WEB EXCLUSIVE: Fired New York Times editor tells all

[rawstory]

Full story at http://www.rawstory.com

Fired New York Times editor tells all

Raines slams culture of 'complaint;' Apologizes for moving too fast

By John Byrne
RAW STORY EDITOR

Former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, who resigned in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, has written a 23-page confessional in the month's edition of the Atlantic.

Raines, who had a 25-year run with the Times, took the helm Sept. 5, 2001, just six days before Sept. 11. His tenure as editor, which was pockmarked with accusations that he was too aggressive, ended abruptly after the paper published a four-page spread on the reportorial falsifications of staff writer Jayson Blair.

In his extensive piece, Raines reconstructs his long career with the paper, detailing his relationships with previous editors and explaining his attempts to control what he called the paper's "culture of complaint." He describes a newspaper riven by a divide of effort, where many of the paper's journalists slip into an apathy which undermines the Times' ability to stay ahead of the news.

"At the Times," he writers, "as at Harvard, it is hard to get in and almost impossible to flunk out."

Notably absent from the article is details surrounding the Blair case itself; Raines makes mention of Blair's case only towards the end of the piece. Most of his time is spent breaking down what he sees as the nearly intractable problems with the Times newsroom.

Raines slams the Times' powerful writer's guild, which, he says, encourages a climate of indifference within the paper.

"On a newsroom floor with 1,200 employees and an even larger, militantly pro-Guild support staff, where the company is the daddy and the union is the mommy, no one is supposed to speak publicly about the attitudes of entitlement and smug complacency that pervade the paper."

"Clubabble underachievers," he adds, "are usually given sinecures rather than encouraged to leave."

He calls attention to what he sees as one of the paper's biggest challenges — to eradicate the idea that the Times can afford to be lazy in covering breaking stories because its eventual article will be better.

To survive, he argues, the Times must shed its "Victorian affectation" and "New York parochialism, to eschew a "glide path towards irrelevance."

[Voltaire99]

1. Mouthpiece of the establishment.

Raines' thoughts on the Times' office culture are probably required reading for about two hundred Ivy League careerists. The rest of us could happily give a fuck less.

The obsequious newspaper he oversaw is at least as responsible for the lies of the Bush administration--which it dutifully burnished and couriered, seven days a week--for the U.S. being in Iraq.

How does it feel to have been the biggest whore of all, Howell?