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The Rise of Arthur Jr.
Although he was a lifelong rock climber, it was the golden ropes of nepotism that hoisted young Sulzberger aloft. In their 1999 book about the Sulzberger family, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, Susan Tifft and Alex Jones relate how Arthur Jr., a child of divorce at five, grew up with a great deal of insecurity over his inheritance and felt a nagging coldness from his own father, who seemed to favor his cousin Stephen Golden, son of Punch’s sister. Sent away to boarding school after grammar school, young Sulzberger returned to New York pretty quickly and acted on a longstanding desire to go live with his father and stepmother, along with his half sister and stepsister. “I was 14 when I came to his [Punch’s] house,” Arthur Jr. told Tifft and Jones, indulging his penchant for off-tone phrasing. “So he had me for more than a year and a half before I became an asshole.”
The tenuousness of his relationship with his father, combined with a certain measure of confusion over his mixed Jewish and Episcopalian heritage, has been said to have left young Arthur with the need “to prove himself to so many people,” as his stepmother later put it. Very much a child of the sixties, he was suspended from Manhattan’s Browning School for trying to organize a shutdown of classes in protest of the shootings at Kent State University. Following a number of his cousins to Tufts University in Boston, Arthur Jr. continued the antiwar activism and earned two arrests for civil disobedience.
Such attitudes did not endear him with his ex-Marine father. Walking across Boston Commons one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.
Despite the generational and ideological strains between them, Punch made sure that Arthur Jr. was well taken care of early in his career, set up with internships at the Boston Globe and the Daily Telegraph of London. There he soaked up the mod air and the sartorial styles, and returned home sporting an affected Carnaby Street look, complete with a wide-brimmed hat, wire-framed glasses, loud ties and a cane. His stepmother thought the affectation was a bid for attention. She once spoofed him by dressing up in the same garb for a family cocktail party.
In May 1975, Sulzberger Jr. married his girlfriend, Gail Gregg, whom he had met through his mother in Kansas City. (They separated in 2008.) As Edwin Diamond describes it in Behind the Times, the wedding was certainly “a scene from a modern marriage.” Standing with Arthur were three fathers (his mother had remarried twice after leaving her marriage to Punch), two mothers, one stepsister, three sisters, a half brother and “an assortment of long haired cousins.” For the rehearsal dinner the night before, according to Tifft and Jones, Arthur “had shown up in a long sleeved tee-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on it. In pictures from the wedding, the groom was wearing a headband, with white pants, white tuxedo shirt and a white belt, but with no tie. The bride, an avowed atheist and feminist, kept her maiden name.”
His father arranged for Arthur Jr. to work at the Raleigh Times. Despite his prestigious internships, Arthur came off to his supervisors as “absolutely, totally green.” Mike Yopp, the paper’s managing editor, told Tifft and Jones that working with him was “very much like dealing with a college intern.” His copy, mostly for light features, was riddled with basic spelling mistakes. In one unedited piece, Sulzberger had misspelled the word “hate” as “hait” not once, but several times. He was well liked, however, and though he drove a Porsche, he generally tried to be a man of the people, telling friends that the car actually had a Volkswagen engine.
Punch Sulzberger soon arranged a reporting job for Arthur at the AP in London, and another job for Gail at UPI. According to The Trust, Punch had originally written “we think she is smarter than he is” in his recommendation letter for Gail. His secretary drew Sulzberger Sr.’s attention to the slight, and it was excised from the final draft.
In 1978, Arthur Jr. went to work for the Times as a reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau. It was the staff there who gave him his unfortunate nickname, “Pinch,” a play on his father’s moniker. By all accounts, though, Arthur Jr. offset the connotations of the name and the baggage of his family influence through hard work and late-night socialization with other reporters, particularly the younger ones who carried themselves around town as a kind of Brat Pack. He often volunteered to work for other reporters if they needed time away and would work the phones as long as he could on a story, looking for yet one more source.
Undergoing another sartorial makeover, he adopted the Ben Bradlee “power look” of striped shirts with colorful suspenders and cigars. Some saw this as Arthur trying to look more serious and professional. Others saw it as a sign of immaturity, “like he was trying to be a man, to have weight or something,” as a visiting friend from North Carolina described it.
