meeting” of newsroom employees to address the worsening staff morale and many still-unanswered questions. Hundreds of Times newsroom personnel filed down the sidewalk into a rented Broadway movie theater in what one tabloid reporter standing next to me on-scene called “the world’s longest perp walk.” Nearby, a prankster costumed as “Baghdad Bob,” the infamously prevaricating former spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Information, held up a sign that said “New York Times Reporter: Will Lie for Food.”
The meeting, which Raines would later call “a disaster,” began with an odd statement from Arthur Jr.: “If we had done this [handling the Blair fiasco] right, we would not be here today. We didn’t do this right. We regret that deeply. It sucks.” From here, the meeting quickly degenerated into tense, angry, profanity-laced accusations. Raines and his deputies, one editor charged, had lost “the confidence of much of the newsroom.”
To the surprise of many, Raines admitted that Blair had been a beneficiary of racial favoritism. “Where I come from, when it comes to principles on race, you have to pick a ditch to die in,” Raines intoned in his best Southern drawl. “And let it come rough or smooth, you’ll find me in the trenches for justice. Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously,” he continued. “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.” Raines also said he had no intention of stepping down voluntarily. To which Sulzberger chimed, “If he were to offer his resignation, I would not accept it.”
Sulzberger’s tone-deafness and the vote of confidence in Raines left many staffers deflated. One Times reporter told New York magazine that the meeting “only served to make the scandal—and the mockery—to build.” Even late-night comedians like Letterman and Leno got into the act. The old slogan at the Times, “All the news that’s fit to print,” had just been replaced by a new one, Letterman declared: “We make it up.”
As it unfolded, the scandal sorely tested the friendship and ideological affinity between Raines and Sulzberger, as well as Sulzberger’s public pledge that there would be no newsroom scapegoats. The day after members of the influential Washington bureau convinced him that the paper would never recover until the two top editors left, Sulzberger stood in the newsroom and announced that Raines and Boyd would step down. He implied that the departures were voluntary, saying he wanted to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.” In an interview afterward, Sulzberger emphasized that he had not been pressured to fire them, either by the board or by family shareholders. (Within months, Raines would go on television flatly contradicting Sulzberger; according to Raines, after returning from D.C. that day Sulzberger had told him “there was too much blood on the floor” for him to remain.) The headline on the page-one Times story said only: “Times’s 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer’s Fraud.” Like much of what Jayson Blair wrote, the headline that closed the scandalous circle was a lie.
Sulzberger’s Ill-Considered Public Utterances. The countercultural values that Sulzberger likes to flaunt generated notable controversy when he gave a commencement speech at the State University of New York at New Paltz in May 2006. Coming so shortly after Rosenthal’s death and the weeklong celebration of his journalistic values—especially his dedication to keeping the paper “straight”—Sulzberger’s speech attracted wide attention, and was featured on talk radio and cable news across the nation.
The core of the speech was a generational expression of guilt over the horrible condition of the world that the graduates would be entering. When he was a student, Sulzberger said, only slightly tongue in cheek, young people had helped end the war and forced Nixon’s resignation. “We entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that,” Sulzberger said. “So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Critics found the speech a risible compendium of 1960s romanticism, generational vanity and self-conferred moral superiority. It reflected a misunderstood conflation of interest-group politics—illegal aliens, gays, abortion—with “fundamental rights.” Citing the speech’s defeatism and gloom, the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham summarized much of the media reaction when she declared Sulzberger “the most negative media figure” in the country, “the Grim Reaper of American Journalism.” In Sulzberger’s worldview, she said, “it’s not ‘Morning in America,’ it’s evening and there’s no end in sight.”
Weapons of Mass Destruction. Judith Miller’s erroneous reporting on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction led many, especially on the left, to charge that the Times had become a propaganda conduit for the Bush administration. Miller was close to the administration both professionally and personally. She was also close to the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who turned out to be unreliable on many fronts. According to columnist/blogger Arianna Huffington, Miller and others in the media who followed her lead were guilty of “selling a war to the American public based on lies.” Some of Miller’s reporting, even some of her wording, was used by administration officials as they made the prewar rounds on the Sunday talk shows to warn about “mushroom clouds” appearing on the horizon. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, the Times conducted a postmortem, combing through Miller’s reporting; this resulted in mortifying mea culpas in both a special “editor’s note” and an editorial admitting that the paper had been “taken in.”
Plamegate. The Times got its fingers broken again in another fiasco involving Judith Miller. In this instance, the issue was the leaking of a covert CIA operative’s name, Valerie Plame, to the media. Allegedly this was done by high-ranking officials in the Bush White House in retaliation against Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who had disparaged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger. The Times initially editorialized fiercely for a special prosecutor, but quickly changed its tune when that prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, sent a subpoena to Miller. Invoking journalistic confidentiality, Miller refused to name the source who had “outed” Plame to her, and she defied Fitzgerald’s grand jury subpoena, a jailable offense, even though she had written nothing about the case.
Miller’s case became a cause célèbre throughout journalism. To Sulzberger, it was a moral crusade, as he took to the airwaves and had “Free Judy” buttons printed up. After losing in protracted court proceedings, Miller finally went to jail, but after eighty-eight days there she decided to testify. When she named Lewis “Scooter” Libby as her source, many believed that she might have been invoking journalistic privilege to protect someone in the White House who had committed a crime or had been engaged in a vengeance-driven smear campaign against Joe Wilson.
Its credibility once again under attack, Times editors commissioned yet another internal inquiry, and produced a long take-out in late October 2005, which unfortunately for the Times had the same effect as their infamous postmortem on Jayson Blair. It painted an unflattering picture of its own reporter, who had agreed to identify Libby as a “former Hill staffer” to hide his fingerprints on the leak, had “forgotten” a meeting with Libby as well as the notes she took during that meeting, and had written Plame’s name in her notebook as “Valerie Flame.” As the New York Observer characterized the accounts, they told “a tale of a dysfunctional staffer running loose at a dysfunctional institution, with historic consequences.”
Within a week of her release, Miller went from being a Times hero to a pariah. The editor, Bill Keller, the public editor, Byron Calame, and columnist Maureen Dowd all took aim, making it clear that Miller would never return to the Times newsroom. Miller soon engineered a graceful, lucrative
