Geoff In Print

Not a big score, but yours truly made it into the back page of The Atlantic Monthly this issue. I rated an honorable mention for a disgracefully snarky letter suggesting a term for the envy one feels when the line next door moves faster than one's own.

"Quevetousness."

As long as we're discussing The Atlantic Monthly, a few months back they featured a really nasty piece of work by Howell ("Good Riddance!") Raines, rightfully disgraced former editor of The New York Times. His piece whined about the institutional sclerosis that the paper had faced, as though the problem were somehow the tenure of its illustrious roster of journalists, rather than the poor editorial judgment that led to the noticeable diminishment in the paper's quality under his watch. The article was so long-winded, so outrageously off-base, and so myopic, that I never finished it, but I saw no evidence in the first half of the 40-page screed that it was building towards anything remotely resembling accurate introspection.

Raines' saturation coverage crusades had the disagreeable effect of writing The New York Times' editorial agenda across the face of the front page. "The paper of record" has always had a distinctly urbane and educated bias (not surprising in a paper directed at urbane and educated readers), but Raines' use of it as a blunt instrument for ridiculous social campaigns seriously undermined the credibility that it had amassed over the years. The paper's devoted readership were never likely to gratefully swallow the saccharine social prescriptions Raines' paper tried to shovel down their throats. Until that point, the paper's strength had precisely been its unwillingness to condescend to its readership.

His portrayal of an institution on the verge of irrelevance and decay would strike any reader who remembered the solid paper of the late nineties as an outrage. Raines was killing the paper, and it is a wonderful thing for this nation that he was stopped.

Anyhow, that's all a long-winded preface to the following Letter to the Editor from one The New York Times' senior editors, Martin Gottlieb, that I think cogently and succinctly rebuts Raines' entire farcical whine:

Howell Raines makes plenty of assertions that are easy to take issue with, but the fatal one was a misevaluation of the Times that, I think, was unavoidable for Howell, given that it was inextricably tied to the self-image that drove his narrative, in The Atlantic and at the paper.

He needed a big wrong to right, and this more than anything real led him to conclude that until his arrival as boss, the Times was marching toward irrelevance. In fact, the day before he took over, the paper was the best it had ever been in its reporting, writing, range, and graphic display.

That didn't leave much room for a dragon slayer, only for someone who could stand on others' shoulders and work day-to-day to improve something that was already quite excellent. Perhaps that would have led to a better paper, and one that probably would have stood behind its editor when a danger that honorable staff members had been trying to flag caused real damage.