E-Mail This Article to a Friend Howell of pain (continued)

THOSE WHO followed the Blair story closely at the time it was unraveling, in the spring of 2003, will not find much in Hard News that’s dramatically new (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, May 16 and 23, 2003). But that’s hardly a knock on its author. After all, as the media reporter for Newsweek, Mnookin told the story more quickly and better than anyone else while it was happening. Placing his reporting between hard covers and offering some perspective is a welcome development (for an interview with Mnookin, see "Hard Times," News and Features, November 12).

No doubt Hard News will become required reading in ethics classes at journalism schools across the country. But I wonder whether that’s really where it will do the most good. Once Mnookin moves away from his gripping narrative, his suggestions for how to prevent future Jayson Blairs are rather tepid. His favorite — spot fact-checking of news articles after they have been published — is a good idea, although, as he observes, it’s not likely to be adopted by more than a handful of news organizations anytime soon.

Rather than handing out Hard News to aspiring journalists, I think it might prove more valuable to business and management students. Because the damage that Howell Raines did to the Times was not unique to journalism. It’s not hard to imagine a Raines wreaking havoc at any large corporation or organization. The psychological elements that Mnookin describes were volatile. In Sulzberger, the Times had — has — a publisher trying to distinguish himself from his publisher-father by being more hands-on and forward-looking, trying to figure out a way for the paper to survive and thrive in the age of new media. In Raines, Sulzberger found someone who he thought would help him to fulfill that vision: hard-charging, a strategic thinker, someone who knew exactly how to flatter Sulzberger and to sell him on the notion that the Times had become content and complacent.

Raines’s one unalloyed triumph as executive editor came within days of his ascension: the Times’ massive, heartfelt coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath, for which the paper won an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes. Obviously Raines had not yet put in place any of the personnel and management changes he had planned, and the coverage was carried out by the very staff he would disparage as lazy and lacking in "competitive metabolism." Nevertheless, Raines’s contributions were not insignificant. He provided leadership and passion at a crucial time, and he also brought a greater visual sensibility to the job at the very moment when photographs were needed to tell the story just as much as torrents of words.

Yet, in the end, Mnookin writes, Raines even managed to transform the Times’ 9/11 coverage into such a self-aggrandizing personal triumph that it served only to help build a case for why he had to go. At a meeting of top managers not long before Sulzberger would ask for Raines’s resignation, Mnookin writes, "Raines launched into a litany of the paper’s accomplishments, each one preceded by ‘I.’ ‘I won seven Pulitzer Prizes,’ ‘I led the paper on the September 11 coverage.’"

Mnookin then reports that Mike Oreskes, the assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s television and Internet divisions, cut in. "I actually agree with how impressive those accomplishments are, except for five words: ‘I, I, I, I, I,’" Oreskes said. "It’s ‘us.’ "

It was only after an enormous amount of damage had been done that Sulzberger could see how Raines’s management style — top-down, egomaniacal, and intimidating to the point where no one dared bring him bad news — had not only created an environment that could let someone like Jayson Blair thrive, but had also undermined the teamwork that’s necessary at a collective enterprise such as a metropolitan daily newspaper.

What gives every great tragedy its resonance is that it didn’t have to happen. Jayson Blair didn’t have to happen to the New York Times. But given the all-too-human failings of Howell Raines and Arthur Sulzberger, it was sadly inevitable.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.