Behind the Times (20 page)

In the third-floor newsroom, Mark Landler, twenty-three, had reached an improbable point in his career as a news assistant in the
Times’
business-news department. After eighteen months of answering telephones, running to the morgue for clips, and doing the other scut work of a copy person, Landler had worked up a big story on his own. Two weeks before, Landler handled one of the scores of daily calls that come to the
Times’
business-news reporters. Typically, public relations people are on the line, to request coverage or remind the
Times
of a press release or photo opportunity. This time, the caller was a private citizen. She introduced herself as Mrs. Terry Rakolta, of Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. She said she wanted to talk to Randall Rothenberg, the
Times
advertising columnist. Her name meant nothing to Rothenberg, who was preparing to go on vacation; he handed off Rakolta to Landler. The story she passed on to the news assistant was now being pitched by the business-news desk for fronting on page one.

As Rakolta told Landler, early in the evening of Sunday, January 15, she was sitting in her living room with her three young children. They had been grazing across the television dial when she clicked to the local station carrying the Fox network’s comedy hit, “Married … with Children.” Rakolta remembered that she was “appalled” by a sequence featuring a woman, dressed only in bra, panties, and garter belt, being ogled by two men. Rakolta told Landler that she decided to monitor “Married … with Children,” to see what else was going during television’s “family” viewing hours. She observed, and duly recorded, “references to condoms and to homosexuality,” scenes built around-Barbie and Ken dolls in (toy) bed together, and locker-room jokes about sex and body functions (“Q: What do older women have in common with ‘dog doo’? A: The older they are, the easier it is to pick them up”). “They are saying women are ‘crap,’ ” Rakolta remembered thinking, angrily.

Rakolta tried complaining to the local station; the switchboard referred her to the Fox network offices in Los Angeles, where a sympathetic secretary gave Rakolta the name of a senior producer
at the production company responsible for “Married … with Children.” The producer told Rakolta the program was intended to be “a body show.” If she didn’t like it, she shouldn’t watch. Rakolta then wrote to the CEOs of the companies who were among the fifty leading advertisers on national television, complaining about the sexual innuendo of the programs that carried their ads. A score wrote back; several said that they shared her concern. The president of Coca-Cola pledged that his company would review its commitments in the light of Rakolta’s letter, and remove advertising on “inappropriate” programming. Rakolta told all this to Landler. Even a fresh-faced clerk could recognize a story with a strong narrative line: Lone, angry housewife takes on network television—and wins. The story appealed to
Times’
editors on many levels, including its unflattering portrait of television. Still, they worried; the story was the work of a news assistant. Landler was asked to make doubly sure that Rakolta wasn’t “the point man for some larger movement.” Satisfied that she wasn’t, the senior editors ran the “Housewife” story on page one of the editions of March 2.

For all of Landler’s checking, the
Times
missed the real story. Terry Rakolta, the “lone angry housewife,” was married to one of the wealthiest contractors in Michigan. Her investment broker had supplied the corporate names and addresses (after assembling a computer list of the relatively small number of companies responsible for 70 percent of national TV advertising). Her letters went out with a professional polish supplied by her husband’s staff and his office word processors. The CEOs had indeed responded soothingly to her letter; but the corporate promises of “review” proved meaningless. Only one advertiser changed its time-buying schedule—while a half dozen other new advertisers joined the line to buy commercial time on “Married … with Children.” As for Coca-Cola, it ran twenty-three separate ads on “Married” over the next twelve months.

The
Times
was also unable to tell the story of the power of its own front page in the narrow, self-referential world of media. Rakolta had shared her story with the advertising-news department of the
Wall Street Journal
at the same time she talked to the
Times.
The
Journal
ran a one-paragraph item two weeks before the
Times
article. When Landler called to interview her, Rakolta concluded he was doing a short item as well. After she learned that he had called several people in the Detroit area to ask about her—including her congressman—she remembered thinking, “He’s certainly going to a lot of effort for a three-line story.” Then,
on the morning of Thursday, March 2, the Rakolta phone began ringing at 6:00
A.M.
; one after another, neighbors, relatives, friends from the country club, called to tell her that she was “on page one of the
New York Times.
” A Bloomfield Hills police squad car came to her door, and the patrolman delivered a message from Ted Koppel in Washington: He was trying to get in touch with her to invite her on “Nightline” (The Rakoltas’ home phone was unlisted, and ABC News had asked the police to help out). In addition to “Nightline,” her story was also featured on “The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” the “Donahue” show, and the “Sally Jessy Raphael Show.” The BBC did a special report. One of Rakolta’s friends from Bloomfield Hills, in the Swiss Alps on ski holiday, saw Rakolta’s face on television during a German-language news broadcast. Unable to understand what was being said, the friend concluded that Rakolta had been taken hostage by terrorists, “for why else would anyone put Terry on TV?”

“I don’t like it in the
Times
!”

That was the unmistakable, proprietary Sulzberger style, expressed by the father, Punch, and mirrored in more recent years in the son, Arthur. Punch Sulzberger’s comments about skimpy lingerie and the habits of lesbian couples set a tone for the
Times
; the father and the son’s monitory notes influenced the words and pictures that made up the surface of the paper, at least for those subjects that interested each man. Important as these news pages were—hundreds of thousands of people each day relied on the
Times
for a reasonably reliable, and balanced, accounting of local, national, and world developments—there was another, enduring
Times.
Behind the daily face of the news existed the heart and soul of the paper, the ideas that were its animating spirit.

