Hard News (22 page)

As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion—and the stakes involved, a man’s liberty and reputation—convince us that a public accounting is warranted. . . . In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.

It was these types of stories that would, at other papers, be addressed by an ombudsman, a quasi-independent person on a newspaper’s staff who investigated and reported on lapses in quality or judgment or addressed readers’ complaints. Since the first ombudsman was appointed in the United States, at Kentucky’s
Courier-Journal
and
Louisville Times
in 1967, many big-city papers, including
The Washington Post
and
The Boston Globe,
had installed some type of public representative. The
Times,
however, had always resisted, both out of a fear that an insider critiquing the paper’s judgment would give ammunition to the paper’s ideological critics and out of a philosophical belief that
all
editors and reporters are meant to serve the public.

When Raines decided to turn his reporters loose on Jayson Blair, he called Dave Jones at home and asked him to oversee the assignment. Jones was no longer under contract to the
Times
and, to his relief, was able to refuse. “This time,” Jones says, “I did let the cup pass from my lips.”

—————

B
ACK IN THE
business-department conference room, members of Bill Schmidt’s office in news administration were guiding the reporters toward stories that deserved further examination. Using Blair’s expense reports and phone records, Schmidt’s staff had been able to determine several other instances when it seemed as if Blair had said he was on assignment but had remained in New York. Schmidt suggested the team pay particular attention to a dispatch from Hunt Valley, Maryland, where Blair had supposedly gone on March 24 to write about the parents of a marine who was missing in Iraq, and one from April 7 in Cleveland, Ohio, where Blair said he had interviewed Reverend Tandy Sloan, the father of a dead soldier. Liptak, meanwhile, was still talking with news administration over whether the team would have access to Blair’s personnel files. As a former
Times
in-house attorney, he’d been on the other side of transactions like these many times. Now, the paper’s lawyers were arguing that if they gave the reporting team access to Blair’s personnel records, they’d be obligated to share those records with other news outlets as well, an argument Liptak thought was specious.

In the middle of the meeting, there was a knock on the door: Jayson Blair was on the phone and wanted to speak with Steinberg. Blair, ever mindful of the machinations of the media, told Steinberg he had a statement, and he was going to give it only to the
Times
and the Associated Press, thereby assuring it would be available to every paper in the country. “It was just a simple thing, expressing regret. We didn’t even write about it,” Steinberg says. “I just went back to the meeting and told them what he’d said.”

From Portland, Barstow asked how many stories Blair had written, and the response that came back stunned everyone: over six hundred. “I said, ‘This is nuts,’ ” Barstow says. “ ‘We need to be real about the magnitude here.’ ”

By Friday evening, the paper’s top editors agreed to assign at least one more reporter to the project. Kramon called Abby Goodnough, a reporter on the paper’s metro staff. “We needed someone else to help, at least just with the writing and wrapping it all together,” says Kramon. “I was aware, too, that this was an all-male team.” But Goodnough was out for the evening and didn’t get the call until the next day. Kramon also asked Joan Nassivera, the weekend editor for the metro desk, if she would call Dan Barry, then a general assignment reporter. Barry is a whippet-thin, aggressive reporter who cut his teeth at
The Providence Journal,
where he shared a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize for investigative projects. He grew up on Long Island, and the past several years had been overwhelming: He’d been diagnosed with cancer, had gone through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and had written a memoir titled
Pull Me Up.
Barry can be overbearing, and he rubs some people the wrong way. Even Blair, who made a point of befriending as many people as he could, was intimidated by Barry; after Barry was warned about Blair’s supposed after-hours snooping in the
Times
’s offices, the two reporters didn’t speak for more than a year. But after Blair’s story on Reverend Sloan, Barry had sent Blair a congratulatory note. “It was a good story,” Barry says. “I told him so.” Blair so disbelieved that he would ever get a congratulatory note from Barry, he thought someone had hacked into the reporter’s computer and sent him the e-mail as a joke.

