Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  Roberts also offered lots of space for Meeropol’s emotional defense of her grandparents, rendered with historical dubious-ness. “If he [Julius] was trying to shore up the Soviet Union to ensure the United States wasn’t the only superpower who held the potentially devastating secret,” Meeropol told Roberts, “then they—and I say they because she was not the naïve housewife and mother, she would have known and believed in it too—they probably believed they were saving humanity from the destructive force of a single American superpower, and their fears have come true. The notion that if you criticize your government you’re a traitor is also very similar.”

  Part of the late 1970s Sectional Revolution, in which the Times became a multisection publication bulging with soft news and lifestyle journalism, was a greater use of market research and polling of target constituencies, especially in the area of cultural coverage. The research explained that the Times needed to “reach out to a new generation, people whose attention spans were shorter,” as Warren Hoge, the assistant managing editor, told NPR. It needed to replace its older readers with a new generation, one that was educated but “aliterate,” meaning they did not read much. “We have to grab young readers by the lapels because they are less interested in reading,” Hoge said.

  Over time, this transformation crowded out coverage of high culture in favor of an oddball, wink-and-nod popular culture. “The entire social and moral compass of the paper,” as the former Times art critic Hilton Kramer later said, was altered to conform to a liberal ethos infused with “the emancipatory ideologies of the 1960’s” and drawing no distinction between “media-induced notoriety and significant issues of public life.” The Times took on more and more lightness of being. It became preoccupied with pop-culture trivia and über urban trends, reported on with moral relativism and without intellectual rigor.

  The change was met by disaffection and derision within the paper’s newsroom. Grace Gluek, who ran the culture desk for a while as replacement editor, was one of the disaffected, and famously once asked, “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this job?” Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the Daily News, said the new cultural pages reminded him of a middle-aged woman learning how to disco: “She put on a miniskirt and her varicose veins are showing.” Gerry Gold, a staff reporter, commented, “We do all these pieces on pop icons as if they are important artistes. In fact they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them.”

  When the Times launched a new Sunday section called Styles of the Times on May 3, 1992, it was geared to the sensibility of the MTV generation and New York’s increasingly visible and vocal gay community. The section carried stories on gay rodeos and on a store catering to skinheads and dominatrices, and odes to talents like Billy Idol and trends like cyberpunk. Styles raised eyebrows throughout the newspaper industry with its first issue, featuring a cover story on “The Arm Fetish,” which according to Tifft and Jones presented a muscular bare arm as a recognizable image for a specific form of sexual activity in the gay community. The story was a public embarrassment for Sulzberger Sr., at whose seventieth birthday party Abe Rosenthal, retired from editing the paper but still writing an op-ed column, said, “I knew we were in a new age when I saw the first edition of Styles of the Times. Not only did it give New York the finger, it gave it the whole arm.”

  Facing complaints about Styles from longstanding readers, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sometimes responded sympathetically. To one college professor he said, “Styles isn’t intended for you. You’re too old. It’s for different readers, for those between 30 and 40 years old.” Then he added, “Maybe I’m getting too old for it too.” But at other times he seemed to revel in upsetting the old guard. The real problem with Styles, however, was that it made no money for the Times, so after two years it was absorbed back into the Metro section.

  Lifestyle journalism and soft news got a big boost under the two-year tenure of Howell Raines (2001-2003), whose obsession with popular culture earned his regime the sobriquet “charge of the lite brigade.” When he took over, Raines wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly (published only after his dismissal over the Jayson Blair scandal) in which he expatiated on the role that popular culture had to play at the Times.

  If you want to reach members of this quality audience who are between the ages of twenty and forty, you have to penetrate the worlds of style and popular culture. If the Times’ journalism continues to show contempt for the vernacular of those worlds, the paper will continue to lose subscribers. To explore every aspect of American and global experience does not mean pandering. It does mean that the serial ups and downs of a Britney Spears are a sociological and economic phenomenon that is, as a reflection of contemporary American culture, worthy of serious reporting. It means being astute enough about American society to understand that the deadly rap wars have nothing to do with what Snoop Dogg said about Suge Knight. The real story behind the rap wars is one of huge corporations like Sony and EMI trying to save a multibillion-dollar industry in economic collapse.

  The gravitas of the paper has suffered as a result of key appointments in the area of cultural news. One of them was the promotion of Sam Sifton from editor of the Dining section to cultural news editor in 2005. His intellectual pedigree was not in doubt: son of Elisabeth Sifton, a major figure in New York’s publishing community; grandson of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian. But his obsession with pop-culture trivia came across full force in a 2007 online “Talk to the Newsroom” Q&A with readers, where he promised more video game reviews—a promise he certainly kept. In the same forum the previous year, he defended his paper’s coverage of Hollywood celebrities, and when a reader asked “Do you party? Do you rock and roll?” Sifton answered in a tone of desperate hipness by quoting Young Jeezy: “E’rybody know I rep these streets faithfully.”

  But the problem at the Times was greater than the taste of the editors it hired. As the current editor Bill Keller has said, the Times puts out a daily newspaper “plus about 15 weekly magazines,” meaning the various freestanding sections in the paper. These fiefdoms are more and more devoted to lifestyle and less to news per se.

