Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  The bottom line? Instead of functioning as an impartial referee in the national conversation about controversial issues, the New York Times has become a cheerleader, an advocate, even a combatant, some critics have argued. Rather than maintain professional detachment and objectivity, the paper has embraced activism. Rather than foster true intellectual and ideological diversity, the paper has become the victim of an insular group-think, turning into a tattered symbol of liberal orthodoxy that is increasingly out of touch. And rather than let the chips fall where they may no matter who is embarrassed or shamed by their reporting, the paper’s news sections have been shaded by a fear of offending certain groups and favoritism toward certain causes. Stories that should be done in a timely and responsible manner are often not done at all, or they are done years after news pegs for them have come and gone. Although the paper can be scrupulous about factual corrections, it has shown limited inclination or ability to come to terms with larger mistakes of meaning and interpretation, especially when doing so might transgress a liberal party line or expose its biases.

  How precipitously this once-mighty institution has fallen and how deeply compromised its principles have become are questions inextricably entwined with what must now be regarded as the Times’ ideological commitments: race and “diversity,” immigration, homosexuality and gender, the “culture wars,” and perhaps most crucially, its dismissive attitude toward the War on Terror, including U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the sixties, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s favorite era, it was common to hear that “the personal is political.” In the case of the Times, it is the personnel that have made for the politicization.

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  Race

  In 1964, on assignment in Mississippi attending church services for three slain civil rights workers, Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times reporter who would eventually become the paper’s editor in chief, witnessed a scene so striking he included it in his 2005 memoir, Omaha Blues: “The network reporters, the wire service reporters, the Time magazine correspondent, and other newspaper reporters were all holding hands and singing. Having the idea that reporters weren’t supposed to show their feelings or take sides, I was one of the abstainers. It was an uncomfortable moment.”

  That sense of professional detachment, very much a product of institutional tradition that was drilled into every reporter, especially during the Rosenthal years, has not endured. Today, when it comes to the issue of race, the Times is sitting front and center in the choir, singing with a moral fervor and gusto that would have been considered journalistically unseemly in the past. An orthodoxy of racial engagement and “diversity” now governs the personnel policies of its newsroom, but even more so the political sensibility behind much of its news coverage.

  To some degree, the Times may be trying to use diversity to assuage a guilty conscience. In the 1940s the paper’s first black reporter, George Streetor, had to be terminated after he was caught fabricating quotations and had amassed a considerable corrections file. After that was a long drought. A confidential company memo in 1961 revealed that the news department had only one black copy editor and only two black reporters; some departments had no blacks at all. There was also a marked shortage of news about the black community. Indeed, up until 1950, the NAACP considered the paper “anti-Negro.” The racial unrest of the 1960s, particularly in Harlem, spurred management to open the paper’s doors to a number of high-profile recruits. Yet the few who managed to take hold at the paper had little effect on what remained an overwhelmingly white newsroom.

  In the early 1980s, as publisher-in-waiting Arthur Sulzberger Jr. began to preach the Gospel of Diversity more forcefully, Abe Rosenthal stepped up efforts to diversify the staff. In 1984 he actually gave a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists announcing a commitment to diversity, which would have been unthinkable for him ten years before.

  One of the senior newsroom managers put in charge of this initiative was William Stockton, who had come to the Times in 1982 from the Associated Press, eventually rising to business news editor and sitting in on front-page meetings. Stockton’s brief involved traveling to journalism schools and meeting qualified minority candidates whom the Times could either hire directly or tag as hopefuls to be watched while they developed their talent at “minor league” papers. As Stockton recalls, “There was fierce competition for essentially a very small group of people, to hire someone who could make it. The struggle to hire people minimally qualified—people who could do the job—was intense.”

  In his memoir, The Times of My Life, Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986, wrote that his exertions for racial integration at the Times “were not just affirmative but prodigious.” Yet Frankel was wary of placing moral and legal concerns over professionalism, having seen “the cause betrayed by too many merely sentimental decisions.” For him, it was a pragmatic matter of avoiding situations where “Too often we found ourselves discussing articles about racial strife without a single black face in the room.” Although great reporters “learn to transcend their own experience and to deal with alien peoples and strange surroundings,” the need to gain the confidence of “contending factions” in newsworthy situations demanded the presence of reporters who could immediately cut through the cultural baggage, Frankel believed.

  Once Arthur Jr. took over the publisher’s position in 1991, the Times created more diversity-related managerial incentives and requirements. According to Bill Stockton, the bonus program was changed to reflect how well managers did in minority recruitment, training and retention, with 25 percent of the compensation based on how many journalists of color officially took jobs. Stockton remembered senior-level editorial meetings where Frankel and his second in command, Joe Lelyveld, put the squeeze on their subordinates because of the pressure they felt from Sulzberger. Editors were asking, “Who can we send abroad? Put on the national desk? Make bureau chief?” Stockton recalled, adding, “They were pushing, really pushing. There was pressure all the time.”

