later resulted in the deaths of millions due to famine in 1932 and 1933. To many, he became known as “Stalin’s Apologist.”
Duranty’s Pulitzer had long posed a dilemma for the Times, although a portrait of Duranty still hung on the eleventh floor of the 43rd Street building, near the executive dining room. In 1990, an editorial on Duranty’s apologetics chastised him for “indifference to the catastrophic famine . . . when millions perished in the Ukraine.” There was discussion about giving the Pulitzer Prize back, but the Times stonewalled.
In 2003, pressure from Ukrainian American groups, who liken their famine to the Holocaust, prompted the Pulitzer Prize Board to open an investigation on rescinding Duranty’s prize. Arthur Sulzberger hired Mark von Hagen, a Columbia historian, to perform an independent assessment of Duranty’s work, expecting validation. Instead, von Hagen said that Duranty’s reporting showed a “lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime” that was a “disservice to the American readers of The New York Times.” Sulzberger raised hackles when, without explanation, he cautioned that revoking the award was somewhat akin to the Stalinist urge “to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” Von Hagen was furious. Such “airbrushing” had been intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin, he shot back. “The aim of revoking Walter Duranty’s prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.” In the end, the Pulitzer Board voted not to rescind the award. Duranty’s portrait continued to hang on the wall near the executive dining room until the Times moved to its new building in 2008.
Sulzberger’s Financial Missteps. The price of Times stock, which traded at about $53 a share during the Blair scandal, has dropped through the floor, as have quarterly operating profits and ad revenue, while circulation continues to decline. The paper’s bond rating is practi
cally “junk,” and a cash flow crisis in 2009 led it to borrow from a Mexican investor at rates considered almost usurious. Wall Street has smelled blood, resulting in an unprecedented shareholder challenge through which one firm, Harbinger Capital, gained two seats on the board of directors.
Meanwhile, there have been company-wide layoffs and, for the first time, newsroom downsizing. Employee stock options and contributions to the Newspaper Guild’s health fund have been adversely affected. The size of the paper itself has shrunk, with a 5 percent reduction in the space devoted to news.
The dark financial picture—a product of general newspaper industry dynamics as well as bad business decisions—has certainly not helped Sulzberger’s eroded position. According to a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta in 2006, the publisher had become “a particular source of concern,” and in late 2005 a family friend asked, “Is Arthur going to get fired?” A Times staffer told New York magazine that no one at the paper felt in good hands “because people believe [Sulzberger] is an incredible boob.”