During those D.C. years, Arthur Jr. did not generate a lot of story ideas and did not seem to have the managerial skills necessary to supervise other reporters. Nor did he have exceptional writing abilities. His political sympathies, however, seemed to leave a lasting impression. Michael Kramer recalled watching the presidential election returns in Houston with Sulzberger in 1980: “We sort of clung together in desperation as the Republicans won a major landslide and Reagan came in.” Richard Burt, a former Pentagon official who was then the Times’ defense expert, remembers getting into heated debates with Sulzberger over arms control in the early 1980s. Sulzberger, he said, liked to think of himself as an anti-establishment liberal. “But how can you be anti-establishment when you are a Sulzberger?” Burt asked rhetorically.
Sulzberger Jr. left the D.C. bureau in 1982 and moved back to New York as a Times Metro reporter. Eventually he was shifted over to a position as an assignment editor on the news desk. As Tifft and Jones explain, “Given his workmanlike prose and creative spelling, which made him unfit to blue-pencil copy, the duties of an assignment editor—coming up with story ideas and motivating people to produce them—were more in keeping with his talents.”
It was fortunate for Sulzberger that he was arriving at the Times as the influence of Abe Rosenthal was beginning to ebb. Rosenthal was an up-by-the-bootstraps hardscrabbler who clawed his way to the top of the Times. Arthur Jr. was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and grew up as the presumed heir to one of the country’s most important and richest media families. Rosenthal was deeply patriotic and temperamentally, culturally and socioeconomically allergic to the Woodstock Generation. Sulzberger was proud to the point of vanity to be part of the sixties and its emancipatory spirit. Nor had his efforts to submerge his sense of entitlement, successful on some people, worked with Rosenthal. According to some reports, Rosenthal had little regard for Sulzberger’s talents and informal affectations. Once, barely containing his fury, Rosenthal grabbed a shoeless Sulzberger by the arm and told him never to come into an editorial meeting in his office that way. At another point, Rosenthal’s secretary caught Arthur Jr. reading her boss’s messages outside his office. “Who do you think you are?” she snapped. Sulzberger contritely apologized. “I’m a reporter. I’ve got all the instincts. I can’t help it,” he supposedly replied.
Years later, in 1999, when he had been firmly established as publisher since 1991, Sulzberger finally got his delayed revenge on Rosenthal when he called the older man into his office to tell him that he would no longer be writing his op-ed column. “It’s time,” Sulzberger said, giving little other explanation. After having given his life to the paper, Rosenthal felt betrayed and heartbroken. “I didn’t expect it at all,” he reportedly told his good friend William F. Buckley.
Family control of the New York Times Company allowed the Sulzbergers to make news decisions free of the financial concerns and strictures that burden a publicly accountable company. The downside of family control is that it has not been able to guarantee that the best people rise to its topmost rungs. The all-pervasive climate of nepotism has also encouraged a kind of schizoid denial about the place that family members have in the hierarchy and how others—the several thousand employees—should treat them.
Punch Sulzberger, for instance, would say that family members would have to work harder than most people if they wanted to get to the top. Yet everyone knew this was not true. “The cousins,” as Arthur Jr. and his immediate relatives working for the paper were called, were objects of a solicitude that would undermine frank, open relations based on workplace equality. No matter what nods to merit were made publicly, almost everyone at the Times knew that a member of the Sulzberger clan was going to run the paper. With the coming of the 1980s, that person looked increasingly to be Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
In managing the succession, Punch Sulzberger put the grooming of his son into the hands of Walter Mattson, a top executive who felt strongly that Arthur Jr. needed to be seen as having “earned his spurs” and that he would win respect for knowing what was going on at every level of the operation, from boiler room to bridge. Mattson structured the apprenticeship, of sorts, that would circulate Sulzberger Jr. through the production, advertising, finance and other key departments. This would expose him to almost every job in the organization and every kind of employee—pressmen, truckers, ad salespeople, night production workers. It was a democratizing experience. If he had felt serious self-consciousness over the nepotism that would propel him into one of the most important positions in American journalism, Arthur Jr. nevertheless grew comfortable with second- and third-generation pressmen who got their jobs from their fathers and grandfathers. “I never knew you could use fuck as an adjective, verb and noun, all in the same sentence,” he once quipped about what he had learned from his contact with the paper’s blue-collar workers.
During Sulzberger Jr.’s apprenticeship, Mattson and Sulzberger Sr. coined a new corporate title just for him, that of “assistant publisher,” although it was said that Mattson himself somewhat teasingly referred to Arthur Jr. as “Deputy Dawg.” In 1988, Arthur Jr. was named “deputy publisher,” at which point he began acting as a kind of “publisher-in-waiting,” sharing in major decisions. In fact, he made the final call on many of those decisions, except for those involved with the editorial page, although he is said to have sat frequently in on meetings there. He was still young, just thirty-five, and even younger looking. His own secretary referred to him as “the Kid.”