  With a revived Style section appearing on both Sunday and Thursday, plus Home and Arts sections, and magazine sections on fashion and design, soft news and lifestyle have come to define the paper as much or more than hard-news coverage. In a somewhat humorous—and devastating—New Republic article of April 2006, about the Times’ fascination with “lifestyle porn,” Michelle Cottle quoted Trip Gabriel, then editor of both Style sections, as saying that most of Thursday Styles “falls under the general category of coverage about appearance and image and what one sees looking in the mirror.... We are another department of basically consumerist pursuits—about the kinds of things that give people pleasure.” Cottle took it from there: “On any given Thursday, Styles fans are treated to a mélange of articles examining the hottest trends in looking good—everything from virtual personal trainers to ayurvedic massage to butt implants—with a whole lot of couture coverage in between. The front page features two or three longer pieces, including a photo-laden fashion spread and a nonshoppingrelated ‘lifestyle’ piece on topics like parenting or online dating.”

  One feature of Styles that seems particularly pointless is the “Critical Shopper,” where a retail experience, usually high-end, is reviewed as if it were a movie, a play or a museum exhibit. In one review, Alex Kuscinski compared the silkiness of a $30,000 mink coat to the silkiness of her pet dachshund, the dog coming up short against a material “so otherworldly I experienced the bizarre sensation of having never touched such material before.” Like the paper’s arts and media criticism, these shopping reviews can also have a political edge, though often a vapid one. Mike Albo made a foray into a hipster chotchke store in Brooklyn called Fred Flare in 2008, and wrote that the place was full of “happy, cheap, eclectic thingies” and an “absurdly happy staff,” who were “like human text messages from Smurfland.” Albo focused o
n a handmade teddy bear that made his “little blackened, coal-size heart grow and become warm and fuzzy.” He hadn’t realized how starved for light-heartedness he was, but it made sense, he said: “If you feel as if you have been emotionally, professionally and politically run over by a tank for the last, say, eight years, then the well-selected, fun merchandise and carbonated energy of Fred Flare will bring a smile on your cautious, crabby face.”

  A lot of these lifestyle features deal with sex, often in a way that’s purposefully transgressive, even vulgar. In a feature on sex between clients and contractors in places like the Hamptons, “The Allure of the Toolbelt,” Joyce Wadler described one local as saying that the client-contractor affairs are relatively safe: there is no need to worry when the contractor’s car is seen in a woman’s driveway in the middle of the afternoon. And client-contractor love, from what he’s seen, rarely threatens marriages because when the job is over, the affair is over.

  A report on an upscale S&M store in Manhattan was headlined “My Other Riding Crop Is for My Horse.” The store, explained Alex Kuscinski, offered “leather restraints with lace insets, cupless bras (delicately renamed the ‘frame bra’ here), embossed leather paddles, braided leather whips, riding crops, silk bondage ropes and, of course, modernity’s most significant addition to the bedroom, the Sony DVD camcorder and lightweight tripod.” Many products were designed to “stimulate an extremely personal part of the body”; they were made from tempered glass, obsidian glass and titanium, and sold at prices ranging up to $1,750. These could be displayed on a coffee table as sculptural objects, Kuscinksi added helpfully, “but it would be difficult to explain when your mother came over for coffee.”

  The queen of dubious trend stories on sex and romance is Stephanie Rosenbloom, author of a series of lifestyle features centered on au courant female sexuality. One was about “girl crushes,” referring to “that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished.” Rosenbloom also wrote about “The Taming of the Slur,” on the increasing mainstream use of the word “slut,” a report that had all the gravitas of Beverly Hills, 90210. Perhaps her most absurd piece involved the etymology she produced for the word “vajayjay,” a slang term for vagina that originated on the television show Grey’s Anatomy and found its way to Oprah and Jimmy Kimmel, as well as the Web. According to Rosenbloom, the word’s emergence marked a certain feminist moment. She quoted an actress from Grey’s Anatomy saying, “It’s a word I use, a word my female friends use, a word I’ve heard women in the grocery store use. I don’t even think about where it came from anymore. It doesn’t belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women.”

  For some, the vulgarity and desperate hipness have been too much. As Joseph Epstein put it in the Weekly Standard in 2010, the New York Times’traditional sobriquet, “the Gray Lady of American newspapers . . . implied a certain stateliness, a sense of responsibility, the possession of high virtue. But the Gray Lady is far from the grande dame she once was. For years now she has been going heavy on the rouge, lipstick, and eyeliner, using a push-up bra, and gadding about in stiletto heels. She’s become a bit—perhaps more than a bit—of a slut, whoring after youth through pretending to be with-it. I’ve had it with the old broad; after nearly 50 years together, I’ve determined to cut her loose.”

  seven

  Gays

  If some of the Times’ lifestyle reporting seems almost tongue in cheek, its coverage of the gay world is in earnest. Whether it’s gay travel, gay entertainment, gay film, gay sex, gay adoption and parenting, or the ultimate cause célèbre, gay marriage, the Times brings a crusading voice to what it considers the civil rights movement of the day. Gay-themed stories appear in the paper routinely, sometimes three or four in a day. As Andrew Solomon, a gay author whose wedding was written up for the Times “Vows” column, put it, “The love that dared not speak its name is now broadcasting.”

