For all its stylishness and bravado, Raines's jeremiad offers an incomplete record of his abbreviated tenure at 43rd Street. He doesn't flood the zone. For one thing, the essay minimizes the extent to which his "managerial reformation" was undone by his own imperious style. In December 2002, top editors spiked two sports columns (by Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton) that dissented from the paper's official stance on the Augusta National Golf Club. The logic in the Araton column, Boyd remarked with classic Times pomposity, "did not meet our standards." (After a hailstorm of criticism, the columns were eventually printed.) One gathers that Raines's handpicked deputy inspired much fear and loathing in the newsroom. The Wall Street Journal, in its own inquiry into Raines's demise, described a high-level meeting at which Douglas Frantz, then the paper's investigations editor, bluntly contradicted one of Boyd's assertions. After the meeting, Boyd, whose persona could be rather menacing, told Frantz: "You shouldn't humiliate the managing editor." (Frantz eventually left the paper.)

"My Times" is weakened by other omissions. A 21,000-word essay of this sort ought to contain the words "Iraq" and "Judith Miller." Much of Miller's shoddiest reporting, after all, took place on Raines's watch, and it displayed, as many critics have pointed out, a credulous reliance on "inside" and "official" sources. (For a hard-hitting survey of the Times's Iraq coverage, with a special emphasis on Miller's transgressions, see Howard Friel and Richard Falk's forthcoming The Record of the Paper.) In a sense, Miller was adhering to a deep tradition at the New York Times, one that has survived Raines's short-lived reformation. It's a tradition that is practically encoded in the paper's DNA. Adolph Ochs, who created the modern New York Times in 1896, despised the muckraking in Joseph Pulitzer's World; he wanted a centrist, impartial, passion-free newspaper for the business class. ("We are not a crusading newspaper," Arthur Hays Sulzberger once lectured the young Arthur Gelb.)

By and large, every one of Och's successors in the publisher's chair has preserved that vision, not least because it was a superb business model: "Ochs had not made a fortune out of the newspaper business," Talese noted dryly, "by offending the mighty, crusading for reforms, espousing the causes of the have-nots against the haves." Still, a journalistic price was paid: The paper's deference to power led to debacles like the Bay of Pigs affair in 1961. (Tad Szulc's story about the impending invasion, which had already been reported in The Nation, was set to run on the front page, but the publisher, Orvil Dryfoos, neutered it; John F. Kennedy himself later reproached the Times for not printing all the relevant facts.)

During the Vietnam era, when dissident winds swept through the journalistic profession, some of the best and brightest talent at the Times publicly contested the Ochsian philosophy of newsgathering. At a 1972 convention sponsored by the vibrant but short-lived journalism review [MORE], Tom Wicker skewered the "official sources" approach, which, he said, fostered a front-page mentality based on a "spurious objectivity," a mentality that "imposes such a deadly sameness on our newspapers." Six years later, in his book On Press, Wicker implored journalists to "take an adversary position toward the most powerful institutions of American life." In a 1973 [MORE] profile of Times éminence grise James Reston, J. Anthony Lukas excoriated his cozy, insider reporting ("Perhaps he was right to trust William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield or John Gardner," Lukas said, but "what of Robert McNamara, William Rogers and Henry Kissinger?"). Later, in his memoir, Russell Baker blasted a hole through "objective" reporting: "No matter how dull, stupid, unfair, vicious or mendacious they might be, the utterances of the great were to be reported deadpan, with nary a hint that the speaker might be a bore, a dunce, a brute, or a habitual liar." (One aphorism from that book ought to be engraved on the wall of every newsroom: "Only a fool expects the authorities to tell him what the news is.")

Despite these and other warnings, the Sulzberger family was always reluctant to depart from core Ochsian principles. Even in the wake of the Judith Miller affair--when the paper published (on page A10) a 1,200-word "From the Editors" note lamenting the shortcomings of its Iraq coverage, a mea culpa partly inspired by Miller's reliance on dubious Iraqi defectors and hard-line Administration operatives--the Times, in too many instances, continues to permit the authorities to define the news concerning terrorism and national security; quotations from named and unnamed Administration "officials" continue to cascade down page one. (Not long ago, the London Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, quipped that the New York Times ought simply to change its name to "American Officials Say.") If Howell Raines has an intellectual quarrel with the shopworn, deferential, "official sources" model of newspapering, which has been so injurious to American journalism in general and the New York Times in particular, he doesn't say so in The Atlantic.

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