Almost from day one, Arthur Jr. demonstrated a management style drastically different from his father’s. While Punch had embraced the “hidden hand” approach and went to considerable lengths to avoid direct confrontation, young Arthur very visibly got involved in almost every facet of the paper and relished being in the middle of battle. His father had allowed strong news executives like Rosenthal virtually as much autonomy as they wanted. By contrast, Arthur Jr., a former reporter—although of mediocre accomplishment—was set on running both sides of the paper, business and editorial, in every respect, no matter how far down the management ladder the decisions had been made in the past. A micromanager, he injected himself into decisions about budgets and finances and also got deeply involved in various labor disputes, which Punch had always let others handle. His friend Anna Quindlen, a former Times columnist, chalked it up to self-doubt: “Arthur is going through his whole life with something to prove,” she told Tifft and Jones. “Every day he wakes up and thinks, ‘How can I show them today that I am the man I want to be?’”
By all accounts, those working around Sulzberger Jr. found the experience an exasperating one. He tended to view the world in black-and-white terms, unaware of, or at least unbothered by, shades of gray. People at the Times talked about a lack of sachel—Yiddish for common sense, tact and diplomacy. Max Frankel, who was made editor when Rosenthal retired in 1986, tried to play mentor and run interference for Arthur, often imperceptibly grimacing inside when Arthur Jr. made glib, inappropriate comments or went off in a mistaken direction. He played behind the scenes to rectify the damage and soothe ruffled feathers. (“I’ll say this about Arthur,” Frankel was said to have quipped privately. “He never makes the same mistake three times.”)
Despite the extensive grooming, as the time drew near for “Punch” Sulzberger to hand over the reins, questions about Arthur Jr.’s management style and personality were mounting. According to Tifft and Jones, at the board of directors meeting after Punch announced his intention to step aside and have Arthur Jr. step into his shoes, the hesitation in the boardroom was “palpable.” The single presentation that Arthur had made to the board left them unimpressed. Many of them didn’t know him at all except for his reputation; his lack of maturity and his questionable leadership skills had left them worried. “We heard a lot of stories,” one board member told Tifft and Jones. “People would say: I was talking to so and so and he tells me that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the most impossible SOB.”
The board responded by delaying the succession proposal. They were not rejecting Arthur Jr., board members wanted to ensure Punch; they just wanted to get to know him better. The board also wanted reassurance that naming Arthur Jr. publisher would not automatically mean that he would become chairman and CEO, out of concern for Wall Street’s dim view of “irresponsible nepotism.” Punch Sulzberger could have overruled the board. Instead, he chose to lobby them for a few months to set a better stage for Arthur’s debut. When the board assembled again in January, they ratified Punch’s choice.
According to Tifft and Jones, a pair of eerie omens cast shadows on the occasion. The day that Arthur was made publisher, the bulbs blew out on the large clock hanging outside the Times building on 43rd Street, with its Gothic letters spelling TIMES. Upstairs in the mahogany-paneled boardroom, just as Punch Sulzberger introduced Arthur as the man who was going to be named publisher, one of the heavy bottom windows in the august room flew up and a cold rush of wind caused a framed photograph of the Shah of Iran to crash onto the floor. One board member joked that it was the spirit of Adolph Ochs. Another jested, “No, it’s the winds of change.” Mike Ryan, the Times’ attorney, told Tifft and Jones that the experience was “frightening.” In thirty-five years he had never seen anything like it in the boardroom.
Insiders were right to worry about the transition. Sulzberger Jr. was about to face a financial and journalistic crisis even worse than the one his father and Abe Rosenthal calmed in the 1970s. As Edwin Diamond observed in Behind the Times, among these challenges was the need to create new news products for an emerging multimedia world while still maintaining the most important aspect of the organization’s franchise: the role of defining the nation’s news agenda and reporting news with fairness, accuracy and context. The paper also had to find a way to balance the interests of its older, elite audience with those of a younger readership—a readership increasingly foreign born. “The Times could once at a minimum count on an intellectual audience that not only wanted to read the Times but felt that it had to. The paper’s authority was unchallenged,” wrote Diamond, but “These certitudes no longer exist[ed].”
At the time of his ascension, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. had been running the paper on a day-to-day basis since 1988, casting critical votes in various company decisions, if not having explicit veto power. But with the new title, he began to act with more force, revamping both the management culture of the paper and its news product to fit his vision for the needs of the future. It was a vision reflecting his own values, beliefs, temperament and experience, defined by a combination of New Age management theory, aging liberal pieties, sixties-style countercultural advocacy and affectations, as well as the identity politics of the 1980s and early 1990s. It was a vision preoccupied with the pursuit of youth demographics, one that encouraged the Times to be self-consciously hip and its reporters to write with flair, or at least make the attempt. And it was a vision that promoted opportunities for “opinion” to an unprecedented degree.
