Gray Lady Down (40 page)

Given the mounting pressure of the last three years, it is little wonder that the darkening financial picture at the
Times
has brought forth fevered speculation on what the future holds. In one
Vanity Fair
article, “Panic on 43rd Street,” the media critic Michael
Wolff pointed to “the dreadful discrepancy between the declining fortunes of business as usual and a more probable upside of dismantling, selling, and letting the market have its certain way.” He realized that he had just written a “God is dead” sort of statement, especially for the over-fifty, urban, liberal-minded crowd. “You mean NO New York Times? Nada? Darkness?” Wolff asked rhetorically. “Well, yes, in effect.” For a whole social sector that has become accustomed to seeing its political dreams embodied on the
Times’
front page, this is the outcome that dare not speak its name. At the very least, the future of the
paper
paper is in serious doubt. In September 2010, at an international news industry conference in London, Sulzberger Jr. told the audience that his company “will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future,” the date “TBD.”

If the damage to the
Times’
journalistic reputation and financial footing affected only the Sulzberger clan, it would not be a matter of broad public concern. But the paper has always played a central role in our country’s civic life and the public debates that shape our democracy and forge consensus. Even if the
Times
were not suffering from self-inflicted wounds, the proliferation of news sources—cable, the Web, talk radio, Twitter—may have meant that it could no longer be the principal point of contact with the real world for our educated classes, as Dwight Macdonald once described it. And conservatives now would hardly say, as William F. Buckley once did, that going without the
Times
would be “like going without arms and legs.” (In late 2004, the idea of “going “
Times
less” was endorsed by Jay Nordlinger in Buckley’s
National Review.
)

Yet even in its fallen state, this newspaper is important, and any loosening of contact with reality, particularly at this critical moment in our country’s history, has significant implications. And so its decline is something that anyone with a gene for public affairs should care about. Even those who are now going
Times
less as a matter of protest and conviction admit that the paper
affects “all of America’s media, whether individual readers know it or not,” as Nordlinger put it. Everyone who supplies the news, “whether in print or over the air, does read the
Times.
And is profoundly influenced by it. The paper is in the bloodstream of this nation’s media.”

That being so, the
Times
will continue to wield enormous influence over what the average American reads, hears and sees, even if the network newscasts no longer filch the front page of the paper in its entirety on a nightly basis. The
Times
still sets the news agenda. Whether it appears on paper or on a digital screen, it will continue to be the polestar for American journalism.

In this time of increasing social and cultural fragmentation, our civic culture needs a common narrative and a national forum that is free of cant and agnostic toward fact—an honest broker of hard news and detached analysis, where the editorial pages are not spread like invisible ink between the lines of its news reports and cultural reviews. As our political system grows more polarized, and political parties play harder toward their base, it is even more important that we have news organizations whose honest reporting can form a DMZ between opposing forces trapped in their own information cocoons. Some liberals may feel a need to rally around and declare,
le Times, c’est nous,
but this protective impulse is not only intellectually dishonest, it hands a rallying cry to the right-wing forces they castigate.

Although he himself writes for an unapologetically ideological page, the
Wall Street Journal’
s Daniel Henninger was right when he wrote awhile back, “We really could use some neutral ground, a space one could enter without having to suspect that ‘what we know’ about X or Y is being manipulated.” While the emergent blogging culture is dynamic, it mostly serves as a check on mainstream news, not a substitute for it. There’s energy and loud argument, but hard information and neutral reporting are not this medium’s strong suit. An inherent fragmentation and multiplicity, not to mention problems with factual accuracy, make it difficult for the blogosphere to provide the common ground that helps cement a shared sense of civic mission, especially on a national level, or the critical institutional counterweight to the
power of corporations, government, vested political interests and self-involved politicians.

The
Times
will not be so easily replaced, which makes its decline—and perhaps even its fall—more worrisome. But if the era we are passing through still demands something like the
Times,
it also cries out for a much better version of the
Times
than is being produced by the current regime.

The new
Times
headquarters, since 2008, is a far cry from the now somewhat seedy Victorian digs of the past. The 52-story tower is made of steel and glass, with a scrim of horizontal ceramic rods encasing it. Designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Renzo Piano, it shimmers and hovers, achieving Piano’s goals of “lightness, transparency and immateriality.” But if it embodies a certain promise, it also symbolizes what has been left behind in Times Square. As the
Times
veteran David Dunlap wrote in a nostalgic tribute before the move, the old building echoed with “the staccato rapping of manual typewriters” and “the insistent chatter of news-agency teleprinters,” with bells and loudspeakers, and the cry of “Copy!” and the printing presses roaring in the basement, setting the whole 15-story building atremble. This was the sound of news being manufactured during the American Century.

Dunlap noted that he and his colleagues were wrestling with the implications of a greater shift than the geographic one: the transition into an unknown future. “Certainly The Times has reinvented itself before,” he noted, yet there was nevertheless “some uncertainty as to whether the Times traditions can survive a move from the home in which they were shaped.” The new building was therefore less a “factory for news” than a laboratory. “We don’t know yet whether the transition will liberate us or leave us unmoored,” Dunlap fretted.

And for all of us, whether we read the
Times
or boycott it, something large rides on how this question is ultimately answered.

