The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040607203530/http://www.janegalt.net:80/blog/archives/004684.html

April 15, 2004

silhouette3.JPG From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Purple Raines: Portrait of A Bureaucrat

I have yet to comment here on the 9/11 blame game. I appreciate my co-blogger's enthusiasm for explaining hindsight bias (and have some points to make later about the financial market example she brings up). But we don't need fancy behavioral finance terminology to explain this. What we're really seeing here is run-of-the-mill bureaucratic ass-covering consisting of lame claims of "I told you so" and phony self-aggrandizing admissions.

Bureaucracies can change slowly, but organize themselves spontaneously and unconsciously to resist major change. For that reason, extreme dysfunctions are not only perpetuated bureaucratically, they are actively preserved. (for more on committees and bureaucracies, see my prior posts here and here). Many more people recognize the major problems of the bureaucracy (e.g. not sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence) than have a practical plan as to what to do about it. Of those who both see the problem and have a plan, even fewer of those are capable of selling the appropriate people their plan and actually executing it.

So when you confront the governing committee of a bureaucracy with its biggest problem, you are not generally delivering news. At this point the bureaucratic antibodies kick in and the group will work harmoniously towards the least troublesome band-aid they can find to get out of the meeting and back to their office.

It is not enough to have written eloquent memos or requested or taken meetings. Just about every thinking member of a bureaucracy has gone on record, at some time or other, with the organization's most glaring faults. Many do it just to protect themselves - to say, after the fact, 'I told you so...'.

And then there's the flipside of blame-casting: blame acceptance. Consider the gotcha question of the press conference- "what was your worst mistake", "will you apologize (for something)?" Bush froze like a deer in the headlights knowing that he was between the two bad choices of slimily 'admitting' a virtue or something harmless, e.g. "I cared too much", "I was too hard on people" or admitting something real and having it pasted on his back in black and white concentric circles. The smarminess of the former option, which would not have bothered prior Presidents and many politicians, just isn't Bush (his myriad other communications shortcomings notwithstanding). [UPDATE: here is Bush's apology after all!]

Which brings us, suddenly and unexpectedly, to Howell Raines long, boring and ultimately slimy article in the Atlantic (only an excerpt is available on-line now). This article offers all sorts of non apologia, and does so with a lot of useless detail that gives the article a long-winded, frilly and pretentious feel. Do we really need so much atmosphere on his many boozy expense-account meetings?

The first of my two dinners with Arthur was at a quiet table in front of an indoor waterfall at Aquavit, the Scandinavian restaurant on West Fifty-Fourth street. Neither of us could have imagined that in a little more than two years, a young, relatively unknown reporter named Jayson Blair would figure prominently in the derailment of the managerial reformation for which we were laying the tracks.

It's the Scooby Doo NYT episode: I would have succeeded if it weren't for that pesky Blair kid!
....If memory serves, Arthur was working his way through his customary Grey Goose martini as we surveyed the landscape for change. I was sticking to white wine, wanting to be sharp for the moment when Arthur would be mellow enough to listen to something he might not want to hear. ....Needless to say, as Arthur and I talked over arctic char and baked cod in that starkly modern restaurant..

....It was an amiable chat over several Martinis at a quiet Greenwich Village bar...

His fishing trips?
On the Sunday morning that their story appeared [the infamous Times' Blair exegesis] I met John McPhee, the New Yorker writer, for a shad-fishing trip on the upper Delaware River. It was a foggy day. The steep river banks were painted in the first pale greens of spring. As we floated along in a McKenzie River drift boat, bald eagles flushed from the shoreline timber and flapped away downstream.

The history of his meeting rooms?
(By the way, the room on the fifteenth floor of the Times building in which we met to plot the takeover of the IHT had in the 1930s been a secret bedchamber where Arthur Hays Sulzberger had assignations with his mistress, the Hollywood starlet Madeleine Carroll)

Ultimately, all this atmospheric fluff conceals Raines hilarious concessions of responsibility. Here's what apparently passes for self-criticism:

I've since heard that some [reporters and copy editors] were afraid to speak up, and I wish I had been more sensitive to that

My indifference to the approval of individual staff members was a disabling flaw..but I'm not a person who is easy to please or eager to please.

