Howell Raines: Why Can't I Be You?

Howell Raines, who championed advocacy journalism in the name of liberalism at the Times during his brief stint as executive editor, is lamenting the fact that the kind of journalism he practiced hasn't succeeded in quashing all alternative viewpoints.

Of course, he phrases it a bit differently:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.

If Raines had a "professional conscience" there is the distinct possibility that he would still be the executive editor of the New York Times instead of posting grouchy op-eds on the pages of his old competitors.

But Raines was by any measure a horrific editor with a fear-based leadership style, and a Stalinist penchant for purging those who did not bow down to him:

According to insiders, Raines is the kind of 1950s-style autocrat who manages through humiliation and fear. Aside from right-hand men Gerald Boyd and Andy Rosenthal and a core of loyalists, morale is said to be at a new low. There are many rooms in that palace and nobody sees the whole picture. But, says one source, "the old timers who lived through the worst of [former executive editor] Abe Rosenthal say they have never seen anyone be so arrogant, so petty, so mean. Vindictiveness is in." Another source says, "It's no longer about managing down. It's about paying obeisance to the king." Among cognoscenti, 43rd Street is now known as the "republic of fear."

It is very much in his nature for Raines to call for the heads of those who would have ideas that do not conform to his own, or those who do not bow down to his latest infatuation with a silver-tongued fraud. Luckily, America caught on to Barack Obama far faster than they did Jayson Blair.

As always, the autocratic Raines will be the last to figure it out.