  Historically, the crusade is an outgrowth of what has been called the paper’s “Lavender Enlightenment,” which was described back in 1992 in a lengthy piece by Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay columnist. The feature noted that it had been more than five years since the retirement of Abe Rosenthal, an editor “who ran his empire not unlike recent European despots.” Signorile charged that Rosenthal’s banning of the word “gay,” which he had considered overtly political, had held back the social movement. Rosenthal’s renowned homophobia also left gay men and women at the Times “immensely frightened and frustrated,” most of them remaining deep in the closet, barely acknowledging each other much less openly socializing. Those who were suspected of being gay often suffered in their careers, sent to unimportant dead-end bureaus and desks or even recalled from foreign postings if word of their sexual orientation leaked out.

  The famous gay riot in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn hardly received the coverage such a now-mythic event should have earned. In fact, when eyewitnesses or rioters called the Times newsroom to report developments and police brutality, they were often shrugged off the phone. Neither would the Times take ads for The Homosexual Handbook, even after it had sold out its second printing of 50,000 copies.

  Once Rosenthal retired in 1986, “the walls of repression came tumbling down,” staffers told Signorile. Rosenthal’s successor, Max Frankel, confessed, “I knew they’d had a hard time, and I knew they weren’t comfortable identifying themselves as gay.” But, he added, “I never dreamed that so many homosexuals were hiding in newsroom closets, awaiting the trumpet call.”

  Frankel sent a major signal that things were going to be different almost immediately. “Punch, you’re going to have to swallow hard on this one,” Frankel told Sulzberger Sr., in a peculiar choice of words. “We’re going to start using the word ‘gay.’” Frankel’s efforts were given a boost by symbolic statements and gestures on the part of the publisher-in-waiting, Sulzberger Jr. According to Charles Kaiser, a former Rosenthal news clerk who is gay, “When he came in, gays in the newsroom lived in terror, and Arthur met them and took each of them to lunch and said, ‘What is it like to be gay here? When I take over, it will no longer be a problem.’”

  In January 1992, two weeks after becoming the new publisher, Sulzberger Jr. held a meeting with the editorial staff in the newsroom, Signorile reported, and told them that “diversity” would be a priority at the paper. Eventually he blurted out the phrase “sexual orientation.” Gay staff members later said they almost fell off their chairs, since it was the first time that phrase had ever been used by a top Times executive.

  According to Kaiser, Sulzberger’s efforts and the signals sent by other editors who took his cue translated into remaking the paper “from the most homophobic institution in America to the most gay-friendly institution.” No more fag jokes, people were told, and newsroom staff members with partners felt free to put pictures of them on their desks. It was a period of “vaulting consciousness,” wrote Frankel.

  Another turning point was Frankel’s decision to allow Jeffrey Schmaltz to report on AIDS. Schmaltz was an AIDS victim himself, as was first revealed when he suffered an AIDS-related seizure in the Times newsroom in January 1990. When Schmaltz returned to work, he asked Frankel to put him on the AIDS beat and allow him to write subjectively about his disease. Frankel had qualms about the built-in conflict of interest and worried that Schmaltz’s reporting could lapse “into partisanship and sentimentality.” But the green light was flashed and Schmaltz produced first-person stories for the Sunday magazine and for the Week in Review. “His scoops were the rarest kind,” Frankel wrote. “He was always as accurate, sharp and honest as we had a right to expect and obviously labored to restrain his emotions.” When Schmaltz died in 1993, Frankel told the obituary writer that he had left “a remarkable bequest to American journalism.” In his memoir, Frankel heralded Schmaltz as “the agent of our ultimate enlightenment.”

  Frankel’s successor, Joseph Lelyveld, brought in an ope
nly gay editor, Adam Moss, to consult on a variety of issues related to attracting a younger, hipper readership, with an emphasis on homosexuals. Moss took a leading role in creating and editing the first (and ill-fated) Sunday Style section, characterized by a campy, ironic tone and an in-your-face gay candor. The paper also emphasized the hiring and promoting of openly gay reporters and editors. By 2000, the institutional hospitality to gay values had grown so warm that Richard Berke, then a Washington reporter, could tell members of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association that “literally, three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.” In 2002, Moss got up at a media panel discussion in Lower Manhattan and declared that he basically edited “a gay magazine,” at least in terms of its dominant sensibility. Some in New York media circles began referring to the Times as “The Pink Lady.”

  The opening up of news space and editorials to previously slighted subjects related to homosexuality in America is to be applauded, as is the basic respect and career advancement afforded to gay journalists, who no longer have to fear being “out” or “outed” at the Times. But looking at the last twenty years of the Times in terms of integrity in the coverage of gay issues, there is less to be happy about. On almost every gay-related topic you can name, the Times has lost all pretense of objectivity, instead assuming a crusading stance and showing an impulse to deconstruct traditional morality and family structure.