Editorial: THE MEDIA: No Raines, No Thunder

National Review, June 30, 2003

Five weeks after the Jayson Blair scandal broke, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, executive and managing editors of the New York Times, resigned. In Trollope's novels the voice of authority that lays down the law for Victorian England is called the Thunderer (read the Times of London). The name is both an honorific and a joke. How big are these tempests, really, outside their media teapots? But the sudden end of Raines and Boyd does illuminate larger journalistic trends.

The Times's unraveling was accomplished, in part, by the Internet -- by the blog of ex-Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, who criticized Raines for months, and by Times reporters themselves posting their gripes online. Yet most of the dynamics were very old. Other newspapers relished the travails of their rival: Howard Kurtz's Washington Post column was another media Wailing Wall, and the Wall Street Journal was pursuing its own story on the Times when Raines and Boyd finally quit. Raines, who had irked his reporters with his highhandedness, lost their confidence by associating them with a sociopath. The Sulzberger family, which controls 70 percent of the Times's stock, reacted to that loss of confidence. Perhaps the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., felt family confidence in himself ebbing. (If the Times is a family-run business without internal tensions, it is the first in history.) Note to future Raineses: Jerks must be successful; screwups must be otherwise admired.

The newspaper itself had changed under Raines, even as the culture changed around him. The Times went from a being a liberal establishment organ to being a left-wing scold. Its termagant campaign against the all-male Augusta National golf club symbolized the shift; the editorial page, which abandoned argument for hectoring and exhortation, was the daily expression of it. But the style of the paper changed as well. The gray, and grayly written, news columns mutated to feature pieces. The photographs got larger (and many of them were excellent); the writing became gabby, almost childish. There were short sentences. Sentence fragments. Words. This was the decades-long percolation into news of New Journalism. The New Journalism -- harnessing literary techniques to reporting -- produced some great work (Capote, Wolfe, Mailer) and a lot of junk. It was never a means of slowly and solidly ferreting out the facts.

The task for the Sulzbergers, and the editors they now elevate, will be to recover the Times's sobriety. Given their recent record, they will want that sobriety to give credence to their worldview. Will they have to simply settle for success? Sobriety is precisely what a medium tilting toward flash and easy readability cannot achieve. The Times can be everywhere, and it can make pots of money. It can't quite be the Thunderer, ever again.