Bill Keller, who has served as The New York Times’s executive editor since July 2003, is stepping down—and an era has ended.
It is fitting, in a way, that Keller’s resignation comes so soon after another departure that ended an era: the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Keller oversaw the bulk of the paper’s coverage and operations in the period between September 11, 2001 and Bin Laden’s capture, a period where questions of war and surveillance framed the national debate. And it seems clear that Keller’s journalistic legacy should and will be defined by how he and his paper met the challenge of this long war.
A quick overview: Keller came in after Howell Raines’s rocky, short tenure, and after two scandals that greatly damaged the Times’s reputation. One, the undetected fabrications of Jayson Blair, was picayune in its concrete impact, but a devastating embarrassment, where a young reporter’s fantasy, lies, and plagiarism were allowed to tarnish the paper’s pages and storied history.
The other, far more significant scandal was the Times’s reporting in the run up to the Iraq war—reporting that relied far too much on often-anonymous government or government-aligned sources, and failed to present adequate context to or challenge their assertions. The Times was forced to run an embarrassing ex post facto disclaimer, focused on Judith Miller’s work promoting the existence and threat of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. This tune was in harmony with the administration’s rationale for invasion, and, blasted again and again from the pages from the Times, the paper of record, greased the path to our immeasurably costly and still-ongoing intervention in Iraq.
Keller did not oversee this reporting. Still, before assuming the top job, during his previous twenty-month stint as a senior editor and columnist that was concurrent with Miller’s worst work, he too boosted the war, warning of chemical weapons and “illicit toxins.” Keller later came to publicly regret both Miller’s work, by sanctioning the publication of said disclaimer, and his own, in a eulogy he delivered for an anti-war columnist.
Miller’s “entanglement” (the word Keller once used) with Scooter Libby and his perjury trial made her a deeply-flawed First Amendment martyr when she was imprisoned for refusing to testify in Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation. After emerging from jail, her heavily lawyered departure from the Times, overseen by Keller, was an ignominious end to a sad chapter.
But Miller’s move from the newsroom to the rearview mirror did not come close to ending the Times’s own entanglement with the Bush administration as it went about reporting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, or the related debates over executive power and torture.
Still to come would be the paper’s controversial decision to hold reporting on the Bush Administration’s NSA abuses, at the request of the government. The story, printed after a delay of over a year, was one of the most important of the decade, but the time it took in coming rankled its reporters—and, once they knew, many readers.
Similar concerns about bending to political wills arose in the paper’s continued refusal, despite protests from many quarters, to avoid calling torture torture when it is done by the United States. That shouldn’t obscure the valuable fact-finding the Times did in
this arena, including 2004 reporting that turned up authorization of CIA waterboarding.
The paper’s collaboration with WikiLeaks revealed to the public a massive amount of information that the government would have rather kept secret. Some called it treason, while WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange complained the paper gave him ill-quarter.
A lot happened on Keller’s watch. And no discussion of a journalistic legacy that stretched this span would be complete without mentioning the titanic business and cultural adaptations demanded by the web news cycle. At this point, it seems the Times has weathered and to an extent thrived in the storm better than almost any other legacy publication.
Still, as a matter of simple words, the yardstick of Keller’s tenure must be how the paper grappled with the greatest stories of the day. The paper’s catalogue of valuable, fair, and aggressive reporting in this era is at least as impressive as the above catalogue of controversy.
Out with the old and in with the new. And what would any good transition of power be without a little of the: ye olden timey airbrushing
Earlier today, I did a little post on the New York Times and religion — or rather, the New York Times as religion. I linked to this article, from the Times, on the recent shuffle at that paper: Veteran Timeswoman Jill Abramson will be the editor in charge. She was quoted as saying, “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” A reader now writes me to say (in essence), “Hey, what gives? The quotation is not in the article you link to.” And, lo, he’s right. That’s a tiny bit strange, isn’t it?
Knowing what I do about Abramson, I’m sure that back in the day her family was quite a fan of airbrushing and those who perpetrated it. I think this is a pretty interesting start and omen for what’s to come of Times with Abramson at the wheel. Transparency at its finest.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Fri 3 Jun 2011 at 03:50 PM
An excellent, balanced look at Keller's tenure at the New York Times, @Clint. I have an enormous amount of respect for Keller, despite the controversies that you cover in this piece. I wish Ms. Abramson the best in her new gig, and Dean Baquet, an outstanding managing editor as well. I wonder who will be chosen to head up the Washington Bureau.
You wrote:
Keller later came to publicly regret both Miller’s work, by sanctioning the publication of said disclaimer, and his own, in a eulogy he delivered for an anti-war columnist.
Do you have a link or reference to this, or the name of the columnist, or any additional information. I would like to read that.
#2 Posted by James, CJR on Fri 3 Jun 2011 at 04:44 PM
Thanks James. Editor and Publisher covered Keller's speech mentioning those columns. The outlet's current iteration doesn't have an archived version, but here's a taste captured elsewhere.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x324206
#3 Posted by Clint Hendler, CJR on Sun 5 Jun 2011 at 12:24 PM
Mr. Hendler's wishy-washy conclusion to his expose of the serious short comings of the NYT is typical of what the great critic of journalism, A. J. Liebling called contemptuously, 'on one hand this, on the other hand that'. With the departure of truth-tellers like Frank Rich, Bob Herbert and others, I no longer look at the Times for accurate information untainted by State Department kowtowing. Thank heavens ,on the internet, I can go right to many sources. Also, I no longer have to deal with the Times prudishness in censoring foul language because it is 'a family newspaper.' Oh! I thought it was the 'newspaper of record'. When Dick Cheney, on the floor of the Senate, told my Senator Patrick Leahy to "Go fuck yourself!", the Times, like someone's maiden aunt, bleeped the comment by saying it was an epthet not 'fit for a family newspaper'. How much more adolescent can you get?
#4 Posted by Al Salzman, CJR on Sun 5 Jun 2011 at 05:45 PM
I don't know if it is the 'defining' story, but Keller's handling of the Duke/lacrosse false rape accusation - a Scottsboro case of our own times - confirmed that when the issue is race or gender, The Times' coverage is deeply untrustworthy. One can expect the same of the tenure of Jill Abramson, who became famous for her work on the now-quaint Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Sun 5 Jun 2011 at 07:23 PM
Thanks, @Clint. Much appreciate the link. Very, very interesting insight. Contrarianism, hmmm. The disease affects a number of VIP beltway pundits.
#6 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 6 Jun 2011 at 07:33 AM