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 | | Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media by Seth Mnookin ISBN-10: 9780812972511 ISBN-10: 0-8129-7251-1 ISBN-13: 9780812972511 ISBN-13: 978-0-8129-7251-1 Paperback 2005-08-09 Random House Trade Paperbacks Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description On May 11, 2003, The New York Times devoted four pages of its Sunday paper to the deceptions of Jayson Blair, a mediocre former Times reporter who had made up stories, faked datelines, and plagiarized on a massive scale. The fallout from the Blair scandal rocked the Times to its core and revealed fault lines in a fractious newsroom that was already close to open revolt. Staffers were furious–about the perception that management had given Blair more leeway because he was black, about the special treatment of favored correspondents, and most of all about the shoddy reporting that was infecting the most revered newspaper in the world. Within a month, Howell Raines, the imperious executive editor who had taken office less than a week before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001–and helped lead the paper to a record six Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the attacks–had been forced out of his job. Having gained unprecedented access to the reporters who conducted the Times’s internal investigation, top newsroom executives, and dozens of Times editors, former Newsweek senior writer Seth Mnookin lets us read all about it–the story behind the biggest journalistic scam of our era and the profound implications of the scandal for the rapidly changing world of American journalism. It’s a true tale that reads like Greek drama, with the most revered of American institutions attempting to overcome the crippling effects of a leader’s blinding narcissism and a low-level reporter’s sociopathic deceptions. Hard News will shape how we understand and judge the media for years to come. From the Hardcover edition. | ||
Reviews | ||
HARD NEWS by Seth Mnookin Hard News is former Newsweek writer Seth Mnookin's book about Howell Raines' twenty-one month tenure as executive editor at the New York Times, during which the Jayson Blair reporting scandal occurred. Mnookin's narrative is almost always fast-paced and engaging, dragging only occasionally (notably when he gets into the minute details of the team of reporters responsible for investigating Jayson Blair's reporting). Even so, Hard News is more often downright entertaining. On the back cover, The Washington Post Book World blurb says, "Hard News reads like a thriller". While this may sound improbable, it is to some degree true. One of the reasons Hard News is so interesting is that Mnookin's main characters are larger than life. Howell Raines is interested in using the New York Times to build himself a grand legacy, and so he institutes his own changes, to an extent, for their own sakes. Raines more or less goes mad with power - he isn't interested in dissenting opinions of any kind. For Mnookin, Raines is a tyrannical dictator of the highest order. Mnookin really gives Raines the business. From beginning to end, Raines is the villain of this piece, misguided, arrogant, and oblivious, and the blame for more or less everything bad that happened at the Times during this period is laid at Raines' feet. Certainly, Raines was the one primarily responsible, and the situation that resulted in his ouster was to a large degree of his own making, but the reader may get the feeling here and there that Mnookin has at least a small axe to grind against Raines. Jayson Blair comes across as a pathological liar, who may very well have some kind of mental illness. He very clearly has no scruples, ethics, morals or principles. He showed no remorse for his catastrophic fraud; he tried to cash in on it with a memoir filled with more fabrications. And when adversity strikes, Blair is the boy who cried "racism!". Given his long history of journalistic problems and fabrications, Blair's rapid rise at the New York Times seems unbelievable. Certainly it fits well into the "truth is stranger than fiction" category. The full title of the book is Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media. Yet beyond commenting on how some media do more in-depth fact-checking (although he also notes that many media still do not fact-check), Mnookin really doesn't get into how the media changed. Rather, he hints at how these events have changed how the media are perceived by the American people, how they have lost credibility and trust across the board. On the whole, Hard News is about as gripping as an account as one might reasonably expect to have about this sort of thing. But the reader may well wonder if Mnookin has been fair in his representations of Raines and others and if, in the end, Mnookin has reported all sides of the story. | ||
Hard Facts Goes after the sacred cow, the New York Times. Put things in prospective of why and how news is reported. Also lets you into the inner circle of the mainstreet media and how it operates. Good education for the person who is not familiar on behind the scenes of news organizations. | ||
