Letting The Press Off The Hook

by Glynn Wilson

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., July 4, 2006 - It would almost be an understatement to say that the American press has been on the bad end of a few bad mouths of late, especially as it concerns recent coverage of the Bush administration's supposedly secret surveillance programs.

If I were a CIA "agency" man, I might celebrate the CIA's losses in war today. If I were a solider, I would celebrate other men and women in uniform, alive and dead, on this Independence Day.

But I am a writer and a journalist. And since everyone here knows there would be no independence without some world class writing, as well as spying and soldiering, I believe the press deserves something of a break today.

So I will tell you a story about one of the greatest newsmen to ever be conceived on Alabama soil, at least by today's standards of how we judge people in this United States of America.

LF

The One That Got Away, Indeed

In his new memoir, The One That Got Away, Howell Raines writes of great and small fish and fishers, giants and dwarfs of the written word - and then there's politicians. He writes of interesting people he knows and has met - and what makes for an honorable life.

By the end of it, he is released in his mind not only by the great blue marlin he fought for seven and a half hours and then lost off Christmas Island in the Pacific. You get the feeling that he writes the last short sentence of the book as if he is "released" from his grief at his great fall - and perhaps now that the story is written and on its way to the publisher.

I want to believe it is true, all of it, like I want to believe that his Minolta underwater camera failed when he tried to take a picture of that blue marlin as it ran alongside the boat and was almost within his guide Tuna's reach.

But fish tales, like memoirs, are often fraught with hype and yes hubris. Hubris is a word Raines uses a lot, perhaps because his public image as an arrogant SOB will live with him for the rest of his life no matter what he does in the future or what he writes.

And the truth is, I'm not big on fish tales or fishing anyway, perhaps because it was my long-dead father's favorite pastime, not mine. There was no such thing as catch-and-release in Eschol Wilson's day, 1926-1973. Then, the idea was to catch the most and the biggest bass you were skilled or lucky enough to get hooks into - then clean, fry and eat the buggers for supper.

Mr. Raines must certainly know that the fish releasing him is the perfect metaphor for his life and how he was run off from the New York Times and left with the time to fish. He's the first Alabamian to ever hold the three best jobs at that lofty newspaper: Washington Bureau Chief, Editorial Page Editor, and Executive Editor.

We've never had a president from Alabama, although we did have one serious candidate for awhile during Howell's lifetime, which is likely one of the reasons he bagged his first shot at the New York Times job in those days of segregation and the fight for Civil Rights.

But he played the journalism political game well and made it all the way to the top. Then just when everything seemed just about perfect - from a record seven Pulitzer Prizes to his new Polish bride and country house in the Poconos - it all came crashing down like it did for Icarus, who you will remember flew too close to the sun.

The image Raines would leave you with is another metaphor, one from Hemingway, one of his literary and journalism heroes. Although curiously, Raines fails to mention the fisherman Santiago's words of life's justification when he lost his marlin, but not his life to the sharks, in Old Man And The Sea. This is an oddity, since Raines makes a big deal out of remembering his nanny read it to him in bad old Birmingham, and then finding a copy of the Life magazine it was first published in after he "made it" to New York.

I guess it would be admitting too much to come out and say, as Santiago did, "man is not made for defeat....A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

If you are into fly fishing and literary journalism of the personal kind, you must like this book. Raines learns from and quotes all the great fishing writers, and has the resources to fish in some incredible places.

He does cast into the waters a few other metaphors, from baseball and of course football. It you know anything at all about Howell Raines, you probably know that he sometimes likes to quote the great but flawed University of Alabama football coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant. You may or may not know how that very thing was one of the annoyances that made the "mandarins" in New York, as he calls them, come to hate him.

And he just can't resist an allusion to the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. In fact, the central test of character from the book comes from none other than the great general of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, who Raines claims not to idolize, being from one of those rare strongholds in North Alabama where his family members hid in the woods to escape the fighting and sold goods to the Yankees.

If I were to construct a similar narrative, I might use a canoe trip down a river or the sometimes maddening or sublime game of golf. But it's his story, and he tells it well - if inevitably incompletely.

There is one key person in this drama, another Alabama writer, who is never mentioned in the book - perhaps at his request. Since he does not want me to write about it either, I will not tell the story here. But one of these days, that story will be told.

For now, let's change Cherokee directions - something I learned about from reading Raines' book and should have known - and imagine another fish tale.

Historians sometimes have to do this, when people are too afraid or dead to talk.

I like to imagine a world in which Ralph Nader and the Green Party, along with the U.S. Supreme Court and some hanging chads in Florida, did not hand George W. Bush the election of 2000 like every gift he ever got in his life of high crimes and misdemeanors.

But that might be too much of a "stretcher" to pull off here today, so let's move forward a bit and bring this fishing trip back to the press.

