Alum Retells Times Saga

Impressively, Seth Mnookin ’94 has turned a New York Times plagiarism scandal into riveting reading for those outside the insular world of journalism. Though the falsification of articles might not seem the stuff of riveting reading, Mnookin’s debut book, Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, is not only highly informative but also surprisingly entertaining to those unschooled in the nuances of newspapers.

Mnookin talked and answered questions about his debut book at the Harvard Coop on Wednesday, in front of a packed audience. “It gets more and more nervewracking every time I read, because I know more people” he said, noting the presence of many of his family members in the audience from his native Newton.

At the event, Mnookin read a passage from his book and answered questions about the inner workings of the Times as well as the current state of journalism in general.

Hard News is the story of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times in the spring of 2003 and its crippling effect on the nation’s most well-respected newspaper. Blair—under the tutelage of top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, who were ousted from the paper in the scandal’s wake—fictionalized large segments of many stories, including those on the front page; he often didn’t even visit locations, culling colorful details about locations from others’ articles.

Even with a shoddy journalistic record at the Times and his college and high school papers, Blair continued to be assigned high profile stories, including the Washington D.C. sniper case of late 2002. In this, one of the most important stories of his career, Blair attributed to numerous “anonymous” sources claims that were later refuted by law enforcement officials. In a less high-profile case, Blair’s colorful details eventually did him in, when a reporter from a regional newspaper noticed that Blair’s quotations about the home of the mother of a missing soldier in Iraq followed her own almost exactly.

Hard News uses the Blair scandal as the launching point of a broader examination of the workings of the Times, particuarly focusing on the rise and fall of Raines. As the executive editor of the Times from days before Sept. 11, 2001 to weeks after the Blair scandal first broke, Raines steered the paper to an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes in 2002 for its coverage of the 9/11 attacks. But his combative demeanor and favoritism, eclipsed by the paper’s success in the aftermath of Sept. 11, became his Achilles’ heel in the Blair case and eventually led to his termination.

The book goes beyond the modern politics of the Times and details its history as the nation’s first major objective news source. “The Times,” Mnookin writes, “is like Harvard or the New York Yankees. It so dominates our imagination that it has become an archetype of what it means to be a journalistic enterprise.”

Mnookin, 32, writes with an intense narrative drive and exactitude that makes the book riveting even for non-journalism junkies. Hard News is divided into three sections—“Before,” “Spring 2003” and “After”—and individual chapters within these sections begin with detailed individual narratives that are later linked to the broader plot. Though these transitions can at times seem too temporally driven—most of them begin with dates and their corresponding events—they do the trick, and keep the reader hooked in a story with tiny but salient details, such as the physical appearance of a particular reporter, or the layout of the Times’ cafeteria.

Mnookin wrote the book in about a year, though he says this was only possible because of his previous coverage and extensive notes culled from reporting on the scandal for Newsweek. “I didn’t need to start from scratch,” he says, “there was a lot I could build on right away.”

He adds, however, “if it were a standing start I couldn’t have done it in a year.”

In fact, expanding his journalism on the story into a full-fledged book didn’t initially appeal to Mnookin. “I wasn’t convinced [it] would be a great book,” he says, “because I thought people who were interested in [the story] had probably already heard and read” everything about it.

The idea of expanding his articles into what would become Hard News became more interesting to him, however, when he began looking at the bigger picture. “I started thinking about some of the larger issues that this brought out, including the relentless pressure on news organizations to increase their profits,” he says. He was also inspired by the appeal of famous newspaper stories that had become incredible yarns to non-media junkies, most notably All the President’s Men.

To Mnookin, the appeal of the Woodward and Bernstein story, and the more recent film Shattered Glass, about The New Republic journalist Stephen Glass who had fabricated a number of stories, “was this sense of telling a detective story through journalism, essentially crafting a thriller through a journalistic narrative.”

Mnookin wrote most of Hard News right here at Harvard—in Quincy House. He received a Joan Shorenstein fellowship from the Kennedy School of Government in the spring of 2004, during which time he lived in Quincy E-35 and worked on his manuscript.

Life After ‘Harvard and Heroin'

While an undergraduate, Mnookin lived in Adams House, “back when Adams was Adams, as we like to say,” he jokes. “I think my sophomore year there was when they finally closed the pool after one too many naked orgies.” Although he enjoyed his time at Adams prior to house randomization, he says that Quincy House was “shockingly diverse” in comparison to his undergraduate experience, what he sees as a positive change.

“When I was in Adams House it was a bunch of white humanities concentrators who did a lot of drugs and a lot of them were gay,” he says. “When I was in Quincy House I thought ‘this is much better.’ One of the good things about college is you meet a lot of people who aren’t like yourself, and I didn’t meet a lot of people who weren’t like myself.”

While an undergraduate, Mnookin was a history of science concentrator and a writer for Fifteen Minutes. Prior to working at the weekly magazine, he comped the the The Crimson’s news section, though after writing a story that made fun of a theft of cereal at Harvard Business School, he was told he was not cut out for the work. “I think I lasted about two days,” he jokes, “I was some punk-ass freshman coming in, and at the time I had dreadlocks and five earrings and blue toenails, and I was probably—not probably—a little bit full of myself.”

Mnookin became more interested in journalism after he wrote a feature on a Greatful Dead concert as a sophomore. “That was the first time I realized I could use newspapers for fun and profit and use it to get into concerts and to interview these people that I was totally obsessed with,” he says. “Over the next couple of years I just did more and more of that.”

After college, Mnookin began freelancing on his own, and went on to write full-time for Newsweek, as well as for The New Yorker, Slate, the New York Observer and other publications. His major autobiographical piece published in Salon, entitled “Harvard and Heroin,” detailed his drug experiences throughout his life, including his heroin addiction during his postgraduate years while living in New York and Boston. After a number of hospitalizations, including an incident in which a doctor said he’d “never seen anyone come in here in this condition and live,” Mnookin underwent treatment at a live-in rehabilitation clinic in Florida, and has been clean ever since.

Mnookin recounts in Hard News his casual acquaintance with Jayson Blair prior to the news of Blair’s downfall at the Times became public, the result of their mutual struggle with addiction. “I had heard that he was struggling to stay sober, and I was sympathetic; I had stopped using drugs and alcohol six years before, when I was in my mid-twenties,” he recounts in the book.

Mnookin understands the difficulties of entering the journalism world after Harvard, noting “it’s really competitive.” Nonetheless, he stressed the importance of broadening one’s hopes and working at a smaller publication rather than toiling away obscurely at a major one.

“I always tell people to go someplace smaller,” he says, “I’d rather write stories that I feel like are going to challenge me to be proud of a less glamorous place.” Even though it’s tough to break in, he adds, “you’ll be surprised at the amount of doors Harvard will open.”

—Staff writer Joe DiMento can be reached at dimento@fas.harvard.edu.