Burning Down My Masters' House
My Life at the New York Times
by Jayson Blair
New Millennium, 298 pp., $24.95
The Battle for Augusta
Hootie, Martha, and the Masters of the Universe
by Alan Shipnuck
Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $25
IF THE PRAISE THAT HUMANITY and the Pulitzer Prize committee constantly heap upon the New York Times is at all deserved, then why is it that people who actually know the paper from within--former staffers and executives--so often have the least flattering things to say about it? Two recent books, and one near-book published in the May 2004 issue of the Atlantic, shed some new light on the psychological drama that continues to unfold on Manhattan's West 43rd Street.
Burning Down My Masters' House is Jayson Blair's highly anticipated or, depending upon whom you hang out with, much-dreaded memoir of a New York Times career characterized by, as the Times phrased it, "frequent acts of journalistic fraud." About those infamous frauds themselves, at least, Blair offers up a brutal, even gutsy self-assessment, and in the book's very first sentence: "I lied and I lied--and then I lied some more." No such candid confession is likely to appear anywhere in William Jefferson Clinton's forthcoming memoir.
And yet even the kindest of Blair's reviews have been blistering. According to his critics, the book is, in one combination or another: shoddily written; padded with irrelevancies; devoid of appropriate contrition; the work of a known liar, and therefore untrustworthy; and--worst maybe--a means by which Blair might financially profit from his own misdeeds. Most of these complaints are unfair, and much of what is valuable in the book has escaped the complainers' attention.
THAT BLAIR'S ACCOUNT of his time at the Times is "shoddily written" is a judgment made, most notably, in the unusually vapid critique published by the New York Times Book Review itself. But neither the Times's review nor the many others who echoed it made any serious attempt to substantiate the charge. And the charge turns out to be false: Burning Down My Masters' House contains some of the most poignant and moving passages ever to appear in a book of its kind. Compared with the sterilized Times histories previously generated by sycophants of the paper's dynastic, Sulzberger-family owners, Blair's book reads like classic literature. His talents may be better suited to fiction than biography, but either way, Blair can wield the pen adroitly.
Similarly misplaced is the idea that Blair's book is "padded." Readers seeking an answer to the question, "How could this have happened at the New York Times?" will find that Blair has "padded" his pages with precisely what the inquiry demands: a day-to-day account of what was going on in the mind of the perpetrator--and in the newsroom whose culture he absorbed.
So we learn a good deal about Jayson Blair's many personal problems, which can hardly be called irrelevant: cocaine addiction, too much Johnnie Walker scotch, stress, irritation with detached editors and uninteresting assignments, purported sexual abuse as a child, anxiety at being away from his girlfriend, and so on. And we learn a good deal, too, about what the Times regularly expects of its employees and how they typically respond--which isn't exactly irrelevant, either. Some of what previous reviewers have construed as finger-pointing is really just Blair making interesting and often acute observations about attitudes and practices in the newsroom. When he first joined the Times, his boss wished him luck and then added, "One more thing Jayson. Congratulations on getting the chance to write for the Times." It was a pride, Blair observes, that in some staffers "emerged as snobbery and arrogance."
The practical consequences of such an atmosphere are everywhere in evidence in Blair's book. He describes a practice known as the "toe-touch," a common way for the Times to justify placing an out-of-New York, on-location dateline on a story: All other work on the story having already been done over the phone, the paper has the writer, or even a reporter not otherwise associated with the story, simply fly to the city where the news occurred--and then fly right back again. "It's hard to imagine," Blair remarks, "how many thousands of dollars are spent on 'toe-touch datelines' each month at the Times."
According to Blair, even outright dateline fakery was common at the Times when he was there. Howell Raines, the executive editor whose career Blair did so much to destroy, wanted to make the paper read as if its correspondents had been everywhere imaginable, and this push "took normal dateline deceptions at the Times to new heights." Blair is known to have faked datelines while he was reporting on the D.C.-area sniper shootings story--and that is properly thought a scandal. But in Burning Down My Masters' House he specifies at least three instances of similar fakery by other reporters working on that same story. If this account of things is true, does it partially absolve Blair of his own transgressions? In context, the answer seems to be a definite "maybe."
On the subject of bias in the newsroom, Blair admits what many critics of the Times have been saying all along. News reporters generally cannot resist the temptation to inject their own opinions into their stories, he points out, but a lot of it goes undetected because "it is usually very subtle--giving an extra quote to the side you support, dismissing counterarguments offhand by sandwiching them in between the opposite side." At the Times, however, pressures--and personalities--exaggerated this natural tendency. Under Howell Raines, according to Blair, "The message was clear: getting it right was not as important as getting it fast." Moreover, Raines's habit of interference with his reporters' copy "unsettled many of those in the newsroom who said it violated the tenets of objective journalism."
