US: The final act in the two-month drama played out at the New York Times since the unmasking of make-it-up reporter Jayson Blair began on Friday last when Charlie Rose got a call at a semi-secret tycoons' seminar he was attending in Idaho, writes Conor O'Clery
Rose is the host of a 60-minute intellectual talk show on Public Broadcasting Service. He was doing an on-stage off-camera interview with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg for an audience that included the likes of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Michael Eisner when word came that Howell Raines, the Times's executive editor ousted over the scandal, was ready to give a tell-all interview on his programme.
Rose got the first plane to New York and met Raines for an hour-long session in the PBS studio. The interview was a disaster. A scowling Raines got things off his chest that, as the New York Observer noted, would have been better kept for the dinner table. He said the Times he inherited two years earlier had had a "lethargic culture of complacency", and that he had been a "change agent" fighting resistance at every turn to instill a "performance culture".
Piling on the insults to his popular predecessor Joe Lelyveld and his former colleagues, Raines characterised the Times staff as lazy, complacent and entrenched in their folk ways. Times reporters and editors watching in the apartments around town smouldered with resentment. Three days later, when New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger announced to the newsroom on Monday that Bill Keller would become the new editor, he noted, "There's no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be."
Bill Keller said that the notion that "the people who knocked themselves out covering an endless scandal, an impeachment in Washington, an election, the Florida recount, a couple of Balkan wars ... were in the least bit complacent or lethargic was insulting to a lot of first-class professionals".
Signalling a new and less fraught era, Keller told his staff to "have a life" and see their families more as "that will enrich your work as much as a competitive pulse rate will".
The selection of Keller, who was passed over for Raines two years ago, was well received in the newsroom. It was also applauded by former colleagues from his Soviet days in the late 1980s when he was regarded as the very best of a talented generation of Moscow correspondents. A rival in Russia at that time, the Washington Post's David Remnick, is now editor of The New Yorker.
Keller won a Pulitzer for chronicling the downfall of communism, and went on the report on the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. His task now is to pull the world's highest-profile newspaper back from the brink of a nervous breakdown.
One the very day that Bill Keller was appointed executive editor, the New York Times had to apologise, yet again, for another story it got seriously wrong. This prompted the Washington Times to comment with a dangerous touch of self-satisfaction that "a chastened (New York) Times has now become deft at delivering pre-emptive mea culpas".
It is always unwise for dog to eat dog. That same day the Washington Times carried a letter it said it received from the US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Mr Stephan M. Minikes. It was e-mailed in reply to an op-ed article in the conservative pro-Bush newspaper accusing some State Department officials of disloyalty to President Bush's foreign policy goals. The letter was a bombshell. It agreed with the article and described career bureaucrats as liberal advocates of the Democratic Party's policy of "apology and appeasement" who should be fired.
There was consternation at the State Department, which got on to Mr Minikes pretty promptly. He denied knowing anything about the letter, which he called a "complete and utter fabrication" that expressed views diametrically opposite to his own.
The information that the Washington Times had been tricked was conveyed personally, and no doubt forcefully, by Secretary of State Colin Powell to editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden. It turns out that no one in the paper had checked if the e-mail was genuine.
"The standard procedure is to verify all letters to the editor; this procedure was not followed in this instance," admitted Pruden in a retraction. "We will find out why, and make changes in procedures as necessary." He expressed regret for the embarrassment to all concerned, and promised they would do everything to find the culprit, and then, he informed readers: "We will make life as miserable as we can for the jerk who did it."
For a President who takes care never to be pictured in anything other than a flattering position, it was something of an embarrassment for George Bush, accompanied by his wife Laura and daughter Barbara, to find himself face to face with two 13-year-olds having sex. The amorous couple were elephants in a Botswana game park visited by the Bush family on their recent tour of Africa.
The one reporter who witnessed the scene was Samson Mulugeta of Newsweek, the writing member of a small media pool. He described in a report for his colleagues what happened, using the secret service acronyms POTUS (President of the United States) and FLOTUS (First lady, etc) for the first couple.
"As the pool convulsed into giggles, POTUS turned back and smiled sheepishly. Barbara threw her head back in embarrassment and covered her face with her hands. Then POTUS threw his cap over his face to shield himself from the impending coitus (which never materialised). FLOTUS's expression was not visible from our angle."
After the elephants gave up, Bush went over to pet them until a worried Laura Bush called out: "OK, darling, that's enough."
President Bush spent only 60 minutes visiting the Botswana game park during his five-day, five-nations tour of Africa. When Bill Clinton went to Africa as president he spent two days on safari.
The New York Times noted that the restless Republican President spent a mere quarter of a day in Senegal and 195 minutes in Uganda, and that four of his five nights in Africa were passed in a luxury hotel in Pretoria, South Africa. Nor did he spend much time talking to the media.