Page One: Inside the New York Times Page #6

But to say you got it wrong

when your sources were wrong,

that, as your colleagues

at "The New York Times" have said,

reduces your role as a journalist

to no more than a stenographer.

No, on the contrary,

I really reject that criticism.

We made errors in our coverage

of the weapons of mass destruction.

We made them at the reporting

level and at the editing level.

Does she tell the truth?

"The New York Times"

can't have a reporter-

And we don't.

Anytime "The Times" fails

on a serious scale

on a particular story, a big story,

there's a cost.

There's a price to pay.

And certainly in recent years,

you've heard people say,

"Well, I no longer need 'The Times.'

I can no longer trust 'The Times."'

One more Jayson Blair

or one more Judy Miller

and you're chipping away

at this institution

that everyone is sort

of desperate to protect.

I think kind of until Jayson Blair,

they were kind of impervious.

They were Teflon.

The Jayson Blair incident was

a real scandalous occasion.

The reporter was found

to be reporting stories

at places where he was

not actually there,

though the dateline would give

indication that he was there,

taking stories and not even

rewriting them-

written by other people

at other newspapers.

He eventually got caught

because he plagiarized

a story from someone

who had previously been

a colleague of his at "The Times."

Not only does he take

and wind a rope around his neck

and, like, go jumping off

a cliff, you know,

right in plain sight,

but he ties it to our feet and tries

to pull us off the cliff with him.

The minute they put it

on the front page in that little box-

I still remember the day it came out-

Raines's reign was over.

This system is not set up

to catch someone

who sets out to lie

and to use every means

at his or her disposal

to put false information

into the paper.

You went from having Howell

being the most successful editor,

not just in the history

of "The Times,"

in the history of newspapering,

to his being fired.

I'm delighted to announce Bill Keller

as our next executive editor.

I'm aiming to raise our ambitions

higher than they've ever been.

When Bill came in,

he was all about

restoring trust

after Howell Raines.

He was supposed to sort of get

the ship back on course.

It just wasn't

in the conversation that,

you know, there was going

to be an economic crisis in journalism.

And that's been

the dominant event,

I think if you

asked him, on his watch.

Darker times

are ahead for the "Grey Lady."

"The Times" will resort to layoffs.

The paper is looking to cut

100 jobs from its news staff

by the end of the week.

We're hearing that the layoffs

are beginning today.

We now know how many people

have opted to go voluntarily,

which means we know how many

people we have to layoff.

In the immediate moment,

we're in the middle of cutting

100 people out of a staff

of roughly 1250.

We've spent a lot of time

in the last couple of weeks

going over lists,

trying to prioritize

based on skills

we can afford to lose.

We are not a specialized newspaper,

we're a general-interest newspaper.

And we try to be excellent

at everything from foreign coverage

to education coverage

to arts to sports.

You know, we're large, but there's

not a lot of slack in the system.

I feel some days that,

you know,

we should be

symbolically wearing, you know,

bloody butchers' smocks

or something around the newsroom.

It's such a kind of

grim undertaking.

I was hired in 1977.

When I was trying

to get this job,

a job-getting focus group

asked me to write my own obituary.

And since then, I've been

the deputy editor of obituaries.

Hey, it's Claiborne Ray,

the departing retiring person.

Should I come down through

the freight elevator

or through the regular

passenger elevator?

I came with the high hopes

of staying for one year.

I've overstayed that by 20 years.

We have to

dump bodies overboard.

They don't really have any choice.

We all got the packets in the mail.

There's something obviously dispiriting

about getting a packet in the mail

that invites you to leave your job.

I almost feel like I don't know

of everything that's going on

and I almost feel like

I don't have a clear grasp

on the enormity of the situation.

I decided not to press my luck.

Nobody knows if there'll be a paper

on paper in another five years.

Everybody is

unbelievably pressured to do

more than people

are really humanly able to do.

I'm sorry to leave "The Times."

There are a lot of unemployed

people out there,

a lot of underemployed people

and a lot of scared people.

And I have to remind myself every day

that I'm one of the lucky ones.

The main effect is just this insecurity

that pervades

the newspaper business.

The mood is so funereal.

For those of us who work in media,

life is a drumbeat

of goodbye speeches

with sheet cakes

and cheap sparkling wine.

That carnage has left behind

an island of misfit toys,

like model trains whose

cabooses have square wheels.

Sure, I've been fired

in my day, but always after

I'd failed to show up at work

like a normal person.

"Go to treatment," my editor at the

magazine in Minneapolis would tell me.

"There's a bed waiting for you."

But at the tender age oi 31,

I still had a year left

before hitting rock bottom,

a year left of being that guy,

the violent drug-snorting thug,

before I found

my way to this guy,

the one with a family and a job

at "The New York Times."

One day I came over from

"The Twin Cities Reader" where I worked,

came over here to the Skyway Lounge

and met my friend Phil.

Phil gave me

a film canister full of coke,

and I was going to get a gram.

I went into the bathroom,

the cop hit

the stall door that I was in

and said,

"You roll a noisy joint, pal."

And he immediately

put me up against the wall

and then walked me down

the street this way

and up the block toward Nicollet Mall

where his car was parked.

The interesting thing about that is that

my father worked right in City Center,

so I was being crabwalked

in handcuffs past the shopping-

the downtown shopping center

where my father worked.

It was another life.

It was another guy.

It's that guy.

Not very.

Look, I'm afraid of guns

and I'm afraid of bats.

I'm really not afraid of anything else.

It's an advantage of having

lived a textured life.

I've been a single parent on welfare.

This is nothing.

I was talking to John Hume

and he said, "Look,

you didn't go to Afghanistan.

You didn't tum

into the great city-hall columnist.

You didn't set out to be

a media reporter, but you are.

And your story has arrived

and it behooves you

to man up, show some sack

and cover it until it's done."

And I thought, "You know what?

That's what I'm going to do."

Welcome, everyone, to another debate

from "Intelligence Squared."

We'll be debating this motion:

Good riddance

to the mainstream media.

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