The animating principle was a sense that the editorial pages were the place where The Times most directly expressed its conscience as an institution, something exercised as a public trust. Whatever readers thought of the editorials' conclusions, it was regarded as essential that readers believed those conclusions were reached honestly and dispassionately.
Unfortunately, the system that assured this has been whittled away over the years, and recently the editorial pages were placed directly and solely under the publisher's supervision.
If you've been following the rather turgid little soap opera that Martinez has created around himself, this little bit of history won't strike you as a digression.
To summarize: Martinez resigned in pique after The Times publisher, David D. Hiller, told him he couldn't go forward with a Current section that was being guest-edited by Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. Hiller intervened when it was learned that Martinez has been dating a Hollywood publicist whose firm represents the producer. In fact, the agency obtained Grazer's business after Martinez's girlfriend's boss facilitated the arrangement between the producer and The Times.
Hiller may have been slow to see a preposterous idea masquerading as an innovation -- there's a lot of that going around these days -- but he had no trouble at all recognizing an ethical train wreck when he saw it coming.
The irony is that, since his abrupt resignation Thursday, Martinez has been posting a kind of serial apologia for his giddy behavior. He told the New York Times, for example, that he had been victimized by -- among many other things -- "a perception that Hiller is trying to suck up to Hollywood and advertisers."
Funny, but it isn't the publisher who was dating a Hollywood publicist.
Martinez's real villains are cabals of newsroom reporters who he alleges, in a series of rambling Internet posts, are attempting to take control of the editorial pages. Strangely enough, two of the scheming journalists Martinez singles out in a post-resignation e-mail to the LA Observed website are Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein ... and me.
It's always a compliment, of course, to be linked with my old friend Henry Weinstein. That said, to the extent a point can be discerned in this latest of Martinez's exiting tantrums, it's that he believes the separation between The Times' newsroom and the editorial pages is insufficient. That's a debatable point, but I'm mystified as to what it has to do with the rather rudimentary conflict of interest that led to Martinez's resignation.
Further -- and also for the record -- I've never exchanged a word with Andres Martinez nor even met him. Similarly, I don't think I know a single editorial writer, nor could I name one. That seems fairly "separate" to me.
In fact, like his resignation, Martinez's difficulties were entirely volitional and had nothing whatsoever to do with The Times' structural problems -- real or imagined. What isn't imagined is the recklessness he displayed toward basic ethic strictures and the anger he's now displaying at The Times as an institution and toward its senior business and news executives, simply because he was caught out.
Like most of my colleagues at The Times, I'm fundamentally uninterested in other people's personal lives, but I've always subscribed to the late Abe Rosenthal's standard for journalists: I don't care whether my colleagues sleep with elephants, so long as they don't cover the circus.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
