BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. For more than a century, the New York Times has been reporting the news without fear or favor worldwide. For the past three and a half years, much more often than it would like, the Times has also become the news in one journalistic scandal and misstep after another. Author Seth Mnookin, who covered the paper for Newsweek Magazine during this turbulent period believes he's found the source of the problem, which he identifies in his new book Hard News: the Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media. He joins us now. Seth, welcome back to OTM.

SETH MNOOKIN: Thank you for having me.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, let's review for a moment some of the bad things that happened at the New York Times over a period of about two years. Young reporter Jayson Blair was caught fabricating at least 36 stories in the National section. Feature writer Rick Bragg was caught doing very colorful descriptions of people and places he'd barely visited, relying on notes from uncredited stringers. Judith Miller was outed as an uncritical purveyor of Ahmad Chalabi's since-discredited intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, if your book has a central premise, it's that these events are not isolated, that they were rooted in one central problem. And that problem was named . . .

SETH MNOOKIN: I think you're getting to Howell Raines and his leadership. He took over the paper the week before September 11, 2001 and then his tenure lasted until June, 2003 when he was fired in the wake of Jayson Blair.

BOB GARFIELD: Your book so indicts Raines for arrogance, egotism, narcissism. Could it possibly be so simple, and could he possibly have been so bad at his job? Would these three otherwise isolated incidents not have happened had Raines not been executive editor of the New York Times?

SETH MNOOKIN: Let's go through them one by one. I think it's impossible to be a hundred percent certain about every story every day. What was unique I think about Jayson's situation is that there were warning signs that cropped up again and again during his six month sort of reign of journalistic terror. Jill Abramson, who at the time was the Washington Bureau Chief, raised questions about a story that Jayson wrote about the Washington DC-area sniper, and because Howell Raines and Jill Abramson had their own inter-personal problems, Raines didn't want to hear it. John Landman, the Metro editor, who had been Jayson's direct supervisor for several years, also had a lot of concerns about Jayson. It's unclear if those concerns made their way to Howell Raines, but what is clear is when Howell was sending 'attaboy memos to Jayson about a story that ended up being one of the ones that was problematic, he cc'd in Jill Abramson and John Landman. So, if Jayson had been working under Joe Lelyveld or Bill Keller, would one or two bad stories have made their way into the paper? Probably. Would 36 stories have made their way into the paper? I think that's less likely.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, how about Rick Bragg and Judith Miller?

SETH MNOOKIN: Well, Rick Bragg I think in some weird way got a raw deal. Rick had always been a reporter who was treated differently from other reporters. He was given more leeway, he was given more help on his stories. So I think what happened with Bragg is, the rules changed in the middle of the game for him. With Judith Miller, I think that's an excellent example of something that likely would not have happened under a different executive editor. She is an expert on the Middle East and also on terrorism and any newspaper would have deployed her to cover that story. However, the editor, who was also an expert, Steve Engleberg, and who had worked with Miller on stories and on books, who knew this subject as well as she did, had left the paper because he couldn't work with Howell Raines. And so, there was an example where the one person inside the institution who had the knowledge to say, "you know what, why don't we ask ourselves why Chalabi is pushing this story, why don't we ask ourselves if Iraq actually has the capacity to make these roving weapons factories," he was gone. He had gone to the Portland Oregonian. The man who replaced Steve Engleberg as an investigative editor, a guy named Doug Franz, also left and went to the LA Times, because he didn't want to work under Howell Raines either. And that to me is a very clear example of where you see a ripple effect of what happened under Howell Raines's leadership.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, I must say I found your book absolutely delicious and filled with just the most wonderful detail, frankly a lot of gossip value, - [Both speak at once]

SETH MNOOKIN: Sure.

BOB GARFIELD: -for someone who professionally finds fault for a living.

SETH MNOOKIN: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: I'm wondering, though, outside of those of us in this very small circle of media naval-gazers, the book really has a larger significance.

SETH MNOOKIN: I think so and I hope so. I think the big issue facing the media world right now is the fact that you have these institutions like the New York Times and other great daily papers, network news, that are loosing their audiences. And they're trying to figure out a way to remain relevant. And to me one of the big stories of Howell Raines's tenure is he got that position by selling himself to the publisher Arthur Sulzberger as someone who had figured out a way to revitalize, and these were terms he used, the New York Times, to make it more "exciting," to "sex it up," and I think what you saw is a product that was changing, that was no longer giving readers what they had come to rely upon and expect. And the fact that Raines is no longer at the New York Times doesn't change the notion and the reality I think that all of these old guard journalistic institutions are going to need to find a way to hold on to their core values, and at the same time convince people who are under 30 that these are products that can have meaning in their lives as well.

BOB GARFIELD: So is the lesson in your judgment not to pander to audiences, and instead to rely on those core values?

SETH MNOOKIN: I don't think it needs to be an either/or. One of the interesting things if you look at the New York Times now is that Bill Keller has instituted a lot of the ideas that Howell Raines was talking about. One of the things he really wanted to focus on was updating the culture pages, revitalizing the Book Review, having more pop culture and popular music and less opera and less classical recitals. And all that has happened under Bill Keller. I think you can be mindful of what your audience is looking for, and at the same time retain your core identity as an institution. The Times' core identity is its reliability, its completeness and its accuracy.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Well, Seth, thank you very much.

SETH MNOOKIN: Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Former Newsweek media reporter Seth Mnookin is the author of Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media.