A Journalism Junkie's Must Read! Read it. It's a great book. Five stars. Hard News has three parts (Before, Spring 2003, and After), and provides a good overview of the history of The Times, the workings of the newsroom, Blair's quick rise as a reporter, details of the Blair fiasco, and how the Times dealt with it. Mnookin concludes the book with a thoughtful Note on Sources, more than 250 source notes, and a good bibliography. If this is a topic you followed, or you are a journalsim junkie or a Times-ophile, this book is a must read. | ||
Exciting Arc of a Tale Hard News is about the brief and troubled reign of Howell Raines as executive editor at the New York Times. It is a powerful story and is ably suited for the book form with its sweeping arc of great success (winning six Pulitzers early) and then a great scandal followed by defeat and resignation in tight twenty-one period (although the author kindly expands this a little to give the reader context concerning life at the Times). The troubled writer Jayson Blair fits into this narrative but it is definately not his story. Besides being both gripping and informative, this is also a book for anyone who cares passionately about the concept of unbiased news, an idea that is sadly almost becoming quaint and old-fashioned in this new Fox-centric universe. This is also a story for those who actually care about the New York Times because despite its troubled period, the passionate people who work at this paper come out very well in this book. It is a book that is hard to put down, a tale told well by Seth Mnookin. Highly recommended. | ||
A Now Familiar Tale Retold Well "Hard News," Seth Mnookin's fascinating and well-researched account of the now-infamous Jayson Blair scandal that shook the foundations not only of the New York Times but also the way journalists do business, is a crisp read. The author is always objective, and his sourcing would seem to be impeccable. For the most part he uses sources who will speak on the record, and when they would not he claims to have verified what they've said with others. And source notes and a bibliography are provided. In Mr. Mnookin's version, the story focuses on what happens to people who make wrong choices that they easily could have avoided--that is, if they were not the prisoners of their own ideology and life experiences. The account starts with the misguided notion of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that the head of the op-ed page, Howell Raines, a narcissistic, inflexible left-wing ideologue best known for his invective-laden editorials against, mostly, conservatives, but also Bill Clinton, could function as the newspaper's executive editor, in which position he would be in charge, not of a small group of like-minded ideologues, but of a newsroom with hundreds of employees of varying opinions and, of course, abilities. Generalissimo Raines couldn't function in that job, and in the process of failing he managed to alienate most of the staff while turning the newspaper into the journalistic version of a banana republic, led of course by himself. Then, the author moves on to the equally bizarre decision by Raines and his no. 2, managing editor Gerald Boyd, to send Jayson Blair out on big stories (the DC Sniper, Jessica Lynch). Blair, a dimestore sociopath, fantasist, and substance abuser, had already been warned by his direct supervisors about his job performance, but Raines and Boyd would eventually claim, improbably, not to know of this when the scandal broke. And scandal there would be. Blair would repay their trust in him with plagiarism, after which he graduated to fabrication, and ended up writing stories with out-of-town datelines without ever having left the Times Building on West 43rd St. in New York. (In the process, as Mr. Mnookin outlines, he demonstrated creative uses for cell phones and photo archives.) When Blair was exposed and forced to resign, the Times assembled a group of reporters and editors to investigate every story Blair had written, and the result was the sensational report that appeared in the paper one fateful Sunday in May 2003. That report made the Times the butt of jokes, and within two months Raines and Boyd were fired; then, after a brief interregnum in which the previous executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, who Raines disdained, returned to pick up the shattered pieces, Sulzberger selected Bill Keller, who had been passed over in favor of Raines two years before. Keller moved rapidly to restore order and institute changes, among them the hiring of the Times's first public editor. As for Mr. Sulzberger, he escaped unscathed--which is unsurprising: his family owns the New York Times Corp. The book is compulsive reading. Even though the outcome is known, "Hard News" nevertheless has the feel of a police procedural. Maybe you'll start imagining who might be cast as the principals if (or should I say when) there's a movie made of this cautionary tale. | ||