| Username |
Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 05-Jun-03 07:42 PM
How incidents of plagiarism rocked The New York Times, damaged its reputation, created rifts within its staff and ultimately led to the downfall of two most powerful media executives in the US.
Enjoy,
oohi
"a life-long fan of The New York Times"
ashu
ktm,nepal
***********************************
Executive Editor of The Times and Top Deputy Step Down
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom.
In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told staff members that he wanted to "applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own."
Mr. Sulzberger said that Mr. Raines, 60, who was the paper's executive editor for less than two years, would be succeeded on an interim basis by Joseph Lelyveld, 66, his immediate predecessor, who retired in 2001. There will be no immediate successor for Mr. Boyd, 52, who was the paper's managing editor.
A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said that the search for a permanent executive editor was likely "to move quickly" other company officials said it could be a matter of weeks and that candidates would be considered from inside and outside the paper.
For the staff members of The Times, the resignations yesterday set off a wave of emotions from sadness to relief, and prompted several dozen journalists from competing news organizations to stake out the entrance of its headquarters, at 229 West 43rd Street.
In one sense, the developments were something of a shock.
At a town-hall-style meeting on May 14 three days after The Times had described in an extensive article how Jayson Blair, a staff reporter, had made errors or committed the equivalent of journalistic fraud in at least 36 articles since October Mr. Sulzberger told the newsroom staff that he would not accept Mr. Raines's resignation if it were offered.
But in the days and weeks that followed, some of the newspaper's reporters and editors said they told Mr. Sulzberger that the newsroom's disaffection with Mr. Raines was so deep as to likely be irreparable.
By Wednesday night, Mr. Sulzberger said in an interview, he and the two editors had "a meeting of the minds, if you will."
"This was a decision that Howell and Gerald made, that I sadly accepted," he said. "It was not precipitated by any specific event. It happened over a period of time."
"The morale of the newsroom is critical," Mr. Sulzberger said in an earlier interview yesterday. The ability of reporters and editors "to perform depends on their feeling they are being treated in a collaborative and collegial fashion."
The announcement of the two resignations came at midmorning, as many people were still arriving for work. Mr. Raines, clutching a microphone before dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom staff members, many of whom sobbed audibly, said, "As I'm standing before you for the last time, I want to thank you for the honor and privilege of being a member of the best journalistic community in the world."
"It's been a tumultuous month, 20 months," he added, "but we have produced some memorable newspapers."
He concluded by saying, "Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell."
The remark, which could have been spoken by one of the role models Mr. Raines often cited to his staff, the longtime Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, underscored both the magnitude of the many news events that have taken place since the two men took over in September 2001, and the extensive resources the newspaper devoted to reporting on them.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 05-Jun-03 07:43 PM
Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd led the newspaper's coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the collapse of Enron; and the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. In addition, the two men took on additional responsibilities during their tenure, overseeing the editorial operations of The International Herald Tribune. (The New York Times Company, which already owned half of the newspaper, bought the rest from the Washington Post Company in January.)
Fourteen months ago, The Times was awarded a record seven Pulitzer Prizes, six related to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
But after the deceptions of Mr. Blair were brought to light, including the plagiarizing of articles from other newspapers and news agencies and the concocting of quotations, long-simmering complaints about the management style of the editors rose to the surface.
At the staff meeting on May 14, Mr. Raines said he accepted ultimate responsibility for what Mr. Blair had done and pledged to improve his rapport with the people who worked for him. In recent days, he tried to win over colleagues, at dinners and in private conversations.
After concluding his brief remarks yesterday morning, Mr. Raines, who joined the paper in 1978 as a national correspondent in Atlanta and later served as Washington bureau chief and editor of the editorial page, walked through an impromptu receiving line of colleagues offering condolences and well wishes. They included Mr. Sulzberger's father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the paper's chairman emeritus and former publisher.
To Michael Wilson, a reporter on the metropolitan staff whom Mr. Raines had helped hire and who had just returned from Iraq, he said, "You had a good war."
A short while later, Mr. Raines grabbed a straw hat from the office he had just vacated and walked out of the building. Mr. Boyd followed a minute later. (Neither man responded to requests for interviews.)