In retrospect, I underestimated the difficulties of inculcating in others my passion for breaking stories that other news organizations had to follow, or that were so inherently interesting that no engaged reader was likely to pass them up.

and here's the old technique of posing your own 'damning' (with audible praise) question and then 'confessing':
Was I in too much of a hurry and overly reliant on my competitive instincts? Yes. Did I pay too little attention tot he cliche of Times Management -that when an executive editor sneezes, everyone else gets pneumonia? Yes.

So Raines confesses to being competitive, driven, indifferent to his own popularity, not realizing how incredibly critical and important he was and not 'inculcating' enough of his perceptive passion in others. I'm sorry, but that is the most narcissistic recitation of 'mistakes' I've ever heard.

The strongest parts of the article are his criticisms of Times work product and culture. Raines portrays a very cozy culture where too many who have achieved rank get by with too little effort, except when it comes time to defend inertia. In other words, it's a bureaucracy:

First and foremost, it is a culture that requires mass allegiance to the idea that any change, no matter how beneficial on its surface, is to be treated as a potential danger.

But I was left unsatisfied by his assessment. He provides a wealth of detail on the internal management issues he feels required attention, but much less on the customer and market side ( a balanced scorecard devotee would say he formed his internal process goals without a clear customer perspective). He certainly mentions the Times' customers, but he fails to identify a single demographic he thought the times shouldn't pursue, and his strategy for the paper can be summarized as 'be better at everything'.
If we were going to get more readers and make more money, the daily and Sunday New York Times simply had to get better.

Throughout the text of the article, virtually every non-front section is singled..er..multipled out for drastic improvement, and virtually every demographic must be courted. Circulation increases would come from the Tri-State area, the rest of the country and abroad. Immigrants and the establishment. Businesspeople and artists. Only the animal kingdom is left out.

Haines does not address the bete noir of the warbloggers, The New York Times' alleged liberal bias. He does make two passing references that provide some fresh meat for those more interested in that than his comprehensive strategy for the paper. The first is merely a matter of word choice within a description of managerial and competency changes he desired:

In their different ways, both Abe [Rosenthal] and Max [Frankel] had demonstrated that a newspaper as comprehensive as the Times had to be the product of many minds and also had to reflect the guiding sensibility of an engaged activist executive editor.

(emphasis mine). The second is more of a humorous aside:
As a group, [the Times reporters/editors] tend to be politically liberal in regard to the government's domestic policies, conservative in regard to the location of their desks, rebellious in regard to the Times' stylebook, and anarchic in regard to the paper's management.

This is pretty funny, but consistent with our bureaucracy portrait. The final bias-related disclosure comes in the form of yet another non-admission:
Another disturbing development, for which I was unprepared, was that a small enclave of neoconservative editors was making accusations of 'political correctness' in order to block stories or slant them against minorities and traditional social welfare programs.

So, not only was Raines too independent, energetic and critically important, he failed to root out the insipid and emerging neoconservative bias!

When he's not non-admitting things, Raines slips the stilleto into a lot of folks with insincere respect and affection. Here he is on Arthur Gelb, whom he describes as a "mentor" in the preceding paragraph:

Like most people who've known Arthur Gelb for a long time, I was familiar with his tirades, but I had never heard him so unhinged. In retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised that he favored what the Nixon White House used to call the 'modified limited hangout route.'[with respect to the Blair scandal] Part of Gelb's charm is his pragmatism. He was famous for insincere praise of Times staff members and had made it a main tool of his management style. He pridede himself on being the ultimate newsroom situationalist. In the series of New York Times 'irregular verbs' invented by the waggish foreign correspondent David Binder, 'to Gelb' meant 'to cling steadfastly to ever-changing principles.'

Yeesh. Is that damning with faint praise or praising with faint damn? Here he is on his 'great friend' Arthur Sulzberger (remember he aired the family's history of 'assignations' and described Sulzberger's tippling habits earlier):
I had to tip my hat to Arthur when he broke the family pattern of timiditiy on critical acquisitions

As well as I know Arthur and as fond as I am of Punch,it took me a long time to figure out that they share the super-frugality one finds in families with multigenerational wealth.

