NYT

We sometimes forget that before the CBS memogate there was the implosion at The New York Times and the fall Howell Raines.  Here's a review of a new book about the matter featured in today's New York Times Book Review.  Excerpts:

That stone wall started crumbling around the same time Raines began moving up, and Raines became one of the new transparency's early victims. During his tenure as Washington bureau chief, Raines was regularly mocked in Spy magazine as a petty tyrant who played favorites; one gossip item had Raines ordering reporters to stack books on their desks horizontally instead of vertically. When Raines was elevated to editorial page editor, criticism of his brusque style spread to The Washington Post and The New Yorker. The New York Observer compared Raines to Captain Queeg, the ball-bearing-jiggling control freak in ''The Caine Mutiny.'' ...

Raines also initiated a Times campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, for failing to allow women to join. A worthwhile subject, to be sure, but when the 32nd story in three months excoriated CBS, which broadcasts the Masters, for ''staying silent'' on the matter, some started asking whether The Times was beating a dead horse.

The crowning blow came when the paper declined to publish two sports columns that disagreed with The Times's position on the matter. ...

A more promising line of revisionism might be whether Raines would have thrived at the helm before our current age of media transparency. He might well have. It was Raines's misfortune to be caught wielding the lash in broad daylight.