Moments before the men departed, the younger Mr. Sulzberger had told the staff, "There is so much to say, but it really just boils down to this: This is a day that breaks my heart, and I think it breaks the hearts of a lot of people in this room."
He added that the newspaper, which was founded in 1851, had "seen good times and bad times" and would continue to do so in the coming decades.
"We will learn from them and we will grow from them," he said. "And we will return to doing journalism at this newspaper because that's what we're here for."
For the news media, the day's events were the culmination of a story line that had played out for weeks. The Times's investigation into Mr. Blair's journalistic deceptions revealed communication problems among the top editors and newsroom department heads. Some staff members said those problems including the top-down management style of Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd contributed to gaps in the oversight of Mr. Blair as he helped cover several major news events, including the Washington-area sniper hunt and the hometown reaction to the rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch. Other internal problems of the newsroom were soon playing out in the news media.
On May 28, for example, several reporters on the national staff circulated internal e-mail messages complaining about comments that had been made to The Washington Post by their colleague Rick Bragg, after The Times published an editors' note that said he had relied heavily on the reporting of a freelance journalist for an article about oystermen of the Florida Gulf Coast in Apalachicola, which Mr. Bragg had visited only briefly.
Mr. Bragg suggested it was common practice for national correspondents to rely on such freelancers for the bulk of their reporting, a characterization that many of the reporters disputed. By early that evening, Mr. Raines had announced that Mr. Bragg, a reporter to whom he was close, had resigned.
The departure of Mr. Boyd, the newspaper's first black managing editor, prompted the New York Association of Black Journalists to release a statement from its president, Errol Cockfield, that said, in part: "There are many black journalists who are questioning whether, in an effort to restore its credibility, The Times has gone too far."
Mr. Cockfield, a reporter at Newsday, added, "We should not make journalists scapegoats for a dysfunctional system."
A committee of editors and reporters as well as several outside news media experts has been charged with taking a sweeping look at the paper's newsroom practices, and is expected to report its findings in July.
Gay Talese, who worked as a reporter at the paper from 1955 to 1965 and later wrote "The Kingdom and the Power" (World, 1969), a narrative account of its history, said that the resignations came on "a dark day," but that the paper surely would endure.
"I grew up believing The New York Times represented the closest that we could get in this country to trying to get the facts right with a sense of fairness and balance," Mr. Talese said. "I believe that The Times, in doing what it did today, sad and sacrificial as it may be, is nevertheless acting in the paper's enduring spirit to be responsible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/national/05SHELL-PAPE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
|
| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Jun-03 08:28 PM
Here's how The Guardian covvered it:Reporter's plagiarism claims scalp of editor as New York Times becomes the news
Two most senior journalists pay price for humiliation heaped on paper by scandal
Gary Younge in New York
Friday June 6, 2003
The Guardian
The editor of America's most venerated newspaper, the New York Times, resigned yesterday after one of the most embarrassing journalistic scandals in American history prompted severe criticism of his managerial competence and abrasive style.
In a hastily arranged and highly emotional ceremony in the paper's third-floor newsroom, during which some reporters sobbed, Howell Raines, 60, announced his resignation, picked up his straw hat from the office he had just vacated and left the building with his wife. Mr Raines' parting words to his former staff were: "Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell."
The paper's managing editor, Gerald Boyd, 52, who was appointed by Mr Raines, also resigned.
The paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, told the staff: "Given the events of the last month...Howell and Gerald concluded that it was best for the Times that they step down. This is a day that breaks my heart."
He thanked the pair "for putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own". Mr Raines' predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld, will take over while a replacement is found.
The paper's top two editors are the most senior casualties to date of a scandal that erupted five weeks ago when the Times discovered that Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, had "committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud".
An internal investigation of Blair's work revealed a litany of plagiarism, deception and inaccuracies relating to 36 of the 73 articles he had written between October 2002 and April this year.
Blair's resignation on May 1 was followed by a front-page story and a humiliating correction inside detailing his fabrications in more than 14,000 words on four broadsheet pages. Blair would later boast that he had "fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism".
