Howell Raines, a frequent target of media critics, has decided to become a media critic himself.
The former executive editor of The New York Times, who lost his job in 2003 in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, will serve as media columnist for Conde Nast Portfolio.
Raines’ first column for the high-end business magazine is set for the March issue. It will look at coverage of the presidential campaign.
Raines, 64, told the Times that, if appropriate, he would comment on the paper that was part of his life for 25 years. But his perspective won’t be that of a disgruntled former employee, he said.
“I don’t see it a forum for settling old scores or revisiting things,” he said.
It may be, too, that there’s not much left to be said, by Raines or his critics, about Raines’s exit from the Times.
The crisis at the Times erupted in the spring of 2003 with the revelation that Blair, a young reporter, had plagiarized or invented parts of many stories. His career ended, Blair resigned.
The news gave ammunition to the paper’s detractors, and raised questions about Raines’s management.
Though he had no direct oversight of Blair, Raines was eventually asked to resign. Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, who died of cancer three years later, was also asked to go.
About a year after Raines left, The Atlantic published his read on the Blair episode. Raines returned to the subject again in his 2006 memoir, The One That Got Away.
“I think of Jayson Blair as an accident that ended my newspaper career in the same unpredictable way that a heart attack or a plane crash might have,” Raines wrote in The Atlantic.
Raines wrote that he had been an agent of change at the paper, and that those who resisted him used the Blair controversy to push him out the door.
Jack Shafer, media critic for Slate, the online magazine, disagreed.
“Like most autobiographers, (Raines) exaggerates his importance, selectively picks his facts, punishes old enemies and constructs new ones,” Schafer wrote.
Others argued that Raines had not just been asleep at the wheel in regard to Blair, but that in other cases he had been steering the paper in the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, Raines had fashioned a remarkable career in journalism before becoming the Times executive editor, and he’ll bring a lot of experience to his role as a media columnist.
He joined the Times as a national correspondent in 1978, having worked before that at several southern papers. At the Times, he was a national political correspondent and covered the White House.
He ran the London and Washington bureaus, and he was editorial page editor. He also won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for a New York Times Magazine article on his family’s housekeeper.
Raines became the paper’s executive editor six days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Times was awarded seven Pulitzer Prizes for its work in 2001, six of which were connected to its coverage of the attacks and their aftermath.
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