Hiller, Wolinsky said, had been inviting groups of people to tell him how they thought I was doing as an editor, and how well I related to the newsroom. The news didn’t come as a shock to me. A few days before, Davan Maharaj, the paper’s business editor, had cryptically told me, “There are people who are supposed to be watching your back who are not watching your back.” And several others had appeared in my office in recent days with similar reports, indicating that Hiller was also asking people what they thought of Russ Stanton, the editor I had placed in charge of the newsroom’s Internet efforts and a favorite of both Hiller and FitzSimons. I knew Hiller and I knew how he operated; he’d often asked me about people in the same fashion. I knew that he and FitzSimons liked Stanton because he wasn’t, well, like me. I sat down and fired off an e-mail to Hiller letting him know that the reports had gotten back to me and that he was undermining me, feeding newsroom speculation that he was looking for an excuse to depose me.
What do You think about The Deal From Hell (2011)?
