Back to the Beltway   

Michael Oreskes has returned to the New York Times Washington bureau, this time as the boss. He plans to strengthen the bureau's investigative reporting and place greater emphasis on covering the culture of Washington.

AS METROPOLITAN EDITOR FOR THE past four years, The New York Times' Michael Oreskes (pronounced o-RES-kiss) commanded 90 reporters, 30 assigning editors and 20 others, deciding every day how to cover the city that never sleeps. It was a job he loved, he says, and one he reluctantly gave up.

Nevertheless, in September he took over the reins of the paper's 50-member Washington bureau, an operation with a smaller staff but enormous national clout. As bureau chief in a city that many Americans seem to be tuning out, Oreskes, 43, faces the challenge of making the news in the nation's capital compelling. And yet, it is still the New York Times, the paper that bears the burden of setting the agenda for the rest of the nation's news media.

After nearly five years of hands-off leadership by R.W. ``Johnny" Apple Jr., 63, a legendary figure better known for his prolific writing than his management skills, many in the bureau are thirsting for Oreskes' aggressive, take-charge style. Apple, a 34-year Times veteran who chose to move on, becomes the paper's roving political and cultural correspondent.

After two weeks on the job, Oreskes talked with AJR in his stark corner office, whose unadorned gray walls, like the bureau, await his imprint.

AJR: Did you always want to be a reporter?

MO: No. Actually, I studied economics [at City College of New York] and only became interested in reporting later. I was working my way through school selling photographs to various publications, including the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. In the course of selling, I got the great idea I'd be a campus stringer for the Daily News. I would use that as an opportunity to sell them my pictures. Well, my plan didn't quite work out the way I intended. They bought my stories but refused to take my pictures because they had 50 Guild photographers. That's how I ended up a writer.

AJR: So then was your goal the New York Times?

MO: No. I started working at the Daily News and had a grand time there. Did some fascinating things. Was the labor correspondent during the last years of George Meany. Was the City Hall bureau chief of the News. Then, in 1981, the Times offered me a job.

AJR: You started in 1981 as a metro reporter, then covered Albany, and did a tour in Washington, D.C., with the bureau between 1985 and 1990. What's different about covering Washington in 1997?

MO: It's interesting how much it's changed. One of the last things I did before I left Washington was a series of articles, ``The Trouble with Politics." It described how the system was breaking down, how it had become so nasty and brutish. I think we were right at the beginning of a process that's now taken on full force. Washington seems a very brittle place. People seem very isolated from each other. One of the best stories in Washington right now is Washington itself--what has happened to the government and the people. That's one of the reasons why I'm pushing the bureau to think more about the culture of the capital, the anthropology of the place. Profiles of people. Behind-the-scenes looks at how things really work. Those are a big part of what we need to do.

AJR: Such as the piece on Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu that ran the other day?

MO: Yes, as far as I know, she's the first member of the U.S. Senate who has to drop her child off at day care. Those kind of pieces tell you a lot about what it's really like here in a way the hard news of the day doesn't, as important as that is. But you need more. You need texture.

AJR: So how's the bureau different?

MO: I have a lot of good friends in this bureau. It is, I'm absolutely convinced, the best assembly of journalists that has ever existed in one place in this city. David Rosenbaum. Linda Greenhouse. David Johnston. Adam Clymer. An extraordinary group of people.

AJR: Better be careful who you leave out.

MO: I can keep going. Can I just run a list with the story?

AJR: So how is the morale here?

MO: You'll have to go in the room and ask them. I think it is a challenging time for us, and that means we have to inspire ourselves to do great things. We can't count on events to drive us. There isn't a Cold War that produces huge stories of the day. There isn't an economic crisis of a deep recession. There is no one driving issue dominating our day. We have to be self-starting.

AJR: Assuming you weren't the only person vying for this job, what was your pitch for why you should get it?

MO: You know, it may surprise people. There wasn't any vying for the job. Whatever [Times Editor] Joe Lelyveld considered in his own counsel, there never was a competition. That didn't happen.

AJR: So what did you say when he asked if you were interested?

MO: Well, the first thing I said was I wasn't sure I wanted to give up being Metro editor. It's one of the great jobs in journalism, a job I loved.

AJR: Aside from loving it, why didn't you want to give it up?

MO: Since I'm sitting here I ultimately decided this is a challenge worth taking. But local news is an extremely important part of newspapering. At the end of the day, a lot of the most important things newspapers do, they do at home. One of the scary things about newspapering these days is the extent to which some newspapers have begun to cut back even in their local news coverage.

AJR: You said you weren't sure you wanted the job. Why take it?

MO: It's a great time to do this job. It's a time when you have to use every tool in your journalistic case to reengage people. Americans aren't all that interested in Washington these days. It's a very sobering moment for the politicians. But it ought to be a very sobering moment for the journalists, too.

AJR: You are about 20 years younger than Johnny Apple. What difference will that make?