  But like the effort to hire minorities in the 1960s, the 1980s initiative was hampered by an inability to hold on to minority talent. “The truth,” Frankel wrote, “was that we did have a problem keeping people of color: the most successful blacks were repeatedly tempted by opportunities elsewhere and the least successful were often left wondering whether they were victims of prejudice or cultural alienation.” Meanwhile, dissension was growing on the white side of the newsroom. According to Frankel, the “diversity training” seminars that the Times sponsored were often “delivered by shameless charlatans,” by “peddlers of pop psychology” who were indulged so the paper could “avoid being branded as racist.” These sessions were an occasion for some black employees to demand that racial identifications be abandoned in news reports, even in the case of criminals at large. One editor even wanted a ban on all idiomatic negative uses of “black,” such as “black magic” and “Black Monday,” or even “film noir.” Frankel’s number two, Joe Lelyveld, thought the sessions a questionable expenditure, and withheld money that he thought was better spent in the news budget.

  The most controversial and ultimately the most tragic beneficiary of the diversity campaign was the former managing editor Gerald Boyd. Although Boyd was not the Ivy League type historically favored by the Times, he “represented a terrifically hard-nosed black reporter that senior management could relate to,” Bill Stockton maintained. “Someone who could be black but still fit in.” The paper saw tremendous potential in Boyd. According to Stockton, “As Gerry Boyd moved up it became apparent to very senior management that he was their one best hope—their last best hope—to springboard a minority to the top.” The plan, says Stockton, was to bring Boyd to New York and rotate him through various senior managerial positions. “If he did not fall flat on his face, he would be promoted to some top destination.”

  Boyd guided the paper’s exceptional coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and edited the year 2000 Pulitzer-wi
nning fifteen-part series on race in America. But many blamed him for egregious and embarrassing miscoverage of a string of race-related incidents in New York in the early 1990s, including the infamous anti-Jewish riot in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 1991. While Jews were clearly victims of the overwhelmingly black rioting, Boyd injected a tone of moral equivalence into the coverage he supervised, angering many New Yorkers.

  Boyd’s missteps, however, did not affect his upward mobility. In late 1990, Frankel had called the correspondent to New York and told him, in so many words, that he would be the Times’ Jackie Robinson. Adapting a page from the Branch Rickey handbook, he warned Boyd about “the tough time” ahead, “because a lot of people are going to be saying we’re doing this because of your race—and to a degree we are, and I think you can handle that.” Although he was passed over for managing editor when Joe Lelyveld became editor in chief in 1997, Boyd got the job when Howell Raines replaced Lelyveld in 2001. Boyd was now one step away from the very top, in a position of imminent historic significance, as Bill Stockton recalls: “The first black editor of the NYT!!! What a statement that would be for the Sulzbergers to make! To their peers. To the nation! See how far we have come—A black man as the editor of the NYT!”

  But the Jayson Blair scandal—in which Boyd’s documented racial favoritism toward a liar and plagiarist wound up destroying not only his career but that of Howell Raines as well—brought the chickens home to roost in terms of diversity’s inherent double standards. “If this hadn’t eventually blown up, and Gerry did get the top job, you would have had an African American shaping the news coverage of the nation’s most important newspaper for more than a decade,” Stockton said, adding that “Arthur just took it too far too fast.”

  Gerald Boyd died in November 2006, but left a memoir that was published in 2010, called My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times. “Second only to my family, The Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige,” he wrote. In his Times review of Boyd’s book, headlined “A Blessing and a Burden,” Robert Boyton wrote: “Much of the book is devoted to the racial slights Boyd suffered during his 20 years at the paper. White subordinates bridled at taking orders from him; white superiors alternately patronized and betrayed him. ‘The Times was a place where blacks felt they had to convince their white peers that they were good enough to be there,’ he writes.” Indeed, as elevated as the Times made him feel, Boyd also often felt “sandbagged, cornered and disrespected,” and was especially bitter about taking the fall for the Blair scandal. He singled out Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor and generally regarded as a hero in the Blair case, as a man of “no decency and integrity” who had backstabbed him. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “A skeptic—or just a good reporter—might find it hard to accept that a man who climbed so high at the politically driven Times could be as guileless as Boyd portrays himself.”

  The Times’ racial script, which has come to resemble the journalistic equivalent of reparations, is particularly evident in stories about instances of historical racism. Some of these stories are newsworthy and do a service in reminding readers of forgotten injustices that lie behind economic inequities, educational disparities, high incarceration rates and enduring prejudice against African Americans. But many others seem to have been assigned in the spirit of racial hectoring, which feeds what John McWhorter calls “therapeutic alienation in blacks” and creates an “exaggerated sense of victimization.”

