The fear and self-loathing often felt by some southerners over the region's past has been playing out in some of the most unlikely places of late — for instance, on the front page and in the editorial-board room of the New York Times. Take the Jayson Blair fiasco. At a meeting with Times staffers, executive editor Howell Raines said: "[Y]ou have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama… gave him [Blair] one chance too many… When I look into my heart for the truth of that the answer is yes." Raines's admission — that he let his personal guilt over having being born a southerner override his stewardship of the nation's premier newspaper — shows just how deep these feelings run.
But such guilt-trips aren't just affecting the Times internally; they're having a direct impact on American institutions and businesses. At the same meeting, Raines told his staff: "Fear is a problem to the extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news."
And no wonder, when one looks at the
Times's virulent coverage of Augusta National. The paper had editorially taken up Martha Burk's crusade to force the private, all-male club to admit a woman member. Given the "bad news" that two of his columnists didn't completely agree with the paper's line and had written so, Raines and his underlings killed their columns. After a firestorm of criticism, the columns eventually ran, but the damage had already been done to the vital separation of power between the paper's columnists and its editorial board. Meanwhile, Augusta's officials were forced back into the glare of the spotlight when all they wanted to do was host a prestigious golf tournament enjoyed by millions.
In the best news organizations, stories bubble up from reporters digging for scoops. But, speaking further to his troubled staff, Raines said: "You believe the newsroom is too hierarchal, that my ideas get acted on and others get ignored." This could explain the Times's borderline stalking of southern companies like HealthSouth, based in Raines's native Alabama.
The paper's coverage has attacked former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy personally, noting that employees hated his Monday morning meetings on company performance (the Times claims they referred to them as "beatings"). After all, how dare the CEO ask how the company's money was being spent?
The Times also published what amounted to a valentine to the prosecutor in the case, Alice Martin, noting that "she wrested guilty pleas from 11 top HealthSouth employees, including all five of the company's former chief financial officers, in just over seven weeks." But when Martin was scolded by the judge after bragging to reporters about more guilty pleas to come, the Times downplayed it as "one bump in the road."
Even more telling, after an eleven-day hearing to decide whether the government could freeze Scrushy's assets, thereby denying him money to mount a defense, the judge ruled in Scrushy's favor. The judge accused prosecutors of trying to mix the civil and pending criminal cases against Scrushy, and admonished them for it. And this story was not even mentioned it the Times — I guess Raines didn't want to hear or read any bad news that day.
All this plays into the self-hating southerner theory: The notion that anyone from the region who amasses a fortune must have done it illegally — it had to have been a con game. This despite Healthsouth's continued operating profit ($1.1 billion) and profit margin (25 percent), and the fact that Scrushy has yet to be indicted.
No matter — CEO Scrushy was supposed to know what every single accountant in his employ was doing at every second of the day, according to the Times's coverage. This is an interesting stance, coming from an organization that was blind to an employee's gross malfeasance for so long that when it all finally came to light, documenting it took four full pages.
— Martha Zoller hosts The Martha Zoller Show on WDUN AM 550 in Gainesville, Ga. She is a regular panelist on Fox 5 Atlanta's The Georgia Gang and is seen regularly on CNN and the Fox News Channel.