I
’d like first to cite the generosity, support and hospitality of my brothers and sisters—Elly, Terrance, Kevin, Bryan, Laureen, Regina and Sean—as well as my enthusiastic nephews and nieces, cousins, aunts and uncles. (A special shout-out to Kyle Salter, IT man extraordinaire.) Thanks also to some of my many friends, who are indeed a blessing—Mary Bemis, Dan and Amy Cotter, Brian and Inger Friedman, Juliet Heeg, Peter Keyes, Alice Malloy, Jack Martin, Dennis and Nancy Meany, Jim Moore, Reg Overlag, Dr. “Crazy” Steve Rayhill, Bob Ripp, David and Libby Seaman, Tom Synan and Steve Voorhees.

Thanks as well to my neighbors, the Charlie Spillane family, especially young Danny Betancourt, future bard of Hell’s Kitchen.

Go raibh maith agaibh
to the Druid publican Michael Younge, as well as Shane McSorley, Michelle Gallagher and Denny Bess.

My loyal and conscientious agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu were key, as were Donna Brodie, executive director of the Writers Room, and Liz Sherman, assistant director.

My thanks as well to Tom Tisch of the Manhattan Institute and to David DesRosiers of Revere Advisors.

Thanks as well to those
New York Times
reporters and editors—current or retired—who, unlike many of their colleagues, broke institutional taboos and consented to interviews.

The editing and production staff of Encounter Books merit special recognition, particularly the copy editor Carol Staswick and the designer Lesley Rock, as well as Nola Tully, Heather Ohle, Emily Pollack, Lauren Miklos and Sam Schneider.

Roger Kimball, the publisher of Encounter Books, deserves a medal for his extraordinary patience and his confidence in me. We made it.

Last, but certainly not least, a thousand thanks to Peter Collier, editor emeritus of Encounter Books and effective taskmaster, whose experience, editing and insight through many manuscript drafts are responsible more than anything else for bringing this vessel to shore. As sailors say of good skippers, he is indeed “finest kind.”

index

ABC News

Abdel Rahman, Omar

Abdul-Basser, Taha

Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk

Abrams, Dan

Abramson, Jill

Abu Ali, Ahmed Omar

Abu Ghraib

Abzug, Bella

ACORN

Afghanistan; in film; and Guantanamo Bay; heroism in; immigrants from; Miller in; and Nidal Hasan; and post-traumatic stress; public opinion on; and al-Timimi; Vietnam analogy

Afrocentrism; theological

Agnew, Spiro

Ahmad, Omar

Ahmadu, Fuambai

AIDS

Ailes, Roger

Air America

Air National Guard

Ajami, Fouad

Akbar, Hasan

Akram, Mirza

al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya

al-Qaeda; and Abu Ali; excuses for; and Flying Imams; funding of; Miller on; and Patriot Act; and Riyadh bombings; and Saudi “rehab,” ; support for; and “torture” interrogations

al-Shabaab

Albo, Mike

Alfaro, Nancy

Ali, Lorraine

Allen, Ryan

Almontaser, Debbie

Alvarez, Lizette

America Alone
(Steyn)

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

American Newspaper Publishers Association

Amnesty International

Andersen, Kurt

Annals of Communism

Anson, Robert Sam

Anti-Defamation League

Apple, R. W., “Johnny,”

Applebome, Peter

Araton, Harvey

Archibold, Randal

Arian, Sami al-

Ashcroft, John

Associated Press (AP)

Atassi, Dena al-

Atta, Mohammed

Audacity of Hope, The
(Obama)

Auletta, Ken

Awad, Nihad

Awlaki, Anwar al-

Ayers, William (Bill)

Backlash
(Faludi)

Baghdad Museum

Baker, Houston

Baker, Peter

Banderjee, Neela

Baquet, Dean

Barnard, Anne

Barnes and Noble

Barstow, David

Bart, Peter

Bay of Pigs

Beck, Glenn

Behind the Times
(Diamond)

Bellafante, Ginia

Belluck, Pam

Benjamin, Victor

Bennett, William

Bening, Annette

Berger, Joseph

Berke, Richard

Berman, Paul

Bernstein, Nina

Bias
(Goldberg)

Biden, Joe

bin Laden, Osama

Birach, Michael

Birmingham church bombing

Black Liberation Army

black liberation theology

Black Power movement

Blair, Dennis C.

Blair, Jayson; and Boyd; and Raines

Blind Date
(Jones)

Blodgett, Henry

Bloomberg, Michael

Blow, Charles

Blumenthal, Sidney

Body of Lies
(film)

Bond, Julian

Boston Globe
; purchase of

Boudin, Chesa

Boudin, Kathy

Boudin, Leonard

Bowe, John

Bowen, William

Bowman, Patricia

Boyd, Gerald; and Jayson Blair; memoir; on Miller

Boyer, Peter

Boyton, Robert

Bradbury, Steven G.

Bradlee, Ben

Bradley, Ed

Bratton, William

Brawley, Tawana

Brentley, Kevin

Brodhead, Richard H.

Brokeback Mountain
(film)

Bronner, Ethan

Brooks, David

Brown, Patricia Leigh

Bruni, Frank

Buckley, William F., Jr.

Bumiller, Elisabeth

Burness, John

Burns, John

Burt, Richard

Bush, George W.; Hollywood on; and Hurricane Katrina; and Iraq War; NSA eavesdropping; and Supreme Court; and SWIFT surveillance; and War on Terror