"Authenticity" is the best description I can come up with for the voice of Russell Baker, now applied to the NYT's Jayson Blair scandal

This first volume of memoirs was followed

by the equally remarkable The Good Times.

"The newsroom [Gerald] Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes."

-- Russell Baker, in "A Bad Morning at The New York Times,"

in the April 29 New York Review of Books

by Ken

I acknowledge the likelihood that my responses are exclusively my own, but just as I was, and remain, depressed by the blinkered pomposities of Ross "The Evaluator" Douthat, I stil feel a bit of a tingle at David S. Broder's recollection the other day ofi his days as a young D.C. reporter in the '60s, when "this city was full of people who did their jobs not only with skill and energy but also with unquestioned integrity. We didn't think much about it then, so commonplace was it," and never mind that Grandpappy Dave made kind of a muck-up of his attempted tribute to his three fallen colleague-heroes.

I'm not pretending that the '60s were a golden age in either journalism or civics, but there's something there that rings true, something that has changed distinctly for the worse.

In my non-appreciation of the Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN,* I noted my frosty response to his standing column title, "Evaluations," which strikes me as unbearably (and I do mean unbearably -- I can't bear it, and don't plan to try) pompous and misguided. I suggested that "evaluation" is a function best left to people with a verifiable process for evaluating, like the folks at Consumer Reports or America's Test Kitchen. "Observations," I suggested, would be a less pretentious moniker. (I trusted it would be understood that I think "observing" would be a much more productive use of a columnist's space than "evaluating.") Which led to the observation that Russell Baker's standing column title was "Observer."

Of course Russell Baker would have understood that. It's not that way back when Russell Bakers were a commonplace, overflowing the newsrooms of America, or that nobody today has that kind of stored-up wisdom and authority. Still, back then it seemed less remarkable, and now it seems utterly astonishing -- increasingly hard to find in the bosom of the Infotainment News Media. The names I would put forward today would probably be nearly all bloggers.

Meanwhile, damned if Russell Baker doesn't seem to continue getting even wiser in retirement. His voice has become even more, um, authentic. I don't know how to say it any better, but it really does seem to me an issue of authenticity.

I am relieved to find that reports of Baker's retirement from his periodic forays into book-reviewing for The New York Review of Books have proved overstated. It's one of those that has set me off this evening, a review of former NYT Managing Editor Gerald Boyd's posthumously published My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times." Characteristically, Baker plunges right in:

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all-- the executive editorship-- seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.

I really didn't want to quote that large a block of text, but show me a point at which it would have been possible to break off. In that paragraph I see an astonishing ability to synthesize information and understanding, and it's done in such a way that it comes out in an easy, even, modest, and irresistible flow, without a wasted word, never calling attention to how much you would have to know just to imagine a paragraph like that, and then how much craft you would need to write it. The end product, seemingly (and almost certainly only seemingly) effortless, is a voice that is purest Russell Baker. And I still can't come up with a better description for that voice than "authentic."

Any thought that the writer might have painted himself into a corner with such a dazzling paragraph is dispelled by Baker's second graf, picking up immediately from the abrupt introduction of the subject of Boyd's firing:

The firing occurred in the spring of 2003 in a bizarre seizure of office politics, and, as such things will, it left Boyd anything but well disposed toward his former employer and colleagues. He has written a good book filled with ill feeling toward the Times, many of its editors, and a variety of colleagues who turned against him under pressure or simply because they wanted him to fail and be damned. Written during the three years between his firing and his death from cancer in 2006, the book is now published posthumously with the help of his wife, Robin Stone.

Already I think we know more about this book than we normally expect to find out in a book review, and Baker is just warming up. We know that race is going to be an important subject here. "Times folk," Baker writes, "especially of the management class, will not be delighted by his account of their awkward struggle with the race problem or Boyd's suggestion that bigotry was one of the causes of his downfall."

However, he quickly adds, "There were other causes."

and when all are combined, they present a picture of a runaway newsroom that left the paper's top editorial caste-- and even its owners-- suddenly powerless to control events. In the plainest possible terms, what happened in the newsroom was a successful workers' uprising against the bosses, in which the workers won and the bosses were humiliated.

What may strike the reader as oddest of all about the several curiosities of this rebellion is that it had almost nothing to do with the paper's editorial policy or its news coverage. When it was over, the Times 's news management had changed hands, but the paper went right on being the same New York Times it had been before. What had happened was not a revolution of ideas, but only a great gale of office politics about matters of negligible interest and no conceivable concern to inhabitants of the world outside the Times building.

The precipitating event, of course, was the Jayson Blair scandal, which makes it easy to understand how the racial ugliness found its way into the mix. But the racial ugliness was only one of a number of sources of tension on the part of the highly privileged newsroom staff, which had acquired a status that would have been unimaginable a couple of decades earlier:

Boyd's newsroom was the home office of a journalistic elite class -- college-educated, the sort of people who could chat comfortably with Supreme Court justices, Wall Street finaglers, prime ministers, opera singers, archbishops, sheikhs, crooks, cops, grave robbers, and even an occasional scientist. Bron in the age of American mastery and comfort that followed World War II, they had large ideals and small experience of hardship or need, and, being quite a bit spoiled, they expected to be listened to with more respect than was accorded the working-stiff hotshots who populated newsrooms in the pre-Kennedy years.

That staff was rising against an increasingly embattled management, represented by controversial Executive Editor Howell Raines and the man who put him in that job, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. ("The 'diversity' issue was always the ugly subtext to the dull narrative about a management failure at the Times. 'Diversity' is not a subject for light amusement in America. It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.")

I'm not here to preempt the story, either in Russell Baker's telling or of course in Gerald Boyd's. If you're interested, I trust you'll go to the source(s). I just want to suggest that the story is filled with lessons most of us probably wouldn't otherwise be aware exist, let alone understand.

Example: In RB's view, the Blair affair was both more important than the public understands ("people unaware of the Times's passion for the integrity of its news columns" don't realize what an almost unimaginable betrayal this episode represented) and less important ("it is hard to find the slightest evidence that Blair's plagiarism or fictions affected anyone's life but his own and his editors'").

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*The Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN is more debates, but not just any kind -- he wants the good kind, the kind that are "more substantive" than anything on MSNBC or Fox News, which he considers equivalent. As in the supposed glory years of CNN's Crossfire, or -- the great model to which our Ross apparently thrills -- the William S. Buckley-Gore Vidal debates. Does anyone can recall anything of substance exchanged between Buckley and Vidal? By contrast, I'm confident that anyone who remembers anything about them remembers what salable theater they were. Which recalls the lament from Jon Stewart to the Crossfire gang which set our Ross in motion on the subject: "You're doing theater when you should be doing debate." Hmm.

#