What if someone had been willing to stand up to the writer's guild and just say no to promoting Jayson Blair? You will remember Blair as the short, black kid who made stuff up at the New York Times and filed plagiarized stories high on cocaine from the suburbs of New York rather than get on the plane to Virginia and Texas. He was given a golden opportunity over a thousand other fine reporters who spent years vying for the chance, and he not only blew his own career up his own nose. He damaged the great ship that was the New York Times like the sharks ate holes in Santiago's boat.

The tribunal is still out on whether this little confabulating missile will sink that ship.

But from my observation point - and I was one of those vying for the chance and got it, for a little while - Howell Raines could have been just the editor America needs right now, to go up against Bush and Cheney and Karl Rove.

Yes, he also listened to Judith Miller, who listened to Chalabi and beat the drums for war. But she was the star of the Washington bureau on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, having written a book about it. And after 9/11 - and I know this from multiple sources - virtually everyone at the Times believed deep down in the ultimate thematic truth that a nuclear attack on New York was likely and that it would be the end of civilization as they knew it.

Faced with what we know now - about no WMD, massive and illegal domestic surveillance, all manner of corruption from Iraq to New Orleans - the so-called "hard charging" Howell Raines who "ate gunpowder for breakfast" - would have unleashed the troops and "flooded the zone" on these assholes in charge in Washington today.

And no matter how mean he was as a boss (he was actually more aloof to me the times I met him), I would like to know what it would be like to live in a world with Howell Raines at the helm of the New York Times today - sans the torpedo in its broadside.

I may just be dreaming, and of course I am because that is not the world we live in today. But by damn, I would like to live in that world.

Everybody else running news organizations today seem like pantywaists to me, and I'm sure to Howell. The PR doctors and the spinmeisters have totally taken over the country now.

I won't spoil the entire book for you by going into all the details he likes to drop in here and there about how bad the news business is and how to fix it. Best I can tell, he is right as rain on most of that advice.

I do, however, have a couple of quibbles.

For one thing, Raines likes to talk in terms of sociology almost as much as he likes to quote Bear Bryant. But I think Mr. Raines' sociological bibliography is as limited as his grasp of the literature on communications research generally. He was an English major, after all. He would be better off talking in terms of political science or journalism history, both of which are flawed disciplines to be sure.

But he would be on sounder footing in his stream of thought that way, like when he says the reason a large audience turns to Fox News is for fake, made up news. That's not it, at all. Really it's not. It's not even that Fox is the Republican network. Roger Ailes' genius there, and of course I disagree with it as much as Raines, is that Fox News is the pro-American patriotic network, what I like to call "America's Al Jazeera."

As for what he says about blogs and bloggers, well, I'll let him off the hook for that. I doubt he reads this one, although another writer and a friend of his does, down in Florida.

And I suspect Mr. Raines is too old and too ink-stained to get this - although he was there when the Times embraced the Web.

Maybe there is hope. A Howell Raines blog. Hell, I would write for it - in the flash of a rise of a fine silver fish . . .

-30-

For the blog diary record, here's the text of the letter I wrote to Howell Raines eight days after September 11, 2001. One particular friend told me to cut the military references and send it. I didn't listen. It went out just like this.

September 19, 2001

Howell Raines, Executive Editor
The New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Raines,

A number of witnesses to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center said words could not describe it. Yet somehow The New York Times put together a package of words like nothing I have seen in my 22-year association with the news business. Like millions of Americans who would now die to serve their country, I would die to serve The New York Times.

So take me, sir, and do with me what you will. I am single and willing to track down Osama bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan if necessary. I am versatile in a way very few new hires could be. I can do breaking news on deadline with wire service precision. I know politics, and have sources the Times could use at this time. My specialty in more recent years has been science and the environment. I know the American South, and could be useful in this region. As a pioneering Web developer, I could be useful to the Times online. I know literary non-fiction and can do features as well.

After working for weekly and daily newspapers, magazines and wire services since 1979, and reading the Times regularly since in the early 1980s, I decided in the mid-1990s that the newspaper business was dead for me in a way. It just did not seem so vital anymore. The news seemed stale. I thought there were no more courageous newspaper editors in the world, that no big stories existed. So I escaped to the halls of academe and began a love affair with teaching the craft of journalism.

After reading your coverage of this gut-wrenching story, however, my only thought was, "I want to be part of it." All I ever wanted in life was to be a reporter, to work for a great newspaper, a great newspaper editor. Judging by your performance in the face of this tragedy, you are one of the last of the great newspaper editors. So as a loyal soldier might report to his commander in chief, I salute you and stand ready to serve.

With deep sincerity,
Glynn R. Wilson, A.B.D., Ph.D., UT
University of Loyola New Orleans