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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Ashcroft and the Post-9/11 Arrogance of Power (June 17, 2003) Ashcroft owes apologies to several hundred people for holding them far longer than necessary. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Hunt for a Winner (June 17, 2003) Most Democrats are more interested in beating Bush than in having a nominee with whom they agree. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: Misleading Voters About WMD Is No Way to Spin a War (June 17, 2003) In prosecuting this long war against terrorism, the electorate's trust is a vital strategic asset. By Clive Crook. Social Studies: Corporate Lying Is Bad. But Allowing It Is Good. (June 10, 2003) It isn't nutty for the AFL-CIO to worry that lawsuits targeting corporate speech may come back to haunt unions. By Jonathan Rauch. Political Pulse: Invitation to Unilateralism (June 10, 2003) Europeans have begun to realize that Europe's weakness is America's strength. By William Schneider. Media: Exuberant Again (June 10, 2003) It's no surprise that readers are skeptical of media assertions that the economy's bouncing back. By William Powers. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The CounterswingAs we turn away from all things Rainesian, let's not lose brightness and dash by William Powers ..... The great shared assumption about scandals in journalism is that they lay bare dangerous weaknesses at individual outlets and sometimes across the profession. And if we can just fix those problems, get rid of the offending parties, and change our ways, all will be swell. This is common sense, and there's nothing wrong with it, as far as it goes. We now know that for the last few years the newsroom of The New York Times was run by clubby autocrats who 1) imperiously ignored the signs that one very corrupt reporter was running amok, and 2) so alienated their own staff that when the dark hour came, there wasn't enough goodwill left to save them. These are serious sins, and a broad consensus exists that the price editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd paid—their jobs—was just. But even as those disgraced editors were leaving the building, a more sweeping thought about their tenure seemed to be gathering. To read some of the coverage, the good news about the end of the Raines era wasn't merely that grave management mistakes were being corrected, but that a whole brand of bad journalistic impulses and tendencies was being thrown out with them, too, and good riddance. Not everyone feels this way, and much was made of the seven Pulitzer Prizes the paper won in Raines's first year on the job. There have been passing, mostly perfunctory references to his strengths as an editor. Still, when public people make appalling mistakes, there's a tendency to reject everything about them. That's happening right now with the Raines era at The Times, an era that brought new vitality to a grand old institution, and in many exciting ways began to redefine it for modern times. The danger is that as we recoil from all things Rainesian, The Times itself, and maybe the whole profession, will swing too far in the other direction, toward everything Howell Raines wasn't, toward all things safe and moderate, perhaps even further into the slouching, zombified dullness that prevails at so many American newspapers and sends readers running in the other direction. And that would be a mistake at least as serious as the ones that cost Raines his job. So far, the most avidly read piece of journalism about the Times debacle, after the paper's own lengthy confession in the Jayson Blair episode, was The Wall Street Journal's front-page story of June 6 by Matthew Rose and Laurie P. Cohen. The article, published the morning after the two editors resigned, was a breathtaking journey into the culture of The Times, full of killer anecdotes about the high-handed ways in which Raines and his clique ruled the paper and carelessly alienated their colleagues. In the week since that story was published, one paragraph in particular has stayed with me. It began, "Mr. Raines's activism included picking and assigning stories for the front page very different from The Times's usual serious fare. Both editors and reporters alike were reluctant to report back that the story wasn't correct or interesting, staffers say. One staffer dubbed Mr. Raines's interest in pop culture as 'charge of the lite brigade.' " The paragraph goes on to describe how two reporters spent five days looking into "Mr. Raines's contention that Britney Spears's career was over without feeling confident they could prove his hypothesis." Nonetheless, the Britney story ultimately ran on the front page, further evidence, The Journal seemed to be saying, that Raines always got his way. What's interesting about this anecdote is that it involves two very different things: 1) Raines's desire for more stories about pop culture, and 2) his cocksure, don't-question-my-authority management style. On the latter theme, it buttressed the other evidence. But I was struck by the former, and The Journal's tart observation about Raines's penchant for stories that were not the "usual serious fare." If you pull up the Britney piece, as I did this week, you'll see that it's unlikely to go down as the apex of 21st-century journalism. It was an interesting idea not quite realized, and running it on the front page was a mistake. But the story had its moments, and it tried to make sense of a phenomenon that is very real in this culture: young pop stars who are created for mass consumption and profit, and have an enormous influence on their impressionable fans. It's a story that doesn't receive nearly enough attention from the "serious" media, which remain, in their heart of hearts, as disdainful of pop culture as blue-haired ladies aghast at the Beatles. I've never met Howell Raines, and I'm willing to believe he was every bit as disastrous a manager as is now being reported. But he was onto something about American newspapers, a deadness to real people and to the rich vivacity of our collective life. His desire to fire up The Times, to make it a more accurate reflection of that life, was palpable every single day. You could see it in the paper's bold new use of photos. It was there in the stunning Portraits in Grief about the 9/11 victims, which flew in the face of The Times's traditional elitism in obituaries. It was there, too, in his efforts, albeit somewhat ham-fisted, to get the pop culture that occupies so much of our collective life onto the front page. As we leave the Raines era behind and rightly condemn its errors, let's not lose the brightness and dash, the audacity, that came with it. The Times has a few big problems, but it's an audacious, ambitious, living, breathing newspaper. And there are way too few of those.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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