RAINES REAMS NYT EX-COLLEAGUES, NEWS CULTURE AT GRAY LADY ("Pinch" likened to Wile E. Coyote)

NY POST ^ | March 25, 2004 | KEITH J. KELLY

[Liz]

Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines has unleashed a blistering criticism of the paper where he worked for 25 years and of the onetime friend who ultimately fired him, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "I felt on the day I became executive editor and on the day I drove away from West Forty-Third Street for the last time that the Times badly needs to raise the level of its journalism, and to do so quickly in order to survive and make the full transition to the digital age," Raines writes in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly - his first public comments since the days following his ouster last year.

[McGavin999]

The only way you are goiing to fix the NYT is to fire everybody there and start out with a whole new crew. The new people would have to be told that any editorial slant in any news item would result in immediate termination.

Since that will never happen the NYT will continue is spriral downward into the muck.

[NYCVirago]

Raines states in the Atlantic essay that he strove in his two-year run at the top to shake up a culture of "mañana journalism" and to dispel what he called the "dangerously outmoded Times maxim, 'It's not news until we say it's news.'

What Raines will be most remembered for, besides the Jayson Blair thing, is his obsessive "flooding the zone" for Martha Burk's crusade against the Masters. That sounds like creating, not covering, news to me. Notice that now that Raines is out, Burk is no longer planning any Masters' protests?

[okie01]

"This journalistic clown is trying to pretend he made no mistakes and push the blame off on others. Sounds sorta like Clarke, doesn't he?"

Actually, he sounds like any liberal.

It's always somebody else's fault.

[Howlin]

Somewhere on here this week, I saw somebody post something that was so funny.

Remember when disgruntled employees use to just go postal? Now we are subjected to their whiney books!

[Liz]

One benefit of going postal is that it takes them off the streets and off TV.

We get punished over and over when authors with an axe to grind get all that media facetime.

[Liz]

Nice take.

[GOPJ]

Raines likens Sulzberger's efforts to thwart the paper's gossipmongers to a cartoon character known for persistence - and failure: "Every executive editor has been frustrated by the Times grapevine, and Arthur sometimes comes across as Wile E. Coyote, so elaborate and endlessly hopeful are his schemes to thwart the gossip network."

Ummmm, would that be like endlessly silly schemes that never work or like the puffed-up idiocy of one who never wins?