ON A SOMEWHAT JUICIER NOTE, Blair describes what he calls the "undeniable perks" of being a Times reporter. Reporters who want tickets to a New York Knicks game need only call the Times sports department. In exhange for getting their clients mentioned in the paper, public relations people, Blair says, commonly provide reporters with free theater tickets, meals, drinks, and sometimes even sex. Times men apparently "have a weak spot for sex"--and also for alcohol and drug abuse. "The culture is not one of sobriety," Blair remarked in a recent interview.
There remains the problem of Blair's contrition--or lack thereof. He is "a young black journalist who descended from slaves," his publishers proclaim, and he writes in his book that it is "impossible to divorce the impact of oppressors' actions on the oppressed." It is hard to "assign culpability" when "we are all products of our backgrounds," he suggests, and where African Americans are concerned, this difficulty applies even where serial murder is the issue; at one point in the book, Blair tries in the same breath to exculpate both himself and convicted D.C. sniper Lee Malvo. The devil didn't make them do it; slavery did.
THIS IS PERFECTLY OFFENSIVE--there being many millions of African Americans who've been driven neither to murder nor plagiarism by the legacy of pre-Civil War history. But it's also a perfect expression of the worldview most of Blair's critics--and the Times, for that matter--themselves embrace: ethnic identity and victimization politics. Let him who is without fashionable piety cast the first stone.
Finally, there is the complaint that Blair must now be lying about the Times because he once earned a paycheck for lying in the Times. Jack Shafer's New York Times Book Review piece opens with the question, "Should you believe anything written by a serial liar?" And Shafer, a frequent critic of the Times, answers no, presuming that the book is "just another installment" in the series. But what an unwarranted gift such a presumption is to the Times: A principal participant in the paper's greatest-ever scandal writes an embarrassing tell-all book--and in its very own pages, one of the paper's toughest outside critics announces that the book isn't worth reading. The Times could not have hoped for a better outcome.
Readers certainly have a right to question Blair's veracity--and many may feel uncomfortable rewarding Blair's misdeeds with their book-purchasing dollars. But only an incurable skeptic would dismiss him out of hand. And other journalists would be positively foolish to do so. It wasn't even a year ago that the Blair scandal broke, but already no fewer than ten newspapers, including USA Today, have since fired or otherwise punished reporters caught falsifying or plagiarizing stories. If anything, it appears that the problem of reporters committing crimes against the truth is on the rise. Surely the confessions of those who've been caught should be studied, not stifled.
HOWELL RAINES and Jayson Blair seem cut from the same cloth. Each feels that his ethical convictions (such as they are) are an inescapable product of his background. For Blair, it is slavery. For Raines it is the slave ownership of his southern white ancestors. And with both men, little room is left over for personal responsibility. Raines, in his 20,000-word ex culpa for the Atlantic entitled My Times, says "I repeatedly take responsibility for the failure to capture Jayson Blair"--and then, like Blair, Raines goes on to fix blame upon everyone around him: newsroom "dukedoms," a "ramshackle personnel system," and a "small enclave of neoconservative editors."
Raines would have us believe that a not-so-vast, right-wing conspiracy at the Times's 43rd Street headquarters was crucial to his downfall: a "neoconservative editor" wrote a memorandum recommending Jayson Blair's dismissal long before Blair wound up nuking the newsroom--but Raines wasn't on the distribution list! "I do feel that had I been in the bureaucratic loop on the memo, the Jayson Blair story would have ended," Raines says. Even the man's most sympathetic readers won't likely fall for that line. As Raines elsewhere acknowledges, one of his own lieutenants once described him as "a kind of control freak who doesn't like details." It's fair to ask then: If Raines had been copied on the memo, would he have given it more than a moment's thought?
And if he had paid attention, would it have mattered? Raines admits that he had been cutting Blair "slack" and that even quite late in the day he was prepared to give the young reporter a "second chance." Hoping that Blair would demonstrate "a level of vitality and social engagement" suggesting recovery from alcoholism--and quickly persuading himself that what he hoped for was real--Raines then immediately assigned Blair to the team of Times reporters covering the D.C. sniper story. What else could a self-described "white man from Alabama" with "strong conviction" about the evils of racial prejudice do? And how do you suppose he would have reacted to advice from a "neoconservative editor" that Blair should simply have been fired instead? Affirmative inaction would still have ruled the day.
Raines's is the "padded" account of things, not Blair's. Raines is long--and redundant--on diagnosis of his former paper's flaws. The Times is a mess, he says, a dozen different ways: "not nearly as good as it could be and ought to be," desperate for "improvements in the quality of its journalism," shot through with "sloppy work," "Victorian affectation," and a "mañana" attitude. The paper's Business, Science, Sports, and Arts & Leisure sections are chronically "weak."
