Behind the Times (42 page)

In the days before Frankel and Lelyveld, department heads made their pitch and left. A core group composed of the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor, and three or four of their assistants, then made the decisions. Under Frankel and Lelyveld, the meetings opened up a bit. Department editors remained to debate story decisions. In Washington, the bureau chief regularly participated via speakerphone. Overseas correspondents on home leave came by, sitting in a rear row of chairs and listening to the give-and-take.

The meetings grew more fractious. Frankel let it be known that his editors “ought to be able to say anything, even dumb things,”
in the interests of a better page one. Still, Frankel was a majority of one and meetings seldom went past 6:00
P.M.
, while the Rosenthal meetings often ran eighty minutes or longer. In both regimes, page-one meetings sometimes became stuck on a point of journalistic arcana; like a broken record player, they lurched on for thirty or forty minutes without resolution. Rump sessions frequently followed as department editors drew senior editors aside and privately lobbied to reverse the decisions made a few moments earlier.

A jumble of hunches, conventions from the past, untestable assumptions, hard facts and unstated principles shaped page one. Senior
Times
editors agreed that, as Al Siegal said, “the lead stories virtually chose themselves.” The bigger the story in the editors’ judgment, the bigger the headline. This day, the 5:00
P.M.
meeting deemed nothing worth more than a one-column head: “Cuomo and LILCO/Sign a New Accord/To Shut Shoreham.” It was not earthshaking—rather, a minimally passable choice, “a story that won’t embarrass us,” one senior editor remembered thinking. As the lead story, Cuomo-LILCO was placed on the top right-hand side of the paper. The
Times
always tried to lead its front page with spot news. The off-lead, or second most important story, went on the left: “Bush Fails to Win Any New Votes/As Senate Fight Over Tower Boils.” It was a story of nonmovement, rescued in part by the accompanying photo of Bush and Tower, smiling. The Venezuelan riots story was placed in the middle of the page.
Times
market research suggested that page-center was a Bermuda Triangle for readers: Few people could recall what appeared there when asked by the researchers.

The rest of the page was unremarkable, if not outright boring: no reader-friendly features, no exclusives, no trend stories, no news analyses, no fallback to the Frankel rule, “If there’s no spot story, then go with the next most interesting story, period.” There was nothing, in short, to cause concern on the part of old-time editors wary of the intrusion of “un-
Times
-like” stories in the Frankel-era paper. This page one on this particular day did not violate the traditionalists’ rule: “The
New York Times
should report the news, it shouldn’t make news.”

One visiting correspondent came away from the page-one meeting thinking he had observed “the best and worst of the
Times.
” He was impressed by “the great collegiality of the meeting and the good paper that results from it.” At the same time, he was bothered by a process that “put such a premium on glibness.”
Well-spoken, well-prepared editors, able to argue for their stories clearly, won the contest for space. Other editors—“the ones who don’t give good meeting”—found that their offerings were rejected. The styles of individual editors, as much as the content of the presentation, subtly influenced story selection, or so the correspondent thought. A deputy editor from the correspondents’ desk tended to mumble his presentation, and on those days that the deputy represented the desk, its stories received less attention.

John Rothman, who spent forty-two years with the
Times
, the last ten as director of its archives, was explaining to a visitor in his office not long ago why some well-regarded journalists had left the paper. Most of the reasons offered were general to the point of opaqueness: Sydney Schanberg resigned shortly after “a publisher’s decision” to discontinue the New York City-affairs column that Schanberg was contributing to the
Times
’ Op-Ed page; Richard Eder, the theater critic, was removed from his reviewer’s post after “bad evaluations of his work.” The explanation for the departure of John Leonard, once the editor of the
Book Review
(as well as a daily book critic), unexpectedly cut through the bland recitation. “
Some people just aren’t good
Times
men.” Then, aware perhaps that he had revealed more about how the institutional
Times
sees itself than he wanted, Rothman corrected himself. “Some people aren’t good
organizational
men,” he said.

Schanberg went on to write a column for
New York Newsday
, continuing the same adversarial approach to the city’s real estate developers that upset publisher Punch Sulzberger. Eder spent a short time in exile in the Paris bureau of the
Times
before leaving the paper entirely to become a critic at large for the Los
Angeles Times.
There, in after-hours conversations, he shared with fellow workers his musings about the differences between the two
Times
es. On his way to meetings
with top editors at the
New York Times
, Eder remembered, “There was
always a sinking feeling in my stomach. I felt my bones afterward to see which ones might have been broken.” Later, after he joined the Los
Angeles Times
, Eder recounted, “I went to the editor and asked him what he wanted me to write, and I was told, ‘Anything you want.…’ Two years later I won the Pulitzer Prize.” The brilliant, erratic John Leonard struggled for a time with depression and alcoholism, but organized a productive career post-
Times.
Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Leonard balanced regular assignments from
New York
magazine (where he wrote television reviews), his column for
New York Newsday
(personal essays about literature and politics), and weekly appearances on the CBS program “Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt” (more commentary).

No one had to pass the hat for these three former
Times
men, or for ninety-nine out of one hundred other journalists, well known or unsung, male or female, who over the past two decades decided, or had it decided for them, that they were not “good
Times
men” and so moved on to other news organizations, to free-lance work, or out of journalism entirely.