By the time Barry’s name was put forward, he was already at home in New Jersey. Before Barry made up his mind, he called Jon Landman, the paper’s metro editor, on his cellphone. Landman was at Yankee Stadium for the first game of a three-game series with the Oakland A’s. “I hadn’t had the assignment explained to me by Glenn or anyone else,” Barry says. “I basically just wanted to know what the deal was. It sounded like kind of an internal affairs thing—like the assignment would involve going around and pulling people aside, including our superiors. And I wanted to be assured that this was going to be an endeavor of integrity.”

“Anytime you’re doing a project that might end up casting a really bad light on the people who run the joint . . . these issues come up,” says Landman. “By that time, things were pretty poisonous. But I told him to do it. I thought it would be good for the paper. And I didn’t think anyone would let the process be corrupted.” At 11:30 that night, Dan Barry called back to the
Times
newsroom with the following message: “I’m in.” The final team was in place.

O
NE
W
EEK IN
M
AY

On Saturday, May 3, Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan Glater, Glenn Kramon, Adam Liptak, Lorne Manly, and Jacques Steinberg met in their quarters on the eleventh floor of
The New York Times
to discuss their assignment. The marching orders were vague. The team was told to root out Blair’s errors and correct the record. At that point, they still weren’t sure if that meant they would be writing a story and supplying a list of corrections or just focusing on the errors. Jayson Blair had worked at the
Times
for four years. Were they expected to look at all his stories? Only the ones from the previous year? “We had no idea how deep this went,” says Barstow, who had flown back the night before from Portland. “It was literally a reporting problem: How do you begin? How do you attack the story? So we decided to focus first on the work he did on the national staff. That’s a more manageable series of time”—about six months—“and it was logical to us that if he was going to pull any funny business, it would be easier to do on a longer leash.”

By that time, the research staff had printed out stacks of Blair’s clips, and the five reporters started to divide them up. David Barstow and Adam Liptak dove into the sniper pile, Jonathan Glater took the stories Blair had written about the family of Jessica Lynch, and Jacques Steinberg grabbed the missing-soldiers pile. Dan Barry, meanwhile, was examining the arc of Blair’s career and trying to piece together details about his rise in journalism. By now, the working assumption was that the final analysis would be in the paper the following Tuesday or Wednesday, May 6 or 7, and would run around 2,500 words.

Even that seemed like a tall order. “It was starting to sink in that this was going to be an extraordinarily draining experience,” says Liptak. The subject of the project obviously made it unique, but it was atypical in other ways as well. Many investigative teams have experience working together. The reporters understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses. The editors know when to push harder, when to ask more questions, and when to pull back. This team had no experience working together on what would prove to be an immensely tiring and harrowing project. Glenn Kramon and Lorne Manly had worked together on the business desk, and Glater and Steinberg were both business reporters (although Steinberg had just been transferred several weeks earlier). Neither Barry nor Barstow had worked with the men who would edit and shape their copy, and on an assignment like this everyone was going to need lots of support and protection. “That day, I remember my shoulders just slumping,” Glater says as he recalls the piles of clips and the implications of the project. “And just thinking, This is going to be a really miserable task. And besides that, I worried it could be a crappy career move—if the article was something Gerald or Howell was unhappy with, that would or could be a really bad thing. It was going to be a very sensitive exercise.”

The team decided its first task would be to try to reverse engineer Blair’s national desk stories to determine if Blair had routinely collected details and quotations from secondary sources instead of firsthand reporting. The reporters were working with librarians, and as they went through Blair’s articles, they’d mark anything that stood out—specific physical descriptions of a house or a living room, for example, or a particularly poignant quote. The librarians would then pull other clips written about the same subject and search for similar phrases or descriptions that might prove plagiarism. The examples kept piling up: On April 3, Blair had quoted Donald Nelson, a friend of Private Jessica Lynch’s, reacting to a letter he had received from Lynch: “We just bawled like babies when we got the letter,” Blair wrote. With a couple of clicks of the mouse, the librarians realized an Associated Press dispatch from April 2 had included the exact same quote. On April 7, Blair described a funeral service for Private First Class Brandon Sloan, the son of a Cleveland minister. Blair wrote: “The senior pastor, the Rev. Larry Howard, opened the prayer service by reminding the several hundred people who gathered that God was ‘bigger than Hussein.’ Mr. Sloan bowed his head and closed his eyes.” Soon, the librarians found a March 29 article in
The Washington Post
in which Tamara Jones wrote: “Now, as the Rev. Larry Howard opened the prayer service for Brandy Sloan, reminding several hundred congregants that ‘God is bigger than Hussein,’ Tandy Sloan closed his eyes and bowed his head.”

