Raines falls from Times. (Insider Report).

Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, top editors at The New York Times, resigned on June 5th following a string of high-profile scandals involving plagiarism and bogus reporting by prominent Times reporters.

The most notorious of those scandals, of course, involved reporter Jayson Blair. The Times protected and promoted him during his 18-month rampage of fabrication and plagiarism. Resigning on the heels of Blair's overdue termination was Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Rick Bragg, who admitted taking byline credit for a story written by another reporter.

But as Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur noted in the June 6th Providence Journal, the Times' conspicuous self-flagellation over the Blair and Bragg affairs "covers up far more serious transgressions by the 'paper of record.' A psychologist would probably say that such a histrionic 'confession' recalls the criminal who pleads to a lesser crime to escape prosecution for a more serious one."

MacArthur cites the example of Judith Miller, assigned by the Times to cover the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) beat. "Since Sept. 8, 2002, Miller hasn't heard a scare story about Iraq that she didn't believe - especially if it was leaked by her friends at the White House," recalls MacArthur. "On that day, Miller and her Times colleague Michael Gordon helped ...