Editorial: THE MEDIA: No Raines, No Thunder.(resignation of Howell Raines, New York Times editor)(Editorial)

Five weeks after the Jayson Blair scandal broke, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, executive and managing editors of the New York Times, resigned. In Trollope's novels the voice of authority that lays down the law for Victorian England is called the Thunderer (read the Times of London). The name is both an honorific and a joke. How big are these tempests, really, outside their media teapots? But the sudden end of Raines and Boyd does illuminate larger journalistic trends.

The Times's unraveling was accomplished, in part, by the Internet -- by the blog of ex-Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, who criticized Raines for months, and by Times reporters themselves posting their gripes online. Yet most of the dynamics were very old. Other newspapers relished the travails of their rival: Howard Kurtz's Washington Post column was another media Wailing Wall, and the Wall Street Journal was pursuing its own story on the Times when Raines and Boyd finally quit. Raines, who had irked his reporters with his highhandedness, lost their confidence by associating them with a sociopath. The Sulzberger family, which controls 70 percent of the Times's stock, reacted to that loss of confidence. Perhaps the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., felt family confidence in himself ebbing. (If the Times is a family-run business without internal tensions, it is the first in history.) Note to future Raineses: Jerks must be successful; screwups must be otherwise admired.

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