SPECIAL
REPORT
Fixing
the System
By
Evan Jenkins
Linda Greenhouse got it
right, I thought. In an interview in May about the Jayson Blair
disaster that was quoted in The Wall Street Journal on June 6,
the day after Howell Raines resigned as executive editor of The
New York Times, she observed:
"There is an endemic cultural issue at the
Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his
vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical
structure. And it’s a culture where speaking truth to power
has never been particularly welcomed."
Greenhouse, who won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for her
Supreme Court coverage, started at the Times as a clerk in 1968,
so she has seen of lot of its comings and goings and ups and downs.
She was describing a phenomenon that seemed increasingly true
to me, too, in my quarter-century on West Forty-third Street.
Making it easier to speak truth to power is surely something the
Times leadership must be thinking about.
The top of the structure when I arrived at the Times as a foreign-desk
copy editor in 1966 consisted, at least in the masthead hierarchy,
of Turner Catledge, executive editor, and Clifton Daniel, managing
editor. They were largely hands-off managers. So were some of
the department heads, with the notable exception of A.M. Rosenthal,
whose Pulitzer-capped career as a correspondent had recently brought
him back to New York and the metropolitan editor’s job.
But in 1966 the editing process — and therefore much of the
day-to-day responsibility for New York Times journalism —
was still dominated by Theodore M. Bernstein, an assistant managing
editor and an authority on the language, and his top assistant,
Lewis Jordan.
Along with three other middle-aged career editors they were the
news desk, informally the "bullpen." Organizationally
an arm of the executive editor’s office, the bullpen had
no staff of its own, no departmental turf to protect, and no constituency
but the reader. Looking back, I marvel at its autonomy. It was
a guardian of Times standards — not only for the language,
but for greater virtues like fairness and accuracy. If the culture
of responsible journalism had an institutional center at the Times,
it was the bullpen. Other papers, later, had ombudsmen to take
their publications to task after the fact. The bullpen’s
work at its best was preemptive integrity.
And the Times in 1966 was an editor’s paper. Great power
flowed from Bernstein’s bullpen to the career editors, "working
editors" as I’ve always thought of them. They were the
departmental assistants — and at the foundation, copy editors
— who actually put ballpoint pen to reporters’ copy
or had built their careers on that foundation. Editors ruled.
The upside was that the system did maintain rigorous standards,
but even some editors complained that everything seemed to be
poured into the same flat mold. Bad writing, of which there was
a surprising amount, was made presentable, but really good, original
stuff might or might not survive. (Gordon Havens, a copy editor
whose longevity at the paper in 1966 matched Bernstein’s
forty-one years, swore some editor had once encountered "George
Washington" in copy and added "the country’s first
president.")
Worse than silly gaffes — fatally worse — was the arrogant
secrecy of much of the editing. Reporters, even the metro people
working in the same room, commonly had no idea what editors were
doing to their copy until they saw it in the paper the next day.
Collegial consultation was far from the norm.
After 1969, when Abe Rosenthal took charge of the newsroom —
still almost lily-white and almost all male — change of all
kinds came rapidly. Aided by his ever-steadying top deputy, Seymour
Topping, and his imaginative, hyper-energetic No. 3, Arthur Gelb,
Rosenthal presided over a transformation in the ’70s. New
sections were added to attract new readers, and saved the paper
financially. The staff grew apace, and a lot of old hands yielded
to younger people who were comfortable (in varying degrees) with
the Rosenthal program. (One of those was a brainy, cocksure young
editor named Allan M. Siegal, who in mid-decade showed the Times
the way from typewriters and pens to computers.) Women showed
up in the newsroom in impressive numbers in those years, and gradually
blacks and Hispanics were better represented. Both the women and
the minorities sued the paper in the ’70s and won settlements
promising a better shake. Lawsuits aside, an awakened management’s
commitment to affirmative action always seemed to me genuine,
though uneven.
A lot of people have used the word "genius" to describe
Rosenthal, and maybe it’s the right word. The New York Times
became a much more interesting, varied, readable paper in his
era. But the power he wielded was not always easy to speak the
truth to, and "top-down" leadership became the Times’s
style. Meanwhile, a powerful premium attached to capital-W Writing.
The pendulum was swinging from editor’s paper to reporter’s
and writer’s paper.
