Gray Lady Down (5 page)

Accelerated minority hiring and promotions rankled some of the old guard, who complained that some of the blacks, Latinos and women were being moved into senior leadership positions years before they were ready. Others bristled at a generally antagonistic atmosphere, which Peter Boyer, a former Timesman, described in a 1991
Esquire
article as “moderate white men should die.” Boyer left the
Times
to become a staff writer at the
New Yorker.
Other accomplished midcareer Timesmen left too, taking with them vital experience, institutional memory and a special old-fashioned
Times
sensibility and culture. Rubbing salt into some of the old guard’s wounds, Frankel, backed by Sulzberger, virtually admitted that the commitment to diversity made double standards acceptable. At a forum at Columbia University, Frankel conceded that it would be difficult to fire a black woman, even if she were less good than another candidate.

The 1991 piece on the
Times
by Robert Sam Anson in
Esquire
described a newspaper increasingly dominated by ideology. N. R. Kleinfield, a veteran business and Metro reporter, told Anson that Frankel wanted “a subtle point of view” in stories—code for a more politicized take. Anonymously, one “senior Metro reporter” said “The
Times
is basically guided by the principles of political correctness. It is terrified to offend any of the victimized groups.” Anson described reporters complaining of being told they couldn’t work on certain stories because they were white, and others admitting that they tailored some articles to liberal political tastes. “Don’t make it too nice” is what one reporter told Anson he was instructed when assigned a profile about a conservative. Anson also cited veteran media insiders, like Richard Cohen of
the
Washington Post,
who said the
Times
now was “not as trusted. . . . People are saying it’s got a line.”

Yet unlike his father, who was bothered by complaints of ideological bias and relayed that annoyance to his top editors, Sulzberger Jr. had little patience with what he regarded as quibblers and naysayers. As legitimate questions were raised about diversity as a force in news coverage, he would hear none of it. Instead, he displayed a righteous, even sanctimonious insistence that he was “setting a moral standard.”

Not surprisingly, the diversity dissidents in the newsroom—and there were quite a few—became skittish. As John Leo of
U.S. News and World Report
put it, the paper’s “hardening line on racial issues, built around affirmative action, group representation and government intervention,” was difficult for staffers to buck. “Reporters do not thrive by resisting the deeply held views of their publisher.... When opinionated publishers are heavily committed to any cause, the staff usually responds by avoiding coverage that casts that cause in a bad light.” Or as one veteran Timesman told me when I was writing
Coloring the News,
no one was going to tell Arthur “We’ve gone too far. We’re losing our credibility.” William Stockton, a former senior editor, described the chilling effect of Sulzberger’s agenda: “With Arthur Jr. saying all those things about diversity in public speeches, clearly it was not good for your career to ask tough questions,” he told me.

In his bid to boost readership among a less news-literate generation, Sulzberger Jr. increased the amount of attention given to soft news and lifestyle. “Junior’s paper,” as the
Times
was now being sarcastically called by some on the staff, also encouraged some reporters to write with more “voice,” which further loosened the definition of news. Soon, features in
People
magazine style were making their way to the front page, sometimes little different from tabloid gossip aside from quality of writing.

In 1991, the
Times
hired Adam Moss, a former editor at
Esquire,
as a consultant to help revamp its coverage of lifestyle and popular culture. The result was Styles of the Times, a bid to appeal to the ad-rich world of downtown chic. Styles of the Times was Arthur Jr.’s first visible move as publisher, and he seemed to sense that
it was a high-profile gamble. “Younger readers had better like it,” he joked to some reporters in the Washington bureau, “because all the older ones will drop dead when they see it.” Moss ran edgy, “transgressive” stories on gay rodeos, dominatrix wear, cyberpunk novels and
outré
celebrities.

The rest of the media took notice.
Time
magazine wrote of “Tarting Up the Gray Lady of 43rd St.” and likened the
Times’
hip affections to “a grandmother squeezing into neon biking shorts after everyone else has moved on to black skirts.” Sulzberger Jr. struck a pose, expressing pleasure at the reaction. At a dinner, a fellow guest who lamented the passing of hard news was informed by Sulzberger that he was an anachronistic “child of the fifties.” At another public function, Arthur Jr. told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers meant “we’re doing something right,” and if they were
not
complaining, “it would be an indication that we were not succeeding.”

Styles of the Times eventually tanked, at least in its first incarnation. So many of the original advertisers defected that the
Times
had to give away ad space. Moss was reassigned to the Sunday magazine, importing a similar sensibility to a long-sturdy feature section that had once been a central forum for debate of the most important domestic and international issues. Soon the magazine featured photo shoots of grown women dressed as little girls, evocative of “kiddie porn,” along with stories about the market in Nazi memorabilia, including items made from human skin, and a Fourth of July photo-illustration of a man with his pants down sitting on an outdoor latrine, waving an American flag in one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other. Sulzberger Jr. backed Moss. But as Tifft and Jones relate it in
The Trust,
when the magazine ran a photograph of a naked Japanese actress bound with ropes for a film to be made for “Prisoner Productions,” Sulzberger Jr. reached his limit. He sent an angry memo to the magazine’s top editor, Jack Rosenthal, ordered Frankel to publish an editor’s note apologizing for the picture, and “conspicuously” copied his father, even though he was retired.

