Gray Lady Down (39 page)

Yet talk was cheap and intended only for the ears of those outside the organization who had loosed a crescendo of criticism on the paper’s political and cultural bias. Liberals continued to dominate hiring and to set the tone of the newsroom, encouraging what the 2005 Pew report on media trends called “liberal groupthink.” While the
Times
readily hired young journalists from the
Washington Monthly,
the
American Prospect
and other liberal
farm teams, as well as the sons and daughters of well-connected members of liberal New York café society, it did not recruit from
National Review
or the
Weekly Standard.

Those few with conservative opinions or life experience who did get recruited—along with their “nonstandard narrative,” as some at the
Times
put it—told Okrent that “they were constantly made aware of their differences, much as black and Hispanic journalists I [Okrent] have known have experienced a persistent feeling of separateness from many of their white colleagues, not because of any racism but simply because of the dissimilarities in their backgrounds, and in the specific perspective they bring to their work because of that background.”

The plain truth is that the only kind of diversity the paper really embraces is that of race and ethnicity. Indeed, an official report on the Jayson Blair episode included “A Note on Affirmative Action,” an appendix by Roger Wilkins, an activist who had become an urban affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board. Wilkins maintained that staff recruitment occurred within a culture where it was taught that “white men were the only people qualified to carry out the serious business of the world.” Thirty-five years of affirmative action had “blunted” but not eradicated “the preferences and prejudices that produced such results,” he argued, and therefore, “The countercultural forces of affirmative action and diversity programs are still necessary to assemble the kind of news gathering staff required to produce excellent journalism.”

As for ideological diversity, the Credibility Committee report of 2005 admitted that “when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, [the resulting] monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.” The report said the paper needed to create a procedure to avoid “conveying an impression of one-sidedness.”

In April 2008, the public editor Clark Hoyt still saw problems with the news/opinion divide. “The Times, like most newspapers, long ago ventured far from the safe shores of keeping opinions
only on the opinion pages,” he wrote. “The news pages are laced with columns, news analysis, criticism, reporter’s notebooks, memos, journals and appraisals—all forms that depart from the straightforward presentation of facts and carry the risk of blurring the line between news and opinion—a line that I believe is critical to the long-term credibility of any news organization.”

Even so, a succession of top editors have gone on the record denying there is bias at the
Times.
At a 2005 advertising convention, Bill Keller extolled the paper for practicing “a journalism of verification” rather than one of “assertion,” and for maintaining “agnosticism” about where a story may lead. In a 2007 online Q&A, “Talk to the Newsroom,” Keller returned to the subject in observations laced with ambivalence. “It would indeed be preposterous to argue that The Times does not have a liberal editorial page, or that a majority of the columnists (with a couple of outstanding exceptions) do not tend liberal. But it’s just plain wrong to say that the newsroom is ‘liberal’—in the sense that it toes a certain political or ideological line. Despite what readers might hear from the clamorous partisans of the left and right, reporters have no license to insinuate their politics or ideology into news stories.”

It was now possible to hear the boots of the party line clicking in unison. In 2008, the political editor Richard Stevenson maintained that his staff “represents all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs and because we all work so closely and in such a fishbowl we all tend to keep one another on the straight and narrow.” And in 2009 the standards editor Craig Whitney demonstrated the paper’s institutional denial when he admitted that most of the paper’s staff had “blind spots (mostly in the right eye),” but said that if “we live up to our vows of political celibacy in the news columns, you shouldn’t be able to say that a news article in The Times has a liberal bent—or a conservative one.”

A failure to achieve the promised transparency and accountability was very much on display in the egregious coverage of such incidents as the Duke rape case and the Fort Hood incident. But even if the editorial efforts at an internal cleansing had ever really taken hold, they would still be akin to rearranging deck chairs on
a badly listing ship. The real problem at the
Times
comes down to what might be called, for lack of a better term, the armaments of political correctness that crowd its newsroom: the subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Americanism, anti-bourgeois hauteur, hypersensitivity toward “victim” groups, double standards, historical shallowness, intellectual dishonesty, cultural relativism, moral righteousness and sanctimony. Journalists are supposed to have an adversarial relationship to the institutions they cover, but when it turns into a reflexive oppositionalism, at odds with the middle register of American society and its values, there’s a problem.

Unfortunately for the
Times,
a failure to correct its biases has converged with a financial crisis of existential proportions, one that dwarfs the downturn of the 1970s when Abe Rosenthal had his nightmares about waking up one morning and there being no
New York Times.
The fact that it is a time of wrenching change in the newspaper industry as a whole offers no consolation. A series of newsroom embarrassments and a consistent pattern of bias have hurt the
Times
as a brand, and this, along with a dubious business strategy, has made it more vulnerable to the depredations of Wall Street. This could mean that the
Times
and its unique corporate governance, with the Sulzbergers dominating the board and the shareholding structure, may not survive in their current form.

During the flush years of the 1990s and early 2000s, the
Times
made several bad business decisions that now weigh heavily on its balance sheet
.
It bought the
Boston Globe
in 1993 and then tried to sell it, but stepped back after the bids were deemed too low. It passed up an opportunity to invest in Google, and also passed on a chance to buy part of
Amazon.com
because the move would have alienated one of its biggest advertisers, Barnes and Noble. In an effort to make itself less likely to be challenged by outside shareholders, the paper’s board of directors endorsed a buy-back of
Times
stock just at the point that its share price started to slide sharply, a move which tapped corporate coffers more than expected. Another blunder was to begin the process of capitalizing
and constructing its new corporate headquarters on 40th Street in midtown Manhattan, a $600 million skyscraper that many analysts thought was beyond its means, in the middle of its financial malaise. Worse, it raised capital for the new building by selling the old one on 43rd Street in Times Square, which it was then compelled to rent for three years while the new building was under construction. During this time, the value of the old building increased threefold, leaving the new owner a tidy profit of $325 million when he sold it in April 2007—which would have been the
Times’
profit had it structured the deal differently.

