The worst of Times

Two new books on the New York Times relive its recent crises. But while the Jayson Blair scandal made for splashy headlines, the real question is how the country's leading newspaper will recover from spreading lies about Iraq's WMD.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Dec 28, 2004 | Near the end of "Hard News," his gripping account of the Jayson Blair scandal and the brief, disastrous reign of former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, media reporter Seth Mnookin makes an offhand comment that pretty much nails the peculiar status of the Times in American society. "For the Times to be the Times," Mnookin writes, "its employees ... need to be willing to sublimate their own egos to serve a larger, quasi-public good."

Mnookin means this to be another log on the pyre he's building under Raines, who is depicted in "Hard News" as a vainglorious tyrant, far more the book's villain than the pitiable Jayson Blair, a bewildered young man perhaps suffering from mental illness who should never have found himself in a position to disgrace the nation's leading newspaper. But what sticks with me here is the notion that the New York Times -- a for-profit media corporation that has been controlled by a single family for the last 108 years -- serves a "quasi-public" purpose. While this is clearly true, the purposefully ambiguous phrasing needs some unpacking.

Every morning's edition of the Times defines what the terms of discourse will be on that day for the political, intellectual and media elites of the United States. Like almost everyone else I know, I read the Times first thing in the morning, and I did so long before I moved to New York. Savvy as we may all think we are about the Times, and much as we may scrutinize and second-guess its perceived missteps, the decisions made by its editors dictate our agenda more than we would like to admit.

During Salon's daily conference call of desk editors, there is nearly always some discussion of the day's Times: How has the paper's coverage of Bush, or of Iraq, shifted recently? What books or movies were reviewed? What trends were spotted embarrassingly late -- or distressingly early? What stories has the Times covered that we've missed? And what stories do we need to jump on before the Gray Lady airs them out?

If there's a connection between Mnookin's measured and judicious "Hard News" and "The Record of the Paper," Howard Friel and Richard Falk's blistering critique of what they describe as the Times' chronic misreporting of U.S. foreign policy, it's that both books remind us that the Times is fundamentally a business, and its reputation for impartial and careful newsgathering is fundamentally a marketplace commodity. It's what the Times is selling us. Like all other commodities, it is shaped by the conditions under which it is sold: It goes up and down in value, it is repackaged and redesigned to seem more appealing, it is understood by different consumers (that is, readers) in different ways.

Of course, it's true that the press in general bears an important public trust in American democracy, at least in theory, and the Times' dominant position brings with it a disproportionate responsibility. But setting the civics lesson aside, the true mission of the New York Times is not to serve the public but to serve its owners and shareholders. It's a corporation striving for market share in a capitalist economy. It's a brand -- the most prestigious brand name in journalism -- and the decisions of its editors and managers, whether good or bad, are seen as affecting the long-term viability of that brand.

This understanding takes us a good distance toward answering a burning question that both these books bounce off en route to their desired targets -- which are, in Mnookin's case, an indictment of Raines' chaotic regime, followed by reassurances that the essential chemistry of the Times has reestablished itself; and, in Friel and Falk's case, a riveting and despairing analysis of the paper's ideological self-castration.

Along the way, both books briefly (and unsatisfactorily) ponder the jarring disparity between the Blair scandal and the case of Judith Miller, the Times reporter who did more than any other single individual, except perhaps George W. Bush, to spread the notion that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and, by extension, that war with Iraq was both necessary and inevitable.

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