Another half-dozen reporters and editors get more severe treatment (for crying in the newsroom, drinking, etc.) . Although they aren't named, enough information is surely available for Times insiders and media buffs to figure out who he's talking about.

Finally, under the 'miscellany' heading, here's another poor choice of phrases:

To catch a terrorist, you have to think like a terrorist. To catch and hold a newspaper reader, you have to think about what makes a reader buy a paper as a matter of necessity.

I'd forgive this awkward (and no doubt unintentional) analogy more easily if he had gone on to deliver an analysis of newspaper reader's ideas of indispensable content. Instead he merely asserts the Times' failure in this regard and goes on to dish more internal dirt.

If this article had spent more time analyzing the customer perspective of the Times' failures and successes it would have been much more interesting. Unfortunately, the bizarre non-admissions, the detailed descriptions of insider politics at the Times (which may interest others more) and Raines' proclivity for giving it to his former colleagues and 'friends' in the neck are just too distracting.

Raines is the less exceptional bureaucrat described at the beginning of this post. He recognized and decried the bureaucracy's problems, but appears to have had few actionable, market-oriented plans as to what needed to be done beyond remaking its internal workings in his image. Instead we have public blame-casting and narcissism disguised as confessions. For those who feel the 'public trust' of the Times was damaged under Raines' watch, this non-apologia must be as unsatisfactory as a bag of day-old popcorn.

See also Clay Waters and Timothy Burke on the same subject.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at April 15, 2004 01:48 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Comments

While I agree that Raines damaged the Times badly, there is still serious damage being done to the paper. Said damage is being committed on an almost daily basis by David Brooks, who lies with abandon and no one on the paper ever calls him on it. If the paper really wants to restore its lost credibility fully, it should can Brooks.

Posted by: Punchy Sulzberger on April 15, 2004 02:34 PM

The Times is a liberal rag, run by a bunch of socialists jerk offs. It's nothing but a Marxist circle jerk.

Posted by: Hans Goethe on April 15, 2004 02:53 PM

I'm hoping for more interesting comments than the first two here...or just funnier?

Posted by: "Mindles H. Dreck" on April 15, 2004 03:04 PM

Mindless Dreck, Whether my comment is interesting to you or not, why is it apparently ok for a conservative like Brooks to lie with abandon, which he does, and not for a liberal or apparent liberal like Blair? Granted Brooks is an opinion writer, but this still shouldn't give him license to make up facts.

Posted by: PunchySulzberger on April 15, 2004 03:07 PM

How many times must I write "lie with abandon" before you prostrate yourself before me, Dreck? Huh? Come on....please?

Posted by: Poonchy Cheeseburger on April 15, 2004 03:13 PM

At least twice, apparently.

Posted by: Cheesey Poonberg on April 15, 2004 03:15 PM

Oh Learned Dreck, enlighten us, as we strive for reaching Nirvana!

Posted by: Ravi Wanker on April 15, 2004 03:21 PM

OK, OK Ravi, I take your point.

But on the subject of Nirvana, it seems that the first step is to lie predictably and with purpose. [like Paul Krugman? - Ed.] None of this reckless 'with abandon' dishonesty.

Posted by: "Mindles H. Dreck" on April 15, 2004 03:55 PM

Iraqi WMD Discovered - In Europe

Per today's Washington Post:

- - - - - - -

UNITED NATIONS, April 14 -- Large amounts of nuclear-related equipment, some of it contaminated, and a small number of missile engines have been smuggled out of Iraq for recycling in European scrap yards, according to the head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog and other U.N. diplomats.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned the U.N. Security Council in a letter that U.N. satellite photos have detected "the extensive removal of equipment and, in some instances, removal of entire buildings" from sites that had been subject to U.N. monitoring before the U.S.-led war against Iraq.