A New Age management theory that Sulzberger found intriguing was William Edward Deming’s notion of “management by obligation.” Demingism asked managers to embrace three virtues: “self-esteem, intrinsic motivation and the curiosity to learn.” Sulzberger Jr. had been much impressed by his teenage experience in Outward Bound; and Demingism, with its emphasis on self-discovery, bonding and team play, has been likened to “Outward Bound in a business suit.” Deming’s ideas also provided Sulzberger with a way of adding gravitas to his leadership abilities.
But the management revolution that Sulzberger wanted to encourage stumbled badly from the outset, further damaging morale as egos were bruised and tempers flared in seminars that were supposed to help close fissures. Sulzberger was undeterred, however. When the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta told him some of the old-timers at the paper were complaining that he was trying to establish his legacy too quickly, Sulzberger quipped: “I’ll outlive the bastards.”
Meanwhile, Sulzberger took the concern over trends and age cohorts to a level beyond what drove the Sectional Revolution of the 1970s. The old thinking about the Times was that it “should not be too popular and should not try to be,” as Edwin Diamond phrased it. But as Diamond also explained, market research and focus groups indicated a disturbing trend toward “aliteracy,” with otherwise educated young professionals saying “they had no interest in picking up a copy of the Times.” And it wasn’t just a local problem. In 1967, roughly two-thirds of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine read a newspaper; in 1988 the figure was 29 percent.
The research commissioned by the Times showed that the paper was defining itself too narrowly to appeal to an elite that no longer existed in its traditional form. It needed to adjust its journalistic offerings, and its pool of talent, to appeal to an evolving elite that included the educated classes from the city’s booming immigrant populations.
One manifestation of demographic anxiety was the crusade for “diversity” that Arthur Jr. mounted in his newsroom and led in the newspaper industry at large. Diversity, he argued, was not just a moral issue, a vehicle for taking the civil rights movement to another level; it was also an economic necessity if newspapers were to survive in an America whose demographic reality was rapidly changing. Enthusiastically mouthing the slogan “diversity makes good business sense; makes moral sense too,” Sulzberger blithely ignored warnings that the ideological and political dimension of diversity risked fragmenting newsrooms along racial, ethnic and gender lines, and could make the Times more partisan as he forged ahead to make it “look like America,” in Bill Clinton’s words.
Arthur Jr. had clearly telegraphed his fixation on diversity before he assumed the throne at the Times. Shortly after he was named deputy publisher in 1988, he started assembling certain middle and senior managers and giving what came to be dubbed “The Speech.” At its intellectual center was one demographic fact that he believed had more resonance for the future of the Times than any other: by the end of the 1990s, 80 percent of all new American employees would be women, minorities or first-generation immigrants. This rapidly shifting demographic mix of future employees—and future readers—did not give the Times very long “to get its white male house in order,” Sulzberger told a management seminar in 1989, again stressing that diversity was “the single most important issue” the Times faced. At the 1991 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Kansas City, Sulzberger spoke of the difficult climate for racial change and the roadblocks standing in the way of “our cause.” To considerable applause, he told the audience: “Keep pushing. Keep pushing to turn your vision of Diversity into our reality.”
Once he became publisher in 1991, he banged the drum even harder, amplifying, refining and implementing “The Speech.” As one of the principal figures in the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Sulzberger pushed diversity as an industry obligation. At the Times itself, he encouraged a variety of corporate and newsroom initiatives to get the paper into the Promised Land. He aimed to replace the Times’ pledge to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” with the more amorphous promise to “enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.” The new motto never got any traction in or out of the newsroom.
On a more practical level, Sulzberger put all managers, especially newsroom managers, on notice that they must reject what he called the “comfort factor” of hiring and promoting only white men. He set up committees to examine diversity in all its permutations at the Times, on both the editorial and the business side, scrutinizing everything from salaries to career paths. Training was key, he believed. In a strong endorsement of cultural relativism, Sulzberger declared, “We are all going to have to understand [differences]. Be aware of them, know what they mean, understand that we don’t all see the world or a moment in time in the same way.”
This fixation translated into a number of high-profile hiring, promotion and assignment decisions that reverberated across every news desk in the newsroom. To enhance minority hiring at lower levels, Max Frankel, functioning as Sulzberger’s de facto diversity officer, instituted what he would refer to as his “own little quota plan,” based on “one-for-one” hiring—one minority for one white male—“until the numbers get better,” as Frankel put it in 1991.
