Nightmare on 43rd Street

From left: New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd (Ap)

Another odd aspect of the Times that doesn't get examination is the tendency to appoint editorial page editors and writers as news editors. The modern-day Times leaped over that line in 1986 by appointing Max Frankel as executive editor. It happened again in 2001 with Raines, who wrote sometimes brilliant and bristling editorials from 1993 until he took the top job in the New York newsroom -- where, by the way, he had never before worked. Even the current executive editor, Bill Keller, an outstanding reporter and foreign correspondent, had briefly become an op-ed page and Sunday magazine writer before moving back into news as Raines's successor. Keller then appointed Philip Taubman, deputy editor of the editorial page, as chief of the Times's Washington news bureau. All are talented journalists. But they also have or are associated with a string of opinions in print -- something that can be used as ammunition by critics looking for bias, and also something that inherently involves a sense of advocacy. One wonders why a newspaper with perhaps the largest collection of reporting and editing talent in the country doesn't choose people to run the news operation who come from the news sections.

Mnookin's book also probes beyond Blair, especially into what appeared to be Raines's 2002 obsession with whether the Augusta National Golf Club would admit women as members -- another episode that wound up embarrassing the newspaper. On the other hand, Hard News offers relatively little coverage and introspection about other subjects of intense, controversial focus in the Times's news pages. One is the saga of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist fired from his job at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in 1999 when he was linked to stolen American secrets that investigators believed had helped China accelerate its nuclear weapons program. All but one of the charges against Lee were eventually dropped. The Times was out in front on this coverage, but in looking back it said, in a "From the Editors" column in Sept., 2000, that "we wish we had done some things differently . . . to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt . . . and pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the FBI case against Dr. Lee." Another is the more recent and even more controversial record of the paper concerning the existence of and search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A handful of Times stories in the Raines era played important roles in backing the case that Saddam Hussein had or was developing such weapons, and the paper acknowledged in a "From the Editors" column last May that some of this information was "questionable" and "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."

Both the WMD and Wen Ho Lee stories were more important and more damaging, substantively, than what Blair was involved with. His stories were phony, but they didn't really change anything.

Two things are interesting here. First, the Wen Ho Lee saga unfolded in 2000 under the previous editor, Joseph Lelyveld, a widely respected reporter and editor. Still, the episode broadens the question to whether the Times has institutional tendencies beyond Raines. Second, some of the Times's coverage of both the Wen Ho Lee and WMD stories, like that of the Augusta National stories, gave the appearance of following a perceived and accepted story line rather than being more open to other perspectives. This is a grave danger for journalism. A revealing line in the editors' column last May about a particular headline said it "gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view." At the time, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, asked rhetorically: "The New York Times has a view in its news stories?"

An aggressive and authoritative New York Times -- and Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and scores of other serious news-gatherers -- is crucial to an informed citizenry. Carrying out that responsibility, without getting carried away, is also crucial.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I know many of the characters in this book. Some are friends. I am quoted in it, but only in an observation made in my role as The Post's ombudsman. Ironically, I thought that if the Times had an ombudsman at the time, Jayson Blair would have been outed as a fraud by staffers who could have used, without fear, the ombudsman's channel to the top, perhaps avoiding the public explosion that so damaged the paper.

I have spent most of my professional life as a reporter and editor competing with the Times, and from 1996 to 2000, I was the editor of the International Herald Tribune, then jointly owned by the Times and The Post. Through it all -- and despite my regrets that the Times deprived readers of a unique blend of American journalism when they forced The Post out of the IHT partnership two years ago -- I have been, and remain, a strong admirer of the Times and its content. I'm optimistic about its future but worried, because it is so important, lest it falter or make itself needlessly vulnerable.

So in a personal way, I was struck by a brief segment in this book in which the Times's media reporter, Jacques Steinberg, remembers how, as a youngster in Massachusetts, his Brooklyn-born father would take his son along everyday as he drove to town to get a copy of the New York Times, "going out of his way to pick up this newspaper with this incredibly small print. I learned by example that it was very important." Growing up in New York City during World War II, we used to get the Times delivered to our fifth-grade civics class. For a penny or two, you could buy one and take it home. I can still feel the weight of that paper in my hand as I walked home, holding lots of little print that I really didn't understand, except for a vague feeling that it was important. •

Michael Getler is The Washington Post's ombudsman.