VERY FEW of Raines's 20,000 words are devoted to providing specific examples of the problems to which he refers in such broad strokes, however. And indeed, certain facts that Raines selectively omits suggest that he's wrong on almost every count. He criticizes his predecessor Joseph Lelyveld for producing a "calcified front-page," for example, but fails to note that it was the "clock-punching" staff of editors and reporters assembled by Lelyveld that put together the Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of 9/11.
Moreover, Raines is maddeningly vague about what medicine he would prescribe to the ailing Times. And here, too, he is unconvincing. Raines says that he and current publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. operated under the assumption that improving the "quality" of the paper would enhance its "marketability." And it was on that theory, he continues, that Raines decided to move the vitriolic voice of Frank Rich--the man whose "intestines" Mel Gibson would like to see "on a stick"--off the Times op-ed page and over to the Arts & Leisure section. Arts & Leisure had become "dull and stultifying." Rich promised to provide it the "energy" necessary to broaden the paper's reach.
Broaden the paper's reach to whom, though? To the 80 million potential Christian readers who populate the South and the nation's heartland? On the contrary, there is ample evidence to suggest that reversing the paper's left-wing tilt, even tilting it over rightward a ways, would be a much more effective means to expand its reach to a national audience whose views and tastes are more diverse than those of Manhattan's Upper Left side.
The front-page "energy" Raines desired was achieved with headlines and lead sentences slanted in favor of the same liberal causes championed on the paper's editorial page. It is no surprise that in My Times Raines makes no reference to basic journalistic concepts like objectivity, fairness, or even accuracy. Nor does Raines respond to charges made that he personally directed the slanting or falsification of news articles. Just last August, David Margolick reported in Vanity Fair that Raines once directly attempted to inject his ideas into a reporter's story. "The only problem was," that reporter remembered, "it wasn't true," and even the compromise version the Times ended up publishing was "still close enough to a falsehood to make me very uncomfortable."
Such is the "quality of journalism" that Howell Raines imagines would make the Times more appealing to a national audience.
ALAN SHIPNUCK'S The Battle for Augusta National: Hootie, Martha, and the Masters of the Universe is a detailed account of one paradigmatic episode in Raines's reign at the New York Times: the editor's attempt to "flood the zone" with ideologically driven "news" stories about the all-male membership policy of a tiny but venerable golf club. In his Atlantic piece, Raines is oddly silent on the subject. But it's clear from Shipnuck's book that Raines was maniacally fascinated by Augusta National. And Shipnuck makes a persuasive case that this obsession significantly contributed to Raines's eventual downfall.
The Battle for Augusta National is really the story of a war and its concurrent battles between "Hootie" and "Martha," the press and the club, internet bloggers and print reporters, and political correctness and common sense--together with all the collateral damage suffered by professional golfers, their corporate sponsors, CBS, and the residents, businesses, and law enforcement officers of Augusta, Georgia.
As it happens, the least important (if most symbolic) of these battles was the one waged between William Woodward "Hootie" Johnson, chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club and Martha Burk, the women's rights activist who led the charge against the club's all-male membership policy. By remarkable coincidence, "Hootie" was Martha Burk's childhood nickname. But there the resemblance ends.
Nowadays, an activist press stands ever ready to provide "progressive" blowhards a megaphone through which to upbraid any businessman who dares resist the cause of the day. And in such an environment, executives concerned to guard their corporate assets have learned how best to deal with groups like Martha Burk's National Council of Women's Organizations: ignore them and hope they go away. Which is what might very well have happened. In this instance, Burk was representing a "victim" class comprising just a handful of extremely successful women, most of them millionaires, who already had full access to the golf course and all its associated facilities--the men's locker room excepted. Burk's argument was that these women nevertheless bore a discriminatory economic disadvantage by remaining ineligible for formal Augusta National membership. She sent Hootie a nine-sentence letter to that effect. Had he just quietly discarded the letter, that might have been the end of it.
But Hootie Johnson is a man of principle, not expedience. And he is not a man accustomed to receiving criticism for his stance on nondiscrimination. It was Johnson who led the effort to desegretate higher education in South Carolina during the 1970s, Johnson who sought removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina's Capitol building, Johnson who became the first white man from the deep South to serve on the board of the national Urban League, and Johnson who helped secure the admission of Augusta National's first black member. Hootie Johnson, who knew something about real discrimination, was inclined to think Augusta's policy on women was more akin to the innocent customs of a social club. "Men like to get together with men every now and then, and women like to get together with women every now and then," he explained. It's a "natural thing," a "simple fact of life."
And so Hootie Johnson, offended by the suggestion that he might be involved in anything more pernicious than that, did not quietly discard Martha Burk's nine-sentence letter. Instead, he prepared a three-page response declaring that his club would not be "bullied, threatened, or intimidated" into changing its membership rules. And as for the press: Bring 'em on. Johnson's reply to Burk took the form of a press release emailed to eight major media outlets across the country.
