"After the Raines of Terror"

Donald Luskin has a great blog today on The New York Times in the aftermath of the departure of Howell Raines:

.... Bully for the Times in going beyond the superficial excuse of the Blair scandal. But of course there's something else at work here, something that the Times is not yet prepared to admit. Raines had to go because the Times' relentless and reckless ultra-left wing agenda was destroying the world's greatest newspaper franchise.

Raines was the instrument of the destruction, with his rogues gallery of radical liberal op-ed screedsters and his capricious and exploitive "flood the zone" campaigns against Enron, Augusta, the war in Iraq, the peace in Iraq, Bush's tax cuts, and all the rest. But Raines is not, ultimately, to blame. Raines is no more than the creature of publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the scion of the family dynasty that owns the Times who elevated Raines first to editorial page editor in 1992 and then to executive editor in 2001, specifically because of his sympathy with Sulzberger's leftist viewpoints (according to Ken Auletta's 2002 New Yorker portrait of Raines). Sulzberger's liberal views extended not just to editorial positioning, but to the very mission and managerial style of the New York Times Company itself, of which he is chairman....

So Raines is out, and retired executive editor Joseph Lelyveld has come back on an interim basis to manage a transition to new leadership. What happens to Paul Krugman and the rest of Raines' menagerie?

My guess is: nothing immediately. And I suspect he'll get away with it for a while, as the Times will no doubt wish to focus its reform efforts where it will count the most -- in returning the paper's "core purpose" to reporting the news rather than "creating" it. The spin will be that the editorial pages are just opinion, so they're fine as they are. There will be change there -- a key "retirement" here, a new more moderate voice there, maybe some new source-citing and fact-checking guidelines. All to the good....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 06/06/03 11:06:42 AM
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