Gray Lady Down

Gray Lady Down by William McGowan Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Gray Lady Down by William McGowan Read Free Book Online
Authors: William McGowan
editorials. Making the chief of the editorial page the chief of the news columns will not quiet those suspicions.
    Sulzberger tried to dismiss such concerns. “A great journalist knows the difference between those two roles. Howell is certainly a great journalist,” he insisted. But as Raines’ tenure proceeded, it would become abundantly clear that Samuelson’s prediction was right.

three
    Bullets over Arthur Jr.
    A be Rosenthal’s funeral in 2006 became an occasion for nostalgia over the death of the Times’ golden days, a recessional for the paper’s transition from the voice of America to an increasingly self-righteous, and politically correct, left-liberal publication. It also became a moment for pause when the effects of young Arthur’s fifteen-year reign could be evaluated.
    It was not a pretty picture. In a relatively few years, a paper that had been known as the gold standard of American journalism had been tarnished by a string of embarrassing incidents, casting it in the harshest of spotlights, putting its credibility and even its patriotism on the line. Its newsroom had been accused of
hypocrisy, corruption, ineptitude, ethical misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, credulousness and, most seriously, ideological bias. The business side was equally under siege, and its board—stacked with Sulzbergers—had presided over a plummeting of stock value to half what it had been in 2002, with advertising revenues in free fall. This steady parade of embarrassing lowlights, where the Times had become the focus of the news instead of merely the bearer of it, had revealed cracks in its foundations and made it a target for public anger and derision—as well as a possible candidate for a corporate takeover.
    Every time one of these incidents occurred, the Times and its partisan defenders—led by Arthur Jr. himself—had tried to depict it as an isolated case, refusing to acknowledge any pattern. But in aggregate these regularly occurring scandals and other expressions of journalistic dysfunction paint a damning portrait of an institution stumbling through chaos of its own making. As Vanity Fair’ s Michael Wolff would write in May 2008, “The ever growing list of its own journalistic missteps, blunders, and offenses threatens to become one of the things the Times most stands for: putting its foot in it. And the expectation, both within the Times and among those who obsessively watch it, is that there is always some further black eye, calumny, screw-up, or remarkable instance of tone-deafness on the horizon.”
    The list of major stumbles on the Times’ downward path reads like a bill of particulars against the Sulzberger Jr. years, a chronicle of decline unparalleled in modern American media history.
     
    The Blair Affair. It began in the spring of 2003 with revelations that one of the paper’s rising African American reporters, Jayson Blair, had plagiarized and fabricated material in scores of articles over a four-year period, including such high-profile stories as the Washington D.C. sniper case in 2002, and U.S. casualties from the first months of the Iraq War in 2003. It ended when Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who had pledged in the pages of his own paper that there would be no newsroom scapegoats, fired his close friend and handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines, as well as the
managing editor, Gerald Boyd, the highest-ranking black ever in the newsroom. Facing a staff rebellion, public humiliation and a charge of bureaucratic disarray, Sulzberger admitted that the plagiarism scandal was “the low point in the paper’s 150 year history.”
    The depressing story was told in the Times’ own 14,000-word reconstruction of the Blair fiasco, headlined “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception.” This inquiry declared that Blair had “violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth.” It said that 36 of 73 articles Blair had written since he started to get national reporting

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