”This just in …” the teaser read across the bottom of the TV screen.
One more time, the breaking news was about news breakers themselves as two top editors of The New York Times had resigned.
”This is a day that breaks my heart,” Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said last week in announcing the resignations.
It was the latest in a journalism scandal that’s shamed a world-class newspaper that just a year ago won a record number of Pulitzer Prizes. Most of the prizes were for coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
This time, the news about the editors broke just as the staff of the Poughkeepsie Journal was gathering to talk about the rash of ethical problems in our business and how public perception has taken a hit.
Timing is everything.
Besides lending some buzz to the meeting, the news slapped on another solemn layer of realization that bad things have been happening in the industry, and that recovery in the public’s eye is going to be difficult.
So, for the next hour, Journal staffers talked about the Times scandal and others. They reviewed this paper’s policies on interviewing, writing and photography. And they expressed shock and disgust at the fact that anyone working in a business devoted to revealing truth would be dishonest in the process.
Times editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd left their jobs because of the turmoil that began over an extensive case of journalistic fraud admitted by young reporter Jayson Blair. A few weeks later, one of the best-known writers in the newspaper business, Times correspondent Rick Bragg, resigned after acknowledging he wrote a story based mainly on information he got from an uncredited free-lance reporter.
Management problems seem to be at the center of the scandal at the Times. But the effects don’t stop at the doors of the newspaper in Manhattan.
I keep thinking about the young reporters at every small-town newspaper who have dared imagine that they might get a chance to work at a place so revered as The New York Times.
And I’m thinking about the legions of people who work at the Times now and do their jobs truthfully, carefully and as skillfully as anybody in the business.
Poignant 9/11 profiles
But, especially, I am thinking about the writers who were part of the newspaper’s Sept. 11 coverage, the ones who wrote the hundreds of ”Portraits of Grief.”
For months, those reporters found out as much as possible about as many of the victims as they could.
Day after day they interviewed survivors who were shocked, grieving and angry. They brought honor to each person’s life, and didn’t face what had to come with such an enormous job — the exhaustion of thinking about each person’s death.
It wasn’t groundbreaking, investigative journalism. The ”Portraits of Grief” were the most basic kind of storytelling — showing how each person lived and how each mattered, one at a time.
Many days, the stories were just too sad to pick up and read. But the reporting, writing and caring continued. And now that kind of work has been dishonored.
To echo the Times publisher — heartbreaking.