The media needed no further invitation. Led by Howell Raines's New York Times, the press formed itself into a fearsome coalition behind Martha Burk. According to Shipnuck, over a four-month period beginning in July 2002, the Times published more than 40 news stories, editorials, and opinion columns about Augusta National. During a single week in the fall of that year, the Times "devoted as much space to Augusta National as it would during Masters week" the following spring. One Times editorial called for Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters tournament.
BUT HOOTIE had long before prepared the club for this onslaught. After holding a bake-off between two public relations firms seeking Augusta's business, Johnson chose a small D.C. public relations firm run by Jim McCarthy, who Shipnuck credits as one of the "stars" of the ensuing campaign.
Early on, McCarthy decided that to win the battle he had to take the press head on, making criticism of the media itself a part of the story. "Stopping the New York Times dead in its tracks," he said, "was critical to the overall effort, because the Times sets the agenda for the broader media world."
And the Internet was important, too. Immediately after Johnson hired him, McCarthy began "steering information and planting ideas" with about a dozen bloggers and media critics, including Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Jack Shafer, and Jim Romenesko. When the Times's crusade against Augusta National culminated in a front-page article declaring "CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta," a story that had been assigned by Raines, the seeds sown by McCarthy brought forth a full crop of criticism from the blogging community.
Linking to postings on Slate.com by Shafer and Kaus, Sullivan commented on Shafer's "excellent job limning the now comical hyping of non-news stories to fit Raines's paleo-liberal agenda." Kaus, who also linked to Shafer, opined that the Times front-pager "might as well have been headlined 'CBS Fails to Pay Attention to New York Times Crusade.'" Shafer, in turn, linked to Sridhar Pappu, the former media columnist for the New York Observer, who uncovered further evidence that troubles were brewing between Raines and his staff--troubles that had first been reported by yet another blogger, John Ellis, in May 2002. Kaus linked back to Sullivan. Jim Romenesko, who runs a left-leaning media blog on Poynter.org, linked to Shafer and Kaus. And, once the mainstream media finally caught up with the story, Romenesko also linked to Newsweek's Seth Mnookin--who, of course, quoted Shafer.
One day after former CBS chairman Jim Wyman announced that he was resigning from Augusta National in protest of the no-women policy--Howell Raines must have thought himself on the verge of triumph--the New York Daily News dropped the golf war's biggest bombshell, revealing the Times had killed two sports columns, one by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson, because they differed with the paper's editorial stance. At that point, "Romenesko's blog nearly melted," reports Shipnuck. The rest of American journalism had joined the fray, with virtually every commentator excoriating not Hootie Johnson but Howell Raines. "The story is no longer sex discrimination but journalistic integrity," beamed McCarthy.
SHIPNUCK RECOUNTS the circus atmosphere leading up to the Masters and during the week of the tournament itself: Martha Burk's efforts to assemble an effective protest near the gates of Augusta National; her unsuccessful legal battles with local law enforcement officials over the time, place, and manner of that protest; the brief entry and exit by Jesse Jackson; news conferences and interviews with Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and other golfers expressing discomfort over the controversy; residents and local businessmen caught in the fray; and the usual Elvis impersonators and T-shirt salesmen--along with one journalistic prank that by itself is worth the price of the book.
On the opening day of the Masters tournament, there were only 40 people attending Martha's protest. When the tournament was over, Hootie held a press conference of his own, after which the press corps universally acknowledged him the victor.
THERE WERE MULTIPLE LOSERS--like Bryant Gumbel, whose membership in an all-male country club was mercilessly exposed to a wide audience by Jim McCarthy on Gumbel's own show. Martha Burk scathed herself through a number of too-obvious, embarrassing inconsistencies, but it could have been worse for her; she at least emerged from the affair with sufficient name-recognition and notoriety to earn herself a book advance. And it could even have been worse for the New York Times as an institution. Shipnuck's book is otherwise meticulously researched, but he has somehow missed the connection between Augusta National's membership roster--in the person of former IBM chief executive John Akers--and the Times's board of directors. For some reason, throughout the crisis, Martha Burk never once demanded that John Akers resign from Hootie's club. And Howell Raines never once ordered up a story headlined " Times Board Member Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta."
It would have been nice to hear Raines's explanation for this oversight. As it is, we are left with Shipnuck's account of the brief interview the defrocked editor granted him. Raines still defends the crusade he conducted against Augusta National--as a means of helping the Times's Sports section "shed its parochial traditions." How the substitution of sociology for "parochial" traditions of sportswriting and commentary might have improved the journalistic quality of his paper--or strengthened its appeal to people interested in sports as sports--Raines does not say.
Bob Kohn is author of Journalistic Fraud: How the New York Times Distorts the Truth and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted (WND Books).