“Every executive editor who has tried to shake the dust of tradition from the Times finds himself assaulted in other publications with blind quotations attributed to ‘senior Times employees’ who are usually not within a mile of knowing what’s actually going on. It is a mystery to me how so many of these reports, which are often untrue, can be so readily believed at the Times, whose newsroom is supposedly the most sophisticated and journalistically exacting in the country, and how no thought seems to be given to the quality of the source (for instance, the New York Post) or to the often well-known foibles and envious natures of media writers at publications that habitually stick it to the Times.”

From an essay Raines wrote for The Atlantic almost a decade ago, after losing his job over Jayson Blair. Adds a new layer to Politico’s piece on Jill Abramson — and the conversation around it — doesn’t it?