The New York Times’
empty confession

The late Willmoore Kendall was a brilliant political scientist and a fiendishly clever conservative. Yale University made the mistake of granting him a professorship with lifetime tenure before it discovered, or at any rate realized the full implications of, that second aspect of his character.

At Yale, Kendall was one of the teachers of young William F. Buckley Jr. and had a profound influence on him. Small wonder that, when Buckley founded National Review in 1955 as a journal of conservative opinion, Kendall’s name appeared on the masthead of the very first issue as a senior editor. Yale subsequently corrected its error by negotiating a buy-out of Kendall’s lifetime tenure contract for a handsome sum, in return for his promise not to darken its doors again.

During the late 1950s (after I had become the magazine’s publisher in 1957) one of Kendall’s assignments was to write an occasional column entitled “The Liberal Line.” In it, he skewered liberal writers and publications as only he could. Inevitably, one of his most frequent targets was The New York Times, which then, as now, was a fountain of pure liberal propaganda. One day, over lunch with the senior editors, he reported a major discovery: “I have just realized,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “that for The New York Times to criticize itself is ontologically inconceivable!”

Don’t be put off by the $25 word phrase “ontologically inconceivable”; it simply means that the thing in question is, by definition, beyond criticism – i.e, is perfect, a quality usually reserved for the nature of God. Since God is perfect, criticism of Him, including self-criticism, is inconceivable.

What Kendall was saying, with impish humor, was that – at least in its own opinion – The New York Times was, journalistically speaking, God.

We have waited 45 years for a definitive test of Kendall’s proposition. But in the saga of Jayson Blair, the 27-year-old black Times reporter who was recently exposed as a wholesale fabricator of news reports, the Times has at last come face-to-face with the painful obligation to criticize itself.

For Blair’s multiple deceptions were not effectively concealed. They were known all over the newspaper. Mid-rank editors had warned editor Howell Raines that Blair must be stopped from writing for the Times – right now. But Raines, who clearly had a soft spot in his heart (or head) for the young prodigy, wouldn’t listen. So the misrepresentations went on, until another newspaper threatened to expose blatant instances of Blair’s plagiarism.

The Times made an enormous display of admitting the deceptions – a front-page story and four full inside pages describing the excruciating details. The top officials of the paper laid the blame squarely where, they clearly felt, it all belonged: on the sagging shoulders of Jayson Blair. Raines accused him of “a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving,” and publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger declared, “The person who did this is Jayson Blair.” Sulzberger went on to acknowledge that “We didn’t do this right. We regret it deeply. We feel it deeply. It sucks.”

For a moment it appeared that this confession of error might result in the inconceivable: self-criticism on the part of the Times. But the confession turned out to be empty rodomontade, devoid of any serious consequences. Raines asserted that he had not offered his resignation, and Sulzberger added that he would have rejected it if it had been offered. Nor has any other individual at the Times, save Blair, been forced to walk the plank.

So Willmoore Kendall was right after all.