Howell Raines - Later Activities

Later Activities

Raines reviewed his tenure as Executive Editor in an extended, 21,000-word piece published in the Atlantic Monthly. In it he claimed that he was hired by Sulzberger in the shared conviction that The Times had grown complacent and no longer functioned as a meritocracy in the assignment of stories to its reporters.

In the private meeting with reporters that he called and during which he announced Keller's succession to Raines' old job, Sulzberger, however, apparently denied ever holding such a view. Raines stood by his account and implied that Sulzberger was retreating from the opinion he says that he and the owner shared at the time of his promotion. "In the only interview I have given on the Jayson Blair affair, I spoke on the Charlie Rose show of the resistance I had encountered as a 'change agent' who was handpicked by the publisher to confront the newsroom's lethargy and complacency. A few days later, as he introduced my successor, Bill Keller, to the assembled staff, Arthur rebutted my comment by saying, 'There's no complacency here—never has been, never will be.' I can guarantee that no one in that newsroom, including Arthur himself, believed what he said... Arthur's words signaled that nothing dramatic would be done to upset the paper's cosseted world."

Raines revisited the controversy in his 2006 book, The One That Got Away, which combines fishing stories and descriptions of his career as a journalist, with particular attention to the events preceding the Jayson Blair scandal and his own subsequent dismissal. As an account of the journalistic episode in general and, more specifically, as an attempt to favorably present his role in it, the book was tepidly received. The reviewer for The New York Times wrote, "When not spinning out his piscine adventures as parables of loss and letting go gracefully, Raines gives readers an alternately jokey and bitter account of his downfall at The Times—which may indeed be perfectly accurate, at least according to the solipsistic standards of memoir writing. But it is unsatisfactory in almost every other way."

On January 14, 2008, it was announced that Raines would become a media columnist for Condé Nast Portfolio. His first column was published in the March issue of the magazine, and analyzed the possibility of Rupert Murdoch buying, and therewith, from Raines' perspective, effectively destroying the New York Times.

Raines penned an op-ed in the March 14, 2010 edition of The Washington Post that was highly critical of Fox News Channel and of the impunity, in his view, that Fox's biased reporting benefits from in the journalistic world at large.