  Stories on the retrial of those involved with the 1955 Emmett Till killing in 2005, for instance, were surely newsworthy, especially one that unearthed the only surviving transcript from an earlier acquittal. So were the stories about the sentencing of the yet-unpunished perpetrators of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Likewise Brent Staples’ “editorial notebook” piece on the organized bloody pogrom that drove blacks from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, an event that became a blueprint for other racist actions throughout parts of the South.

  Yet the bulk of the Times’ reporting and commentary on the racial past is distinguished by a sense of grievance and cynicism. The fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, for instance, was not an occasion to celebrate for Adam Cohen, an editorial writer who instead wondered if the civil rights situation in America had become even worse. A 2005 report on the number of African immigrants coming to America—more than in the days of slavery, according to the reporter, Sam Roberts—allowed Howard Dodson, a radical activist at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to assert that “Basically, people are coming to reclaim the wealth that’s been taken from their countries.”

  To a large degree, the Times’ reporting and commentary on contemporary racial developments seems based on William Faulkner’s famous comment that the past is never dead, it isn’t even past. For example, voter identification laws in states like Georgia, Missouri and Indiana have been referred to editorially as the functional equivalent of an “illegal poll tax.” According to the editorial writer Brent Staples, disqualification of convicted felons from voting “recalls the early U.S. under slavery” and is no different from tools used to limit the political power of emancipated slaves in the Jim Crow era.

  Some of the stories on hate crimes against blacks that have appeared in the Times are deserving of the coverage, like the death of James Byrd, a Texas black man who was dragged behind a truck by racist whites in 1998, and a similar case in 2008. Yet in many other cases, the paper has been suckered by people who are perpetrating a scam or indulging in propaganda.

  In October 2007, the Times got caught up in a racial hoax—as it had several times in the 1990s—because it was eager to break news of rampant white racism. The story involved the discovery of a four-foot-long hangman’s noose on the doorknob of a black professor’s office at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The victim was Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, whose specialty is race, racial identity, multiculturalism and racial justice. The noose was particularly upsetting for Teachers College, which prides itself as “a bastion of liberalism and multiculturalism.” The local police said that their hate-crimes unit had mounted a full investigation, including testing the rope for DNA. The Department of Justice opened an investigation.

  Professor Constantine called the episode “an unbelievably blatant act of racism,” telling about two hundred supporters who had gathered outside Teachers College that she would not be intimidated. “I want to let the perpetrator know that I will not be silenced.” The Times gave ample space to accusations of racism. “This incident really gives you a new perspective on the state of race relations in this country,” said Michael J. Feyen, a doctoral student at Teachers College. Another student insisted to the Times that “It’s the latest and maybe most visible and extreme case of a climate of racism that we face in our entire society but of course is manifested at Columbia as well.”

  Yet the more street-smart New York Post and Daily News, citing unnamed sources, said the noose might have been the result of an academic dispute with a rival professor, who was white, which had led Constantine to file a lawsuit in May 2007 charging her with defamation. The investigation mounted by the Hate Crime Task Force of the New York Police Department yielded few leads or clues. But in June 2008, more than a year after the incident, the Times was forced to reveal that the university had fired Constantine after what was reported to have been an eighteen-month investigation found that charges of plagiarism against her were accurate. According to the school, Constantine had lifted material from two former students and a former colleague prior to the noose incident. In fact, Columbia had sanctioned the professor in February, but allowed her to stay in her job to appeal the ruling. Columbia, however, had never released that information, and the Times, which has close contacts and good sources at the school, either never found out about it or chose not to report it. To date, the Times has still never performed a postmortem, acknow
ledged its role in yet another racial hoax, or followed up in any way to determine who exactly was behind the noose, or whether Constantine should have been charged criminally.

  Meanwhile, as responsive as the paper is to allegations of hate crimes against blacks, it has not demonstrated the same responsiveness in cases where the races are reversed and whites are the victims. In December 2000, for instance, Jonathan and Reginald Carr went on a heinous rape and killing spree in Wichita, Kansas. The two brothers were black; their victims were all white. After breaking into the residence of three young men, the Carr brothers forced the two women who were their guests to perform sexual acts on each other, and then forced the men to participate. The Carrs raped the women, and then drove the five victims to an ATM machine for money. Next they headed to a soccer field, where the victims were made to kneel in the snow and beg for their lives. All five were shot in the head, before the Carrs ran over them with their truck. One of the women survived and walked more than a mile in the snow for help; her fiancé was among those killed.

  Two years later, the Carr brothers were found guilty of four counts of capital murder, along with rape, aggravated robbery, burglary and theft. As Michelle Malkin wrote in her account of the case, “The horrific James Byrd dragging case in Texas and the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming, for example, garnered front-page headlines and continuous coverage,” yet there was little national coverage of the Wichita murders, and none at all from the New York Times. Malkin quoted one Wichita resident in a letter to the local paper: “If this had been two white males accused of killing four black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports.” Malkin concluded: “If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post or watched the evening news this week, the Wichita Massacre never happened.”