Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  The plain truth is that the only kind of diversity the paper really embraces is that of race and ethnicity. Indeed, an official report on the Jayson Blair episode included “A Note on Affirmative Action,” an appendix by Roger Wilkins, an activist who had become an urban affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board. Wilkins maintained that staff recruitment occurred within a culture where it was taught that “white men were the only people qualified to carry out the serious business of the world.” Thirty-five years of affirmative action had “blunted” but not eradicated “the preferences and prejudices that produced such results,” he argued, and therefore, “The countercultural forces of affirmative action and diversity programs are still necessary to assemble the kind of news gathering staff required to produce excellent journalism.”

  As for ideological diversity, the Credibility Committee report of 2005 admitted that “when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, [the resulting] monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.” The report said the paper needed to create a procedure to avoid “conveying an impression of one-sidedness.”

  In April 2008, the public editor Clark Hoyt still saw problems with the news/opinion divide. “The Times, like most newspapers, long ago ventured far from the safe shores of keeping opinions only on the opinion pages,” he wrote. “The news pages are laced with columns, news analysis, criticism, reporter’s notebooks, memos, journals and appraisals—all forms that depart from the straightforward presentation of facts and carry the risk of blurring the line between news and opinion—a line that I believe is critical to the long-term credibility of any news organization.”

  Even so, a succession of top editors have gone on the record denying there is bias at the Times. At a 2005 advertising convention, Bill Keller extolled the paper for practicing “a journalism of verification” rather than one of “assertion,” and for maintaining “agnosticism” about where a story may lead. In a 2007 online