- - - - - - -

See:

http://nikita_demosthenes.blogspot.com/

Posted by: nikita demosthenes on April 15, 2004 04:13 PM

Slightly off topic, but the right answer to the biggest mistake question -

"Expecting you to ask an intelligent question...Next question."

Posted by: Neil on April 15, 2004 05:40 PM

Mindles' description of Raines' narcissism and insincere blame-taking rings true.

I wrote on the subject today
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/waters200404150850.asp that one of the few times Raines "faults" himself in the piece is when he fails to fully appreciate the spinelessness of others: "It pains me to think that I didn't do enough to buck [Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger] up....I didn't bother to check his emotional temperature often enough."

I also like how, the instant Raines loses his journalistic perch, the idea of journalism, which he's lauded throughout his novella-length peace, becomes suddenly ephemeral: "I do not miss the daily grind of newspapering or the ephemeral nature of newspaper writing. Since I was twelve or so, my strongest interest has been in literature, and I'll be turning in that direction during the extra years I've secured by getting fired."

Go get'm, Howell.


Posted by: Clay Waters on April 15, 2004 06:55 PM

Does Raines address the golf thing? My respect for the NYT plummetted when they got obsessed with Augusta. I wasn't put out so much by the fact that they covered it, as the fact that they killed an op-ed piece that deviated from the party line.

Posted by: B on April 15, 2004 07:02 PM

Amazing. I wonder how much Raines had to pay The Atlantic to publish this dreck?

Posted by: Kirk Parker on April 16, 2004 03:06 AM

One of your quotations includes these words: "his mistress, the Hollywood start Madeleine Carroll". So what's a "start" in this context? A starlet? A tart? A bit of each?

Posted by: Dr. Weevil on April 16, 2004 06:30 AM

Sorry - since it isn't on line I had to re-type.

Posted by: "Mindles H. Dreck" on April 16, 2004 08:50 AM

I suffered through the print version of the article, and "suffered" is apt. Or, as Raines would have put it:

The evening I sat down to peruse the latest treatise on newspaper reporting by the well-respected Raines was a cold and clear one, the evening sky reflecting the harsh brilliance I hoped to find in the prose I read.

Cheap red wine in hand, I leaned back in my serviceable La-Z-Boy recliner, bathed in the opalescent light cast by my trusty Target-bought reading lamp, and prepared to be amazed.

Amazed I was, by the insipid whining, disdainful tone and ass-covering contained in this overlong piece of moody, yet ultimately poor, writing. As a reader, perhaps I was lax in making my standards known to The Atlantic, a mistake I now regret...

GAH.

Posted by: BAW on April 16, 2004 10:17 AM

something occurred to me reading Mindles' piece..

it would appear that Raines had somewhat limited managerial skills ..

maybe the reason big media journalism is so lame is because they continually, indeed consistently, promote journalists to managers..

has anoyone written anything on this ?

just wondering

Posted by: JonofAtlanta on April 16, 2004 01:09 PM

BTW , a 'start' is a round-heeled aspiring actress.. it's actually a CONTRACTION of 'starlet' and 'tart' ;)

Posted by: JonifAtlant on April 16, 2004 01:14 PM

and I am lying without a shred of abandon

Posted by: JonofAtlanta on April 16, 2004 01:15 PM

>>"Circulation increases would come from the Tri-State area, the rest of the country and abroad. Immigrants and the establishment. Businesspeople and artists. Only the animal kingdom is left out."

That's probably a subconscious oversight. Raines must be aware that the NY Times circulation undoubtedly makes them the world's leading bird cage liner.

Posted by: Swen on April 18, 2004 12:38 PM

It's a pretty clear sign that radically different readers see the Atlantic piece by Raines in exactly the same way--I had almost the same reactions at my blog as Mindles and Clay Waters.

Posted by: Timothy Burke on April 18, 2004 08:02 PM

'to Gelb' meant 'to cling steadfastly to ever-changing principles.'

Geez, what does "to Kerry" mean, then?

Posted by: Tom Maguire on April 20, 2004 08:09 PM

A NYT editor, of all people, wrote something long and boring. I'm shocked.

Posted by: maor on April 21, 2004 11:26 AM

Comments are Closed.