Free Gray Lady Down by William McGowan Page A

Jackie
Robinson. Adapting a page from the Branch Rickey handbook, he warned Boyd about “the tough time” ahead, “because a lot of people are going to be saying we’re doing this because of your race—and to a degree we are, and I think you can handle that.” Although he was passed over for managing editor when Joe Lelyveld became editor in chief in 1997, Boyd got the job when Howell Raines replaced Lelyveld in 2001. Boyd was now one step away from the very top, in a position of imminent historic significance, as Bill Stockton recalls: “The first black editor of the NYT!!! What a statement that would be for the Sulzbergers to make! To their peers. To the nation! See how far we have come—A black man as the editor of the NYT!”
    But the Jayson Blair scandal—in which Boyd’s documented racial favoritism toward a liar and plagiarist wound up destroying not only his career but that of Howell Raines as well—brought the chickens home to roost in terms of diversity’s inherent double standards. “If this hadn’t eventually blown up, and Gerry did get the top job, you would have had an African American shaping the news coverage of the nation’s most important newspaper for more than a decade,” Stockton said, adding that “Arthur just took it too far too fast.”
    Gerald Boyd died in November 2006, but left a memoir that was published in 2010, called My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times. “Second only to my family, The Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige,” he wrote. In his Times review of Boyd’s book, headlined “A Blessing and a Burden,” Robert Boyton wrote: “Much of the book is devoted to the racial slights Boyd suffered during his 20 years at the paper. White subordinates bridled at taking orders from him; white superiors alternately patronized and betrayed him. ‘The Times was a place where blacks felt they had to convince their white peers that they were good enough to be there,’ he writes.” Indeed, as elevated as the Times made him feel, Boyd also often felt “sandbagged, cornered and disrespected,” and was especially bitter about taking the fall for the Blair scandal. He singled out Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor and generally regarded as a hero in the Blair
case, as a man of “no decency and integrity” who had backstabbed him. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “A skeptic—or just a good reporter—might find it hard to accept that a man who climbed so high at the politically driven Times could be as guileless as Boyd portrays himself.”

    The Times’ racial script, which has come to resemble the journalistic equivalent of reparations, is particularly evident in stories about instances of historical racism. Some of these stories are newsworthy and do a service in reminding readers of forgotten injustices that lie behind economic inequities, educational disparities, high incarceration rates and enduring prejudice against African Americans. But many others seem to have been assigned in the spirit of racial hectoring, which feeds what John McWhorter calls “therapeutic alienation in blacks” and creates an “exaggerated sense of victimization.”
    Stories on the retrial of those involved with the 1955 Emmett Till killing in 2005, for instance, were surely newsworthy, especially one that unearthed the only surviving transcript from an earlier acquittal. So were the stories about the sentencing of the yet-unpunished perpetrators of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Likewise Brent Staples’ “editorial notebook” piece on the organized bloody pogrom that drove blacks from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, an event that became a blueprint for other racist actions throughout parts of the South.
    Yet the bulk of the Times’ reporting and commentary on the racial past is distinguished by a sense of grievance and cynicism. The fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v.