The most essential American news source
Inky Tears
Time is on the block. The New York Times is teetering. It can get an alumnus down, but the last thing the news business needs is a case of nostalgia.
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Published Apr 7, 2013
This spring marks the tenth anniversary of a journalistic scandal that everyone would like to forget, and that many have. On May 11, 2003, an unsuspecting Sunday Times readership woke up to a page-one headline heralding a four-page investigation of one Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter whose serial fabrications and plagiarism constituted what the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., called “a low point” in the history of America’s greatest newspaper. Even at the time, Blair, a third-tier neophyte in a post-9/11 newsroom, was a bit player in the conflagration engulfing the Times. But his misdeeds exposed a larger breakdown: The same management culture that let Blair run amok on mostly minor assignments also allowed, even encouraged, Judith Miller (among others) to hijack the Times’s credibility and sometimes its front page to bolster the Bush administration’s spurious evidence for Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The failure of the Times—and of virtually every mainstream news organization, including every broadcast-network news division—to vet the case for the Iraq War remains one of the worst systemic failures in the history of American journalism. The Times, above all, was expected to outperform the pack.
In the paper’s besieged and airless old 43rd Street building during the Blair imbroglio, the mood was grim. As one editor, a Times lifer and loyalist, put it to me in a desultory conversation one afternoon, “You can work for a century to build up an institution like this, and it can still be torn down in a weekend.”
A remarkable thing happened on the Times’ way to demolition, however. A clean slate of leaders, uncharacteristically humble circumspection, hard work, and a new regimen of checks and balances restored the paper’s internal equilibrium and external reputation. That’s not to say the Times is perfect; no news organization has been or ever will be. (To keep some perspective here, it’s worth remembering that another of the Times’ low points was its minimalist coverage of the Holocaust.) But the paper has reclaimed its status as the most essential American news source—one of the last still fielding ambitious correspondents in most places where news is made, and still investing untold man-hours, serious investigative talent, and acres of paragraphs to enterprise reportage that spans the globe and nearly every field of human endeavor. If the Times didn’t provide a daily crib sheet, American television news wouldn’t know how to fill its airtime, and politicians wouldn’t know what authority to cite or, on the right, to tar and feather.
(More here.)
Time is on the block. The New York Times is teetering. It can get an alumnus down, but the last thing the news business needs is a case of nostalgia.
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Published Apr 7, 2013
This spring marks the tenth anniversary of a journalistic scandal that everyone would like to forget, and that many have. On May 11, 2003, an unsuspecting Sunday Times readership woke up to a page-one headline heralding a four-page investigation of one Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter whose serial fabrications and plagiarism constituted what the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., called “a low point” in the history of America’s greatest newspaper. Even at the time, Blair, a third-tier neophyte in a post-9/11 newsroom, was a bit player in the conflagration engulfing the Times. But his misdeeds exposed a larger breakdown: The same management culture that let Blair run amok on mostly minor assignments also allowed, even encouraged, Judith Miller (among others) to hijack the Times’s credibility and sometimes its front page to bolster the Bush administration’s spurious evidence for Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The failure of the Times—and of virtually every mainstream news organization, including every broadcast-network news division—to vet the case for the Iraq War remains one of the worst systemic failures in the history of American journalism. The Times, above all, was expected to outperform the pack.
In the paper’s besieged and airless old 43rd Street building during the Blair imbroglio, the mood was grim. As one editor, a Times lifer and loyalist, put it to me in a desultory conversation one afternoon, “You can work for a century to build up an institution like this, and it can still be torn down in a weekend.”
A remarkable thing happened on the Times’ way to demolition, however. A clean slate of leaders, uncharacteristically humble circumspection, hard work, and a new regimen of checks and balances restored the paper’s internal equilibrium and external reputation. That’s not to say the Times is perfect; no news organization has been or ever will be. (To keep some perspective here, it’s worth remembering that another of the Times’ low points was its minimalist coverage of the Holocaust.) But the paper has reclaimed its status as the most essential American news source—one of the last still fielding ambitious correspondents in most places where news is made, and still investing untold man-hours, serious investigative talent, and acres of paragraphs to enterprise reportage that spans the globe and nearly every field of human endeavor. If the Times didn’t provide a daily crib sheet, American television news wouldn’t know how to fill its airtime, and politicians wouldn’t know what authority to cite or, on the right, to tar and feather.
(More here.)
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