MO: (Long pause) Johnny is one of the really great journalists of his generation. He's an extraordinary man. I think I do have some of the sensibilities of my generation. The Cold War is a thing we grew up in. It's history to us now. Our world is probably more domestic. I put Bruce Springsteen on my CD player. I understand Johnny had opera.

AJR: Might there be a different approach?

MO: Of course. Johnny was one of the great interviewers. One of the great profilers. He's my model in many ways of great newspapering. A lot of what he did was very special. If we can reach the same standard Johnny Apple did at his peak, we will have done quite well. We're different people. We have different tastes. Different interests. On the other hand, we're both political junkies. Love politics. Like so many things, it won't be a radical change.

AJR: You recently stole [former Wall Street Journal Deputy Washington Bureau Chief] Jill Abramson to beef up your investigative reporting.

MO: Yep, that's how I spent my summer vacation.

AJR: What did you say or do to lure her away from what's arguably one of the other best newspapers in the country?

MO: I told her I wanted the best Washington bureau in American journalism. The toughest, strongest, most aggressive investigative report. The smartest.

AJR: Did you not have a Jill slot here before?

MO: She did not succeed anyone else. It was something I felt we needed. Frankly, it was Jill in a way that defined the job. When I came down to Washington, I spent a couple of weeks in the bureau and around Washington and asked people to describe to me what it is the New York Times most needed to do in Washington. People from a whole range of positions said the same thing: Hire Jill Abramson.

AJR: Did you know her?

MO: Never met her. Certainly knew her by reputation. I called her and had lunch at the Red Sage. We talked. I had her talk to a couple of other people at the Times. She came to visit me at my summer house in Connecticut. By the end of the summer, we made a deal. I'm very, very pleased. She'll be both writing and managing and working with other reporters.

AJR: Are you going to be writing?

MO: Not at the outset. Perhaps later. Right now my job is to lead the orchestra, 50 of the greatest musicians in journalism here, and we want to make sure the music is a symphony.

AJR: You've been quoted as saying the bureau needed more investigative clout.

MO: Jill is what I'm talking about. Jeff Gerth is one of the finest investigative reporters in the business. Don Van Natta has been doing some terrific stuff. But we do need to coordinate what we do, and that's going to be part of Jill's job.

AJR: Do you think the Times has gotten its clock cleaned on the Asian money story?

MO: I think we are going to produce a really fine Washington report. History I would leave to the historians.

AJR: What does that mean?

MO: It means we got Jill. We got Jeff. We are going to do a hell of a job.

AJR: Do you think the Times has covered that story as well as it could?

MO: I almost never think we do things as well as we could. I am a chronic, chronic discontented person.

AJR: Your poor wife.

MO: A fair observation.

AJR: What other changes have you already made in your short tenure?

MO: We've reorganized the desk. Adam Clymer is essentially deputy bureau chief. Jan Battaile, I gave her a portfolio that includes profiles, enterprise stories. She'll be working full time on those kind of stories. We hired the foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune, Thom Shanker, to be the new weekend editor in Washington. That's a high-level talent to steal from the Tribune.

AJR: Do you like stealing?

MO: I like getting the best talent from wherever I can get it.

AJR: You wrote back in the series about politics in 1990 that ``negativism has virtually doubled in the past 30 years." Now you have a chance to shape the coverage. What are you going to do about the negativism?

MO: There is a line. On one side of the line is the healthy skepticism, the proper distance that every journalist should have. On the other side of that line is a dripping cynicism that is often uninformed. That often replaces good reporting with a snide attitude. The heart of good newspapering is on the skeptical side of that line, and we have no business on the other side of that line.

Everything we do should have a certain skepticism to serve our readers. Nothing we do should be touched by that cynicism. That's a big order. Anything I can do to help people steer to one side of that line, and not the other side, I will do. That to me is one of the biggest things that has gone wrong in newspapering in the last 25 years--the substitution of cynicism for skepticism. It's not just about newspapering. It's a problem in society.

AJR: Can you give me an example of the cynicism?

MO: Cynicism is where the reporter shrugs his shoulder and says, ``We've heard that before. We know he's lying to us. So what's new?" Well, you know what, not everything every political figure says is a lie.

AJR: But don't editors demand a certain kind of cynicism?

MO: I think cynicism runs up and down the ladder in newsrooms, and lots of people are guilty of it. It is one of the principal jobs of an editor to help steer people to the bright side of the line, to the skeptical side of the line.

AJR: Are you interested in having New York Times reporters appearing on television shows and joining the punditry circles?

MO: Not the pundit routine. I think it's a lot of silly stuff on television. I'd stay far away from that. We are working, for example, with MSNBC on having reporters from the Times on television, describing the stories we are doing in the newspaper. I think that's a good, productive relationship.

AJR: So do you feel like you've died and gone to heaven?

MO: I don't know that I would call this heaven. No. I do think it's a great, exciting challenge.