The reporters were also reaching out to
Times
reporters and photographers who had shared bylines with Blair or worked with him on assignment. Time and time again, photographers and other
Times
reporters told the team that, yes, they had been on location with Blair. But time and time again, it turned out that Blair had never actually met with them—he’d said he was on his cellphone down the block, or around the corner at a deli, or just driving away from a church. Haraz Ghanbari was a freelance photographer assigned to shoot an April 6 church service in Cleveland attended by the Reverend Sloan the day after his son had been pronounced dead in Iraq. Ghanbari called Blair fifteen times that day and reached him three of those times. Blair told Ghanbari he had momentarily left the church to get his cellphone fixed. Ghanbari took the pictures, and Blair filed the story, but they never met up. Only Ghanbari had actually been there.

—————

J
OURNALISM
, its practitioners like to joke, is the perfect profession for people suffering from extreme attention deficit disorders. Reporters and editors can bore in on a subject for a week or a month or even a couple of years and then move on to something totally different. On a large daily paper like the
Times,
it’s not unusual for a single career to include stints as a foreign correspondent, a science reporter, a metro editor, and an arts writer. One of the delights of working at an institution with ample resources is the chance to get out and actually explore, to see the country (or the world), to meet new people, to not be tethered to a desk all day. Reporters fight—sometimes viciously—for the chance to travel on assignment. Even after Steinberg’s reporting had uncovered the likelihood that Jayson Blair had not gone to Texas, there was still an inability to fully accept that he might not have been traveling on assignment at all. Plagiarism was one thing. It might be the result of crumbling under deadline pressures, raging insecurity, or just bad writing chops—and in his brief career, Blair had repeatedly demonstrated just these tendencies. But not showing up at all? Then what was the point of being at the
Times,
of being a journalist?

Late on Sunday, May 4, the team began to discuss how their piece would progress. Barstow and Barry were especially vocal in their desire to have the piece be edited by someone other than Howell Raines or Gerald Boyd. They also said they thought a Tuesday deadline was unreasonable, as was a proposed length of 2,500 words. “Even by Sunday, the big drama for us was, Were they going to give us the space we need? Were they going to recuse themselves? And if they don’t, what do we do?” Barstow says. “I don’t think there was any doubt that if they tried to fuck with it, we would have walked.” Kramon did all he could to reassure his colleagues. “I gave them my word that [Raines and Boyd] wouldn’t influence the piece in any way,” Kramon says. “That weekend, Barry was saying, ‘They’re gonna cook this.’ And I just said, ‘No, they won’t. I’ll lie in front of it.’ ”

On Monday, May 5, as the newsroom returned to its weekday rhythms, the team was moved from the eleventh floor to an empty room on the fourth floor where new hires were trained on the paper’s computer system. Technically, the fourth floor is also part of the newsroom—it houses many of the paper’s “soft news” sections, including the sports and culture departments. But it was removed from the din of the main third-floor newsroom and, more significantly, from the metro and national desks, where Blair did most of his work.

That morning, the team asked Howell Raines to send a formal staffwide e-mail asking reporters and editors to cooperate fully with any questions that arose. Raines refused. He told the reporters if anyone on staff had reservations about cooperating, they could come to him and he’d reassure them. For a team that was growing ever more certain that Raines would be a likely subject of their piece, it wasn’t the answer they had hoped to hear.

By this point, the reporting team was realizing the degree to which the increasingly dysfunctional culture of
The New York Times
had affected Blair’s career, especially in its latter stages. The
Times
—like every newspaper in the country—has always had its share of editors and reporters who feel disenfranchised or resentful. But under Howell Raines, the frustration that normally simmered just below the surface seemed to explode. Desk editors weren’t speaking to one another. Reporters were almost at the point of open revolt. There was such fear of Raines’s temper and dismissive attitude that some editors said they kept to themselves concerns about shoddy stories or reporters.