Besides diluting the paper’s overall gravitas, the push for softer, hipper journalism required an influx of journalists with
far less hard-news experience; it called for grad-school-educated “specialists” in popular culture, consumerism and trendy esoterica. Fluff-ball features on junk culture and other trivia like “the return of tight jeans” and “micro plastic surgery,” amid a crush of television-obsessed reports and analysis, caused serious readers of the
Times
to roll their eyes and cancel their subscriptions. The paper, according to the
New York Observer’
s Michael Thomas, kept “plumbing the depths of trivialization.”

The fact that the soft news was restricted to the back sections of the paper at first provided a defense. But as editors tried to make the front news section more hip, the paper’s decline in seriousness came increasingly under attack. The barbs were particularly fierce after the
Times
published a front-page report echoing salacious, uncorroborated details from a Kitty Kelly biography of Nancy Reagan alleging that she had had an affair with Frank Sinatra. Controversy about slipping standards erupted again a short while later when the
Times
ran another dubious front-page story about rape allegations against a Kennedy cousin, William Smith, which named Smith’s alleged victim, Patricia Bowman, and offered up insinuations about her personal life and sexual past. Many critics read the lurid piece as a classic example of blaming the victim that sprang from a pre-feminist era. Women staffers at the
Times
circulated a petition and secured a meeting with Frankel in the
Times
auditorium, where three hundred staff members put him up against the wall. “How could you say that woman was a whore?” one staffer wanted to know.

Sulzberger Jr. regarded such unpleasant experiences as road bumps on the way to putting his personal mark on the editorial voice of
his
paper and bringing it into the new age. One of the first moves he made was to hire Howell Raines as editorial page editor. Unlike his father, who had tried to mute the editorial page’s stridency, Arthur Jr. wanted to make it more outspoken, edited by someone who reflected his own taste for confrontation and countercultural values.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Raines had sat on the sidelines during the mid-sixties civil rights demonstrations there, leaving him with a lifelong sense of Southern guilt and a determination never again to shrink from declaring his beliefs and opinions. Embracing a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision, he once declared that “Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.” According to Tifft and Jones, Arthur Jr. saw in the passionate Raines “a kindred spirit, a contrarian whose values had taken shape during the sixties, who viewed the world as a moral battleground, who relished intellectual combat, and who wasn’t shy about expressing his convictions in muscular unequivocal language.”

Under Raines, the editorial page assumed a caustic, take-no-prisoners tone reminiscent of the days of the ultra-liberal John Oakes. The page also became a platform for the new publisher’s preoccupations, focusing, sometimes obsessively, on diversity, gay rights, feminism, the history of racial guilt and other fixations of the cultural left.

Some of the editorial writers whom Raines inherited were not happy with the change, contending that there was more “shrill braying” than “sound argumentation” on the page. Now in retirement, even Max Frankel wrote that “mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” Timothy Noah of
Slate
said that Raines’ editorial page “routinely attempts to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt.” Michael Tomasky, then at
New York
magazine, accused him of “using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.”

Sulzberger also made Raines part of an informal “brain-trust,” composed of the executive editor and selected senior corporate managers, to plan the paper’s future. This gave Raines power and influence over other parts of the
Times
that no other editorial page editor ever had. It also had the effect of weakening the firewall between news and opinion, particularly on the publisher’s pet issues, especially that of diversity.

Sulzberger Jr.’s effort to reinvigorate the editorial page also involved a substantial change among op-ed columnists. Packing
the roster with his personal and political favorites, he added Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to Anna Quindlen, who had secured her place several years earlier when Arthur Jr. was deputy publisher and had become an important ally. According to a growing cadre of
Times
critics, the problem was not that Sulzberger Jr. hired liberal op-ed columnists, but that he hired them in a vastly disproportionate ratio to conservative voices. At one point after Sulzberger abruptly relieved Abe Rosenthal of his column in 1999, William Safire was the only conservative on the op-ed page. Sulzberger’s choices were also markedly narrow in journalistic experience. Of the four aforementioned, none had spent any time as a foreign correspondent, and the national-level reporting experience of the group as a whole was limited. It seemed that Arthur Jr. chose most of his columnists on the basis of how much they agreed with his own sixties-era values and with the P.C. agenda he embraced.

Had Sulzberger merely allowed Raines to sharpen the combative edge of the editorial page, and turned the op-ed page into a mirror of his liberal politics and self-consciously iconoclastic values, his innovations might have been defensible. But he also initiated changes that encouraged the infiltration of opinion into the news pages. He did so chiefly by increasing the number of columnists on the inside pages; by relaxing or ignoring rules that had barred television, film, theater and literary critics from injecting their politics into reviews; by increasing the amount of space devoted to news analysis and other forms of explanatory journalism; and by expanding the importance of popular culture in the news mix.

Up until well into the 1960s the
Times
had had very few columnists; by the early 2000s there were four dozen, scattered throughout the paper. In late 2009, there were eighteen “cultural critics” alone, courtesy of the expanded coverage of popular culture. Had someone like Abe Rosenthal been there to keep a weather eye out for critics using their perch to introduce political or social commentary into what were supposed to be “straight” reviews, the boost in the number of critics and “inside” columnists
would not have been such a problem. But the new Timesmen and Timeswomen were encouraged to write with “voice.” Given the ideological proclivities of the people hired by Sulzberger, that meant a liberal voice as well as political posturing.