HOWELL RAINES’S appearance on “The Charlie Rose Show” last Friday was filled with delicious moments. Andrew Sullivan (channeling Leon Wieseltier) has done a small dissection and other journalists have merrily piled on. It now seems possible that Raines could become not just a disgraced editor, but might actually descend into Pat Buchanan/Jack Kemp/Ramsey Clark territory. (For the full effect, read the transcript.) Some of the highlights from the interview included Raines saying that “we should all strive for inner humility” and then a short while later explaining that he has “a passion for newspapering that sometimes comes across as an aggressive or adversarial intensity.”
He told Rose that his overarching goal had been to increase the Times’ readership from 1.2 million to something like 80 million (evidently there are “Times statistics” showing that 80 million people in the United States “have the intellectual appetite for a paper like the New York Times”), but he failed to mention that even with September 11 and two wars to pad the books, circulation at the Times dropped by nearly 5 percent on his watch.