A newsroom where editors are scared to voice their concerns is a disaster waiting to happen. Newspapers are built on trust, and for that trust to survive there needs to be a robust and open exchange of information. Even worse is the newsroom where concerns are raised but ignored by the top editors. As the reporters were discovering, that seemed to be the case under Howell Raines. The more warning signs and public admonishments the reporters found scattered throughout Jayson Blair’s files, the more they became aware of a culture that seemed to discourage an open exchange of information, an exchange that likely would have prevented Jayson Blair from ever getting assigned to the sniper story in the first place. That weekend, the reporters discovered an April 2002 e-mail from Jon Landman that seemed particularly damning. The e-mail, sent to newsroom administrators, including Bill Schmidt, said, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

By the afternoon of Monday, May 5, “we were already seeing that there were going to be some pretty awkward questions that we were going to have to ask our bosses,” Barstow says. “It was clear we had to address management issues,” says Manly. “We all worked there. We knew the problems. The obvious question for the reader was, How the hell did this happen? Part of the answer was that Jayson was well liked in spite of his problems. But part of it was how things changed under Howell, how senior management felt frozen out, how a malaise set in and people just stopped fighting back.” The team grew more nervous as the day went on and sought ways to protect itself and whatever it might uncover. That day, Glenn Kramon and Lorne Manly asked Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to recuse themselves from the editing process. Boyd, without making any commitments one way or the other, said it was his fiduciary duty to read every story that went into the paper. Still, by Monday afternoon, Al Siegal was brought in to oversee the entire project.

To call the sixty-four-year-old Siegal a
Times
institution is an understatement. He was first hired at the
Times
in 1960 and, aside from a brief stint as a reporter, has worked mainly as a copy editor and then masthead editor. Since 1977, he has overseen usage and style throughout the paper. More than any other person—more than Arthur Sulzberger, more than Howell Raines, more than famed Washington correspondent R. W. “Johnny” Apple—Al Siegal is the institutional memory and conscience of
The New York Times.
He’s in charge of the paper’s corrections. He co-authored The New York Times
Manual of Style and Usage
and wrote the introduction to
Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at
The New York Times, a compendium of the paper’s most humorous errors. Siegal is the person editors go to when they want to know what the precedent is—if the
Times
ever let its columnists disavow a news story, for instance. He’s the man who wrote the 96-point headline that ran across the top of
The New York Times
on September 12, 2001—
U
.
S
.
ATTACKED
. (It was only the third time in the history of the paper that such a large headline type was used. The other two times were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969 and when President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.) And it was Al Siegal who named the special section created to cover the aftershocks of the September 11 attacks “A Nation Challenged.” For Siegal, Howell Raines’s tenure had been a happy change. He felt more vital than he had under Joe Lelyveld and appreciated the extent to which Raines made him realize he was needed in the day-to-day operations of the paper.

Siegal’s seriousness, dry manner, and physical presence make him an intimidating force in the
Times.
He’s a heavyset man, and he moves with purposeful intent. Not a small number of reporters and editors find him cutting and occasionally cruel, and his public dressings-down can make reporters and copy editors feel both superfluous and stupid. But no one doubts his love of
The New York Times.
After he was put in charge of the project, members of the reporting team began to petition Siegal, asking for a guarantee that neither Howell Raines nor Gerald Boyd would see the final product before it was printed. “They half begged and half demanded,” Siegal says. Some reporters said they’d heard Blair had protectors among members of the masthead. The reporters tried to argue on precedent, drawing a comparison to the report filed by the ombudsman of
The Washington Post
in the wake of the 1981 Janet Cooke scandal, in which a young reporter was found to have invented an eight-year-old heroin addict about whom she wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning feature story. Siegal told the reporters that Blair didn’t have any protectors and that
The New York Times
didn’t have an ombudsman. The story would be edited in whatever way the executive editor saw fit. “I don’t seek that kind of autonomy,” Siegal says. “The editor is the editor. But I told them I would do what I can do to see there is no tampering. I will throw my body in front of it. I couldn’t understand what everyone was so scared about, because I wasn’t afraid.”