The decision not to charge for website access also turned out to be one the
Times
would regret, as would most of the rest of the industry, which took its cues from the
Times.
Although the paper’s Web edition is journalistically dynamic, like most other newspaper websites it can charge only one-tenth the advertising rate that the print edition commands. Advertising revenues in the retail and classified categories have tanked, depressing the company’s stock price and bond ratings. In 2002,
Times
stock stood at $54; in February 2009 it hit a low of $3.92. (It has rebounded somewhat since then.) In 2008, Standard and Poor’s reduced the
Times
bond rating to just above junk status; Deutsche Bank, still believing that
Times
stock was overvalued, advised its clients to take advantage of a “near-term selling opportunity,” as did analysts at other financial institutions. In the first quarter of 2008, the New York Times Company lost $335,000; the first-quarter losses for 2009 were
$74.5 million.

Historically, the
Times
newsroom has been insulated from the corporation’s financial condition, with the Sulzbergers’ dominance of the board, and their vision of the paper as a quasi-public trust, allowing the family to put quality journalism over profit. But the current financial squeeze has gone beyond renouncing dividends. It has forced cuts, both in the newsroom and in the news product. The paper is now narrower than before; the “news hole” is 5 percent smaller and the magazine has shrunk by 15 percent. (Meanwhile the editorial column has actually been
widened,
which might be emblematic of the increased emphasis on opinion and attitude over reporting.) The
Times
has closed some suburban
bureaus, discontinued everyday publication of some freestanding sections like Business, Sports and Metro, and junked altogether its suburban inserts and the City section, although it has retained
both
the Sunday and the Thursday Style section. Such moves have led to legitimate barbs about a continuing loss of seriousness along with the ascendancy of soft news, making the world safe for more stories about Lady Gaga and new columns like “Crib Sheet,” which, the
Times
corporate announcement said, “offers a quick primer on the week’s hot conversation topics.”

In late 2007, the company instituted a corporate hiring freeze, followed in 2009 by offering voluntary buyouts to reporters and editors to meet a goal of trimming the newsroom staff by one hundred. Failing to meet that goal, it laid off twenty-six reporters, editors, graphic artists and Web producers two days before Christmas in 2009. It has instituted a 5 percent pay cut for editors and all employees on the corporate side. In the meantime, even as it has raised its newsstand price to two dollars a day and five dollars on Sundays, it has ceased contributions to the Newspaper Guild’s health care fund, suspended its stock dividend, and embraced austerity measures such as advising reporters not to call 411 and canceling magazine and newspaper subscriptions for the Metro staff
.
Pressure from shareholders and some board members prompted both Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the company vice chairman, his cousin Michael Golden, to forgo the stock options that went along with their bonus compensation in 2006 and 2007. (Ironically, excessive executive compensation is one of Sulzberger Jr.’s hobbyhorses, getting considerable space in the Business section.) In November 2008, the company cut its dividend from $0.23 a share to $0.06 a share. In February 2009, the board voted to suspend the company’s quarterly dividend entirely. According to the
Huffington Post,
the move was “a significant blow” to Sulzberger family members who had gotten used to fat quarterly checks, as well as “a sign of the company’s financial struggles.”

In 2007, the
Times
faced a challenge from Morgan Stanley, which was trying to get the board opened to more members outside the family. The
Times
beat back this challenge but was unable to deter others, most notably in 2008 from Scott Galloway of
Harbinger Capital and another hedge fund, Firebrand Partners, which engineered the approval of two new outside members to sit on the board. (Harbinger has since sold off some of its stake, and did not stand any candidates for election to the board in 2010.)

In the meantime, mounting debt forced the
Times
to turn to another outsider, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos “Slim” Helu, for a loan of $250 million so it can make interest payments on that debt. The analyst Henry Blodgett described the transaction with Slim as “the corporate equivalent of borrowing money from a payday loan shop.” Whereas the
Times
had once characterized Slim as a “robber baron,” now it was calling him a “shrewd investor.” When one of Slim’s holdings got involved in a Mexican telecommunications scandal in early 2010, the
Times
was accused of dragging its feet in reporting it out of deference to its financial angel. And in May 2010, Slim added to his stake after Harbinger sold off some of its holdings.

Also at the same time, there was increasingly fierce competition from the
Wall Street Journal,
owned by Rupert Murdoch. By all reports, Murdoch is hell-bent on not only beating the
Times
but killing it. So he has been remaking the
Journal
from a “business” newspaper into a general interest publication, an effort described as a “crusade” in an early 2010
New York
magazine report. The crusade is as much financial as personal and political. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is, for Murdoch, “a symbol of the
Times’
hypocrisy, its smugness and its shortcomings.” Murdoch has pumped money into the
Journal
when almost every other publisher in America is cutting back. He has also, it is said, slashed rates to grab national advertisers from the
Times,
and has launched a “metropolitan section” focused on New York City, traditionally the
Times’
proprietary domain, as well as a stand-alone weekend book review to compete with the TBR. According to
New York
magazine, the new metro section has been conceived as “the ultimate
Times
killer,” as it will “directly challenge the paper of record on its home turf.”