Posted on 06/08/2003 6:41:13 AM PDT by Davis
Newspaper Daze, Part 4
It's unlikely that the account in the NYTimes of the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd will win a Pulitzer. It's overlong, tendentious, flat, delicate where it might have been bold, not sufficiently analytical, and it totally omits a number of important facts.
The author of this account is Jacques Steinberg, the Times's media editor who had earlier demonstrated pluck, ingenuity, and a stoic public countenance in the teeth of absurdity: although he was barred as a member of the press from attending the staff meeting held three weeks ago to quell the Times's newsroom rebellion, he managed to cover it by interviewing Times staffers who were present. He took no notice then of the absurdity of his position nor of the foolishness of management's decision to declare the meeting closed when they knew it couldn't keep it closed.
Steinberg's report of the awesome aftermath of Jayson's Blair's misdeeds fails to mention that Blair is black and was hired to satisfy the Times's noble obligation for racial preference, diversity. There's no mention in Steinberg's piece that Blair was hired and promoted-protected by Raines and Boyd and Prince Sulzberger--despite Blair's gross and obvious unfitness for the job, indeed for any job. Steinberg doesn't mention "diversity" at all, a stunning and telling omission. It's clear, isn't it, that Steinberg is bowing to what is now the official line: that there is no causal connection between the Times's racial preference program and l'affaire Jayson Blair--and this, quite simply, is untrue.
It is likewise now clear that devoting four Times pages to set out minute details of Blair's miscreancy was an atrocious management decision. At the embarrassingly stupid meeting that followed, Times staffers banged away at Raines and Boyd for a multitude of management sins, particularly for promoting and preferring people unfairly, for cosseting a head-case suck-up for his complexion, not the content of his character, for overriding the judgment of responsible subordinates: We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now. For simply not listening. Raines and Boyd were humiliated in public so severely that it is no wonder they could never thereafter recover "the trust of the newsroom." Helluva way to run a railroad.
Nothing in Steinberg's story gives any hint of the financial terms of Raines's and Boyd's departure. Prince's memo to the staff, leaking PC at every pore, says only that they resigned "for the good of the Times." For smugness and pomposity it is topped by the Times' barf-inducing editorial. Get a load of this:
The forced introspection The Times has been going through since the Jayson Blair story surfaced will, in the long run, be healthy. A string of rather spectacular successes might have made us too cocky, too sure that the future would simply bring more of the same. Now, we are re-examining some of our internal rules and structures. The recent weeks have not been particularly enjoyable for those of us on the inside, but even in the moments of greatest internal stress the reporters and editors have done their jobs. That comes from the strength of the institution. Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd quit to protect that strength, and their sacrifice simply gives the rest of us one more reason to work toward that perpetual goal of the perfect report.
It's time, isn't it, that Prince Sulzberger make a similar sacrifice.
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