Formally, the principles of the
Times
were expressed on the editorial page of the paper, in endorsements for political office and stands on matters of public policy. As is the case at scores of other newspapers, the
Times’
publisher had the ultimate authority to make the paper’s endorsements, set the paper’s overall aims and decide its specific editorial campaigns. In practice, the publisher’s real authority lay in the power to pick the editors to execute these tasks—the men (and one or two women) who carry forward the vision of the paper. The way this
authority was exercised at the paper in the late 1980s and early 1990s made reading the
Times
a challenging task, and especially enjoyable if the reader knew what to look for. Punch Sulzberger continued to run the paper together with his top appointees, while his son was putting together his own team of editors and managers, Arthur loyalists, who comprised a government in waiting. The good Harvard doctor Chris Argyris, with his interest in living systems, would have profited immensely had he been conducting his interventions during this period. As it was, Argyris never probed quite deep enough to understand how the Sulzbergers’ custodial role shaped the institutional
Times
, its “objective” news reports and its editorial policies.

Father and son both valued the power of the memorandum. The younger Sulzberger’s interests were at once broader than his father’s and more specifically focused. He involved himself across the board, and socialized with his employees in a way his father never did. The older Sulzberger was close to one or two associates at any given time. Young Arthur’s shadow cabinet included: Lance Primus, the president of the paper and, like Arthur, only in his early forties; the columnist Anna Quindlen, whose work appeared on the Op-Ed page; the architectural critic Paul Goldberger (promoted to cultural editor in late 1990, and effectively allowed to consolidate the
Times’
arts and entertainment coverage under his control); and the managing editor—and next in line to be the top editor when Max Frankel retired—Joseph Lelyveld. The elder Sulzberger had been selective in his editorial interests.
Not every subject captured Punch Sulzberger’s attention—“very fortunately for those of us he didn’t bother with,” according to a member of the cultural staff. Punch Sulzberger seemed to concern himself with those areas, this reporter said, where “significant advertising was involved, for example, the theater and movies, two subjects related to the business health of the
Times.
”

In his turn, Arthur Sulzberger worried less about advertising—he had others do that for him—and more about the
Times’
circulation and its hiring policies. These concerns were, as Arthur Sulzberger saw it, complementary halves of the same overriding social interest. The pursuit of a wider audience and of a racially and sexually diverse newsroom was part of his plan to broaden the
Times’
appeal as it moved into the new century. The paper was by tradition edited for the middle and upper-middle classes; Arthur Sulzberger wanted a more egalitarian
Times.

The Sulzberger-family principles were never spelled out imperiously, in the manner of, say, a William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s messages enunciating policy for the Hearst newspapers were relayed over open wires from his lieutenants and usually began: “The Chief says.…” Punch Sulzberger spoke privately, obliquely, and at times with an element of guile. In a way, Sulzberger was a “Hidden Hand” publisher, to borrow the phrase the Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein used in his revisionist view of the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The public Eisenhower appeared as a fatherly figure, friendly, and—with his fractured syntax and slightly out-of-it manner—a bit of a bumbler. According to Greenstein, however, “behind Eisenhower’s seeming transcendence of politics was a vast amount of indirect, carefully concealed effort to exercise influence.” The private Eisenhower was manipulative, letting others give the lecture, do the dirty work, or take the fall: “The Hidden-Hand Presidency.” Punch Sulzberger developed a similar behind-the-scenes style, particularly when dealing with matters that touched on the
Times’
economic well-being. By contrast, his son’s hand was seldom as hidden, perhaps as much because of the changed circumstances at the paper as the differing personalities of the two men. Punch Sulzberger, a social conservative in a tumultuous period, consciously lowered the
Times’
voice. Arthur Sulzberger, energetic and an activist at a time when American society seemed exhausted and wary of change, tried to push the
Times
into more high-profile stands.

The year 1963, when Punch Sulzberger took over as publisher of the
Times
, marked the beginning of what turned out to be a decade of unprecedented upheaval: assassinations, civil rights demonstrations, the unpopular (and ultimately unwinnable) Vietnam war, and the birth of the environmental movement with its demands for greater “corporate responsibility.” In the early 1970s, the start of Sulzberger’s second decade as publisher coincided with the Watergate scandals and the impeachment proceedings that forced the resignation of Richard Nixon. Then came the OPEC oil shock and the fiscal crisis in New York City. While these were exhilarating times journalistically, they were not cost-free for a newspaper of the
Times’
standing. The press during these years became an object of some hostility; feelings went beyond the old pattern of blaming the messenger for the bad news. Along with other leading news organizations, the
Times
invited anger
when it departed from the political consensus that had held during the cold war years, and began questioning U.S. policy in Vietnam. The
Times
startled the establishment still more when the paper half turned its back on the official news it regularly processed and vigorously began generating important stories out of Washington. The tradition of independent journalism goes back to the early twentieth-century muck-rakers and even earlier to the abolitionists and urban reformers of nineteenth-century America. But the establishment wasn’t accustomed to seeing such investigative energy on the part of an institution, like the
Times
, considered one of its own. By then, of course, the establishment itself had split on Vietnam.