In a journalistic culture that worships at the altar of objectivity and prides itself on accuracy and accountability one cannot overestimate how deep a blow the Blair ordeal was for the Times or how widespread the ramifications of it would be.
In a world where factcheckers are commonplace and corrections columns have been in place for decades, this was regarded not as an individual aberration but as a systemic failure. The scandal has caused other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Buffalo News, to call staff meetings to examine their working practices.
The investigation made it clear what Blair had done; the more difficult question was how had he been able to get away with it for so long.
Many fingers pointed at Howell Raines. The mood in some parts of the paper after the debacle was a mixture of sombre and seditious. Some reporters and editors argued that Mr Raines' bullish management style, crusading editorial approach and desire to promote youth and energy over age and experience had all contributed to Blair's promotion and the paper's failure to prevent his fraud.
A few days later Mr Sulzberger held a staff meeting at the Astor Plaza Theatre, near the Times offices, so employees could question Mr Raines and Mr Boyd in person. One of the paper's writers, Joyce Purnick, described it as a "raw, emotional and candid session". "I believe that at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom," said Joe Sexton, a deputy editor of the metro section, which covers the New York area. "I do not feel a sense of trust and reassurance that judgments are properly made...People feel less led than bullied."
|
| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Jun-03 08:29 PM
Questions were also asked about the paper's affirmative action policies.
Blair is black and some journalists argued that he had been overpromoted because of the paper's desire to elevate reporters from ethnic minorities.
Mr Raines entertained the suggestion: "You have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many," he said. "When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."
The meeting offered Mr Raines, not known for being self-effacing, a rare opportunity for contrition. He took it. "I'm here to listen to your anger, wherever it's directed," he told his staff. "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...I was guilty of a failure of vigilance that, since I sit in this chair where the buck stops, I should have prevented."
But if the meeting provided the opportunity for a postmortem examination, Mr Raines also saw it as a chance to acknowledge concerns about his editorship after almost two years in the chair.
He took up the post, with the official title of executive editor, in early September 2001 - a week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. The paper's coverage of the attacks was lauded and won six Pulitzer prizes.
But his management style, at times insensitive and autocratic, alienated many. Several senior national correspondents left - one, Kevin Sack, went on to win a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times. Mr Raines wanted to make it clear that he was aware of the criticism.
"You view me as inaccessible and arrogant," he said. "I heard that you were convinced there's a star system that singles out my favourites for elevation. Fear is a problem to such an extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news."
A business reporter, Alex Berenson, asked him if he had considered resigning. Mr Raines said no, or at least not unless he was asked to by Mr Sulzberger, who was sitting next to him. He would not accept the resignation even if it were offered, Mr Sulzberger said.
Quite what happened in the intervening three weeks to change their minds is not clear.
An internal review of reporting practices and management checks and balances was ordered but the paper started to implode under the weight of internal rancour and frustration.
More scandals and scalps followed. Last week one of Mr Raines' favourites, the Pulitzer-winner Rick Bragg, resigned days after the editor suspended him with pay. Bragg admitted that an unpaid assistant had done virtually all of the reporting for a story on oyster fishers in Florida for which he took full credit. Bragg said such practices were commonplace; his colleagues publicly disagreed. Other freelancers who had worked for the paper said they too had been denied bylines.
It also became apparent that the main source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme for the paper's bioterrorism expert, Judith Miller, had been the Pentagon's favoured Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi. That in turn suggested that the Pentagon and Mr Chalabi had used the paper to help create the justification for war.
Mr Raines spent the past few days trying to win over some of his sternest critics within the paper, arguing his case over dinner and in private.
"Everyone is kind of stunned," said one reporter. "These are two guys who put their whole life into the paper and they certainly didn't set out to do anything bad.
"My first reaction was maybe this would allow people to move on, but none of it's good really."
Whether the resignations will quell the controversy remains to be seen. "I think the focus now becomes Arthur Sulzberger," said the New York magazine critic Michael Wolff. "And, in fact, I think that's the root of what's happened here. It's all about survival of the publisher at this point."
|
