| ashu |
Posted
on 16-May-03 12:45 AM
May 15, 2003
Editor of Times Tells Staff He Accepts Blame for Fraud
By JACQUES STEINBERG
The Times meeting was closed to news coverage. As a result, Mr. Steinberg, The Times's media writer, did not attend it.
The executive editor of The New York Times told a town-hall-style meeting of newsroom staff members yesterday that he accepted blame for the breakdown of communication and oversight that allowed a Times reporter to commit frequent acts of journalistic fraud in recent months.
But the executive editor, Howell Raines, spent much of his time at the nearly two-hour meeting responding to often angry complaints and questions about his management style, according to people who attended the session.
One business reporter, Alex Berenson, asked Mr. Raines if he had considered resigning, to which Mr. Raines responded that he would not step down unless asked to by The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Mr. Sulzberger, who was sitting next to Mr. Raines, quickly interjected that he would not accept Mr. Raines's resignation even if offered.
The meeting was convened by Mr. Sulzberger; Mr. Raines; and the paper's managing editor, Gerald M. Boyd, after The Times published a four-page package on Sunday that detailed how the reporter, Jayson Blair, had fabricated quotations, falsified datelines or lifted material from other newspapers in several dozen articles over a six-month period, which ended with his resignation on May 1.
"I'm here to listen to your anger, wherever it's directed," Mr. Raines said at the outset of the closed meeting, according to a recording made by someone in the audience, "to tell you that I know that our institution has been damaged, that I accept my responsibility for that and I intend to fix it."
He said later, "I was guilty of a failure of vigilance that, since I sit in this chair where the buck stops, I should have prevented."
But Mr. Raines made clear that he viewed the session as something more: a forum on his 20-month tenure as the newsroom's leader. During this period the paper has won eight Pulitzer Prizes six for its coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but it has also been a time of dissension. A growing number of employees have expressed deepening concern about what is viewed as a top-down management style that, they say, could have contributed to Mr. Blair's ability to do what he did undetected for so long.
"You view me as inaccessible and arrogant," Mr. Raines said, ticking off a list he had compiled from his own newsroom interviews in recent days. "You believe the newsroom is too hierarchical, that my ideas get acted on and others get ignored. I heard that you were convinced there's a star system that singles out my favorites for elevation."
"Fear," he added, "is a problem to such extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news."
Before opening the session to questions, Mr. Raines made a pre-emptive attempt to address whether Mr. Blair's race he is black had played a role in his being added last fall to the team covering the hunt for the snipers in the Washington area.
Only six months earlier, Mr. Blair, 27, had been found to be making so many serious errors as a reporter on the metropolitan staff that he had been informed that his job was in jeopardy.
"Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter," Mr. Raines said. "I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities."
"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."
In addressing Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, one newsroom employee after another gave voice to complaints and concerns that they had mostly shared only with one another in the months leading up to the disclosure of what Mr. Blair had done.
"I believe that at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom," said Joe Sexton, a deputy metropolitan editor, according to notes taken by an audience member. "I do not feel a sense of trust and reassurance that judgments are properly made."
"People feel less led than bullied," he added.
Shaila K. Dewan, a reporter on the metropolitan staff, said she worried about the message young reporters would take from Mr. Blair's advancement despite his performance. "What will you do to restore our faith that there is a modicum of fairness in the advancement process?"
Many of the reporters and editors left the meeting saying that it would take months, if not years, for Mr. Raines to prove he could raise morale in the newsroom.
But Joyce Purnick, who writes the Metro Matters column and has worked at the paper since 1979, expressed more optimism than most.
"It struck me as an unusually raw, emotional and candid session," she said afterward. "I think the willingness of Howell, Arthur and Gerald to take all of that, and to accept responsibility for what happened, at least creates the potential for some fundamental changes."
"Whether we will ultimately see those changes, I obviously don't know," she added. "But today I feel that we could, and in the earlier stages of this awful story, I was not all that sure."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/15/business/media/15PAPE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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| ashu |
Posted
on 16-May-03 07:36 PM
Unfit to print
May 15th 2003 | NEW YORK
Crisis management for a top media brand
QUALITY control problems can wreak havoc with any business, especially when a reputation for high quality is a crucial ingredient of its brand. Ask the New York Times, which is having to deal with its own version of Ford's dodgy Firestone tyres, and Coca-Cola's Belgian taste troubles.
The glitch in question is Jayson Blair, lately a fast-rising star on what is widely regarded, not least by itself, as the world's leading newspaper of record, exemplified by its slogan, All the News That's Fit to Print . Alas, it turns out that his college degree was bogus, and much of the acclaimed reporting he did, according to an internal Times inquiry, appears to have been invented or pasted together from the reporting of others.
To the credit of Times journalists, some had given early warning about Mr Blair to their superiors. But corporate whistle-blowing often fails to do the trick (remember Enron?). It certainly could not halt the rise of a young black journalist at a paper which may have allowed its celebration of diversity and opportunity to cloud its judgment.
How much damage Mr Blair has done to the newspaper's brand is unclear. In a four-page exposé that may have struck many outsiders as self-absorbed, detail after detail was disgorged. Mostly, his offences seemed to consist of what journalists call colour . However, the Times confirms that the Justice Department is taking an as yet unspecified interest. Rivals of the Times were withering. The upstart New York Sun disputed the claim by the Times that this was a low point in its 152-year history, offering in evidence its past celebration of the virtues of Stalin and the democratic principles of Fidel Castro.
This has come at a bad time for the Times. Its circulation fell by 5% in the six months to the end of March. It attributes this, mystifyingly, to the difficult year-over-year comparison . Yet in the same period, in New York's fiercely competitive newspaper market, the tiny Sun and the tabloid New York Posteach notably keener than the Times on the war in Iraqhave enjoyed strong growth.
In the past year of business scandals, the Times has not shied away from making tough calls, including criticising a lack of accountability of bosses for corporate failures. The executive editor, Howell Raines, won plaudits after being appointed two years ago and quickly guided the paper to seven Pulitzer Prizes. Yet Mr Raines's apparently close relationship with Mr Blair, and the paper's prolonged failure to unearth a pathological liar within its midst, has raised questions about what other low points might yet emerge. After Mr Blair's failings were made public, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, said let's not begin to demonise our executiveseither the desk editors, or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher . Other troubled corporate titans would no doubt conclude that the Times is finally getting religion.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1784805
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