In 1974, after a happy but
brief tour as a reporter, I returned to editing as an assistant
on the national desk. The Nixon presidency was disintegrating;
it was a hell of a time to be editing national news. I headed
national’s night "backfield," charged with pre-editing
stories before they went to the copy desk. One afternoon in that
tense time, a copy kid dropped a piece of paper on my desk. A
duplicate went to Lew Jordan, news editor and head of the bullpen
since Bernstein’s semi-retirement a few years before. The
copy was the first page of the end-stage-Watergate story that
would lead the paper the next day.
Almost instantly, it seemed, Jordan was at my desk. The lead of
the story read well, he said, but was loaded against Nixon and
would have to be redone. We talked about some possible rephrasing.
I called the desk editor in Washington to give him the bad news.
About five minutes later he called back to say that if we insisted
on the changes, the reporter — one of our best in every way,
including his sense of fairness — wanted his byline removed.
I told Jordan, who sighed briefly but said, "All right, take
it off."
That episode has long seemed to me symbolic — of the happy
midpoint of the Times pendulum’s swing from editor’s
to reporter/writer’s paper, and of a proper balance between
career-editor domination and masthead-down leadership. Jordan
the "working editor" could make the decision he did
about the principal story of the day without consulting the top
brass, and I could carry it out without consulting my own higher
authority (though I should have). What neither Jordan nor I could
have done was keep the reporter in the dark, as we might have
a decade earlier. Abe Rosenthal and the people who reported to
him would not allow it. And of course they were right.
But it’s also true, I’m morally certain, that within
a couple of years no editor below the masthead level — not
the news editor, not the national editor, in whose jurisdiction
the story was handled — could have made the decision on his
own that Jordan made that day. The pendulum would swing too far
for that.
Jordan retired a couple
of years later, and after a brief interim Al Siegal became news
editor and my boss; I had been appointed to the news desk in 1975.
It seemed clear to me that under Rosenthal the news editor —
and certainly his small cadre of assistants — were expected
to avoid involvement in important issues in the day’s report.
Power was centered higher up.
Siegal became an assistant managing editor — a title Rosenthal
never bestowed on Lew Jordan — almost the minute Max Frankel
succeeded to the executive editor’s job in 1986. Another
career editor was appointed news editor, with me as deputy. Frankel,
though of the writerly school himself, also found merit in working
editors. And he was a much more approachable and much less tempestuous
man than Rosenthal.
But Frankel was also more efficient as an administrator, and nothing
was too minute for his attention. Top-down control, which he said
he opposed in principle, became even tighter. Working editors
still referred to the masthead folks as "the grownups."
They were mocking themselves for their own ineffectuality, and
they were mocking the system that imposed it.
Ileft the Times in 1991,
when Frankel was still editor. Al Siegal was my boss to the end,
and I’ve never had a more able one, or a tougher. He remains
a friend. He was named in May to head a post-Blair committee that
is reexamining all things Timesian, and I wished him well. We
have not discussed the substance of his new assignment. I have
been thinking about his task, though, and about some of the questions
that the Times might well be asking itself now.
To me the Blair episode is a freak of nature, enormously embarrassing
and even damaging to the Times and journalism at large but an
aberration, not a sign of basic institutional weakness. Yet aberrations
do occur. I find myself asking whether the editor’s paper
of Bernstein and Jordan would have prevented the Blair mess. It’s
conceivable that with his error rate and with the power they wielded
they’d have raised enough hell to get him fired — or
far out of harm’s way — before anyone knew he was a
thoroughgoing, disturbed con artist. Maybe even before he became
one. Blair clearly was cut some slack before his larcenous nature
was known — but not after, as far as I can tell — because
he was black. It would be a huge mistake to forget that black,
white, or green, he was also cut some slack because he could write.
Beyond aberrations of the Blair sort are journalistic excesses
with far greater consequences for the body politic. Think Wen
Ho Lee. Think Travelgate and Filegate and, for my money, think
Whitewater itself, and all the frenzied energy the American press
expended on them. Those kinds of excesses, too, also happen when
truth can’t speak forcefully enough to power.
From all I’ve read, and heard from Times friends, such speaking
was harder than ever there under Howell Raines. But I hope the
Siegal committee and the publisher and the next editor will conclude
that the problem is not solely a function of personality, and
that the structure of the newsroom has put too much power at the
top. And that it may be time to swing back the pendulum, creating
some entity that has no turf to protect beyond standards and credibility.
It can’t be the working-editor autocracy of the past, and
I can’t offer a detailed prescription. But some such systemic
change — some sort of editor-reporter collegium? — should
be a serious consideration. An ombudsman is nice for addressing
problems after they occur; an agency for preemptive integrity
is better.