Yet such experiences provoke curiosity about what the qualities of “good
Times
men” were. More generally, they raise questions about what it was like to work in the
Times
newsroom and why some men and women flourished and others left, in failure or frustration.

There is also a connection between
the conditions of news work at the
Times
and the news output of the
Times
—that is, the content of the stories themselves.
Times
’ editors proclaim their efforts to insure fairness and balance. No one questions their intentions; but they work at a subjective task. From the multiplicity of events in any given day, the collective newsroom extracts the stories it wants to tell, believes should be told, or thinks its readers are eager to hear. Journalists call this “news.” It is not “reality” but an artifact, someone’s story of what happened. In the
Times
newsroom, the selection is done by a company of almost one thousand men and women working under agreed-upon procedures. Who they are and what they are trained to value matters in the collection and publication of the news. This is not a stop-press bulletin. The cultural historian Robert Darnton points out how “the context of work” shapes the content of the news: The stories the newspaper tells depend on certain “inherited techniques of storytelling”—conventions passed on from older to younger journalists. Long before
Darnton, too, Walter Lippmann explained how the “processes” of journalism are intended to produce news as distinct from truth.

One of the most visible processes of the
Times
is the bureaucracy: The newsroom is vast and hierarchical. Many, many people oversee the output of many, many other people. Another obvious characteristic is the
Times
’ journalistic self-image; these are people who describe their work as stressful, competitive, and—above all—“important.” The editors’ attitude is that, as I’ve indicated, there’s no fundamental connection between the conditions of news work and the outputs of work, at least not one that they can’t anticipate and correct. The news is the news, and anyway, the
Times
is not that different from other places where intellectual work is done; it’s only bigger and better. Thus, when the behavioral scientist Chris Argyris conducted his interviews at the
Times
, he discovered that most
Times
people regarded any introspective analyses of their “condition” as
a waste of time—the same complaint Max Frankel would voice a generation later. Yet reporters described themselves and their colleagues to Argyris as “highly competitive,” “partially paranoid,” “out to show the emperor to be without clothes.” Some reporters, intent upon succeeding within the
Times
system, said that they would be willing to commit “shady acts” to get a story. They acknowledged that, under pressure and vying for the attention of their superiors (and for good display in the paper), they might sometimes “magnify” certain elements of the story.

When Argyris then inquired how such predispositions affected the way the
Times
reported reality—how it covered “the news”—the line went dead: His subjects professed not to know what he was talking about. They argued that all reporting was incomplete and subjective because it was done under daily pressure. In Argyris’s words, “They polarized the issue”; they exaggerated the depth, pervasiveness, and inevitability of distortion—and then dismissed the subject. “There was no sense discussing ‘subjectivity’ because nothing could be done about it.” The reader must take the
Times
“as is.” This exasperated Argyris. To stretch the point a bit, assume the consumer was not a reader of the
New York Times
but rather a passenger flying TWA. The airline and its unionized pilots are involved in a contract dispute over seniority. The passenger remains unconcerned about the details as long as the disagreement doesn’t affect overall TWA flight operations or the crew’s performance in getting the aircraft from city A to city B. So, too, with the conditions of work at the
Times
(absent any life-threatening possibilities).
When the product, the news, is reliable and complete, the operations of the bureaucracy and the morale of the newsroom are not of great concern to the reader. They are the grist of insiders’ gossip, the stuff of Page Six of the
New York Post
, or
Spy
magazine. The personal becomes public only when it affects the outputs of paper.

Robert Darnton is on the Princeton faculty, where his specialty is French history; he also knows the
Times
newsroom. His father was a
Times
combat correspondent who was killed during World War II (a wall plaque near the foreign desk commemorates his death). His brother, John, a
Times
senior editor, supervised the paper’s metropolitan coverage from 1988 to 1991. Beginning in 1959, Robert Darnton worked as a police reporter for the
Newark Star-Ledger
and the
Times
before leaving journalism in 1964 for a scholar’s
career. Ten years later, Professor Darnton reflected on what reporter Darnton had learned of the “sociology of the newsroom.” The
Times
, he concluded, was “an editor’s paper.” New arrivals—young, eager, malleable—quickly pick up the not-so-hidden clues to what the news desks want. They learn, through the patterns of rewards and punishments, the values of “the good
Times
man”—just as employees of large companies like IBM or Citicorp learn what’s expected of them. The editors mete out plum assignments and public pats on the back, or withhold these reinforcements. The carrot or the stick, observed by one’s peers, an important audience, led as well to their approval, or scorn. Among the editors’ most tangible rewards are merit pay increases and bonuses. All organizations use the power of the purse; the
Times
has enshrined the process. The Publisher’s Awards, cash prizes for the best work each month, are posted on all bulletin boards. In the years after Robert Darnton left, and particularly during the Max Frankel era, the editors’ favorites were assiduously cultivated. In 1990 Frankel created a new “senior writer and photographer” category, outside the provisions of the
Times
contract with the Newspaper Guild. This allowed him to single out nearly two dozen men and women and pay them $15,000 to $20,000 more than the Guild’s top scale. (In 1993, the minimum salary for beginning reporters at the
Times
was $60,264.)