In short order, blacks and Latinos were appointed bureau chiefs, national reporters and foreign correspondents; the number of racial-minority desk editors increased as well. Eventually the Times would institute a minorities-only internship program. Sulzberger cleared the way for Gerald Boyd to be named the paper’s first Metro editor, and later for him to become one of the paper’s assistant managing editors, which made him the first black ever on the Times masthead and put him on track to be considered for the paper’s executive editorship.
Under Sulzberger’s leadership, the Times developed new beats to reflect multicultural change and boosted the importance of certain beats already in existence, allowing some to become vehicles for ethnic and racial advocacy. Sulzberger was adroit at telegraphing his diversity priority through his monthly “Publisher’s Award.” The recipients of the cash award were well balanced by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, while the subject matter of the stories was in keeping with the new multicultural orthodoxy.
Arthur Jr.’s vision of diversity encompassed a more expanded role for women. In some early speeches he made the highly symbolic gesture of using “she” as a general pronoun. He also made no secret of his close association with Anna Quindlen, the op-ed columnist who became an unofficial part of his brain trust and was, many thought, on track to become a top editor.
Sulzberger also encouraged more open attitudes toward gays, a sharp break from what were increasingly portrayed in newsroom culture as the bad old days of Abe Rosenthal, who felt it best for gays to stay in the closet. In a videotaped speech he sent to the 1992 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Convention, Sulzberger affirmed newsroom identity politics when he said, “We can no longer offer our readers a white, straight male vision of events and say we are doing our job.” In that same speech, he declared he wanted the Times to extend company benefits to same-sex couples. Afterward, he let it be known that those who discriminated against gays would risk losing their jobs. Even before he became publisher, Sulzberger, in league with Max Frankel, also got his father to drop his opposition to the use of the term “gay” in news reports. Sulzberger Jr. met with openly gay staff members and assured them times had changed. He committed considerable company resources to underwrite panel discussions and job fairs sponsored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and made sure the Times sent sizable delegations to NLGJA conventions and other events.
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.
And so, writing about Goodnight and Good Luck in his 2006 Oscar predictions column, David Carr called the film “A well crafted look at a time in American history when anything less than complete fealty to the republic was seen as treason, which sounds familiar to some movie goers.” In a review of Sophie Stoll (2006), a World War II German period film about the fate of civil liberties under the Nazis, Stephen Holden said, “It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?” Holden also hailed Oliver Stone’s documentary about Hugo Chavez (2010) for depicting the anti-American Venezuelan dictator as “a rough-hewn but good-hearted man of the people whose bullheaded determination is softened by a sense of humor.” The television critic Anita Gates lauded a British show called Cracker for providing “the punch of confirmation that much of the rest of the world may indeed despise the United States for what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.” The choreographer Bill T. Jones’ performance piece Blind Date (2005) was praised by Ginia Bellafante for questioning “the expediency of war,” for reflecting on “limited opportunities for the urban poor,” and for remarking on “the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.”
The biggest erosion of the wall between news and opinion, however, came in the elevation of Howell Raines to the position of executive editor in 2001. The Times now practically dropped the pretense of objective reporting altogether, opting for crusading zeal and advocacy on a level heretofore unseen in the paper. Besides bringing dogmatic political opinions to the job, Raines blurred the line between news and opinion by putting editorial department staff into key newsroom positions. For example, he made the columnist Frank Rich an associate editor, with responsibilities for cultural coverage. Rich had been moved from the op-ed page to the Sunday Arts section, then back to the op-ed page on Sundays with a much bigger platform—usually at least half a page. What the new position meant was that Rich was not only opining on various subjects linking culture and politics, but also determining how the Times was covering arts and culture.
Robert Samuelson of Newsweek commented on the changes that came to the Times with Howell Raines’ promotion:
Every editor and reporter holds private views. The difference is that Raines’ opinions are now highly public. His [editorial page] was pro choice, pro gun control, and pro campaign finance reform.... Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines’ positions compromise the Times’ ability to act and appear fair-minded. Many critics already believe that the news columns of the Times are animated—and distorted—by the same values as its editorials. Making the chief of the editorial page the chief of the news columns will not quiet those suspicions.
Sulzberger tried to dismiss such concerns. “A great journalist knows the difference between those two roles. Howell is certainly a great journalist,” he insisted. But as Raines’ tenure proceeded, it would become abundantly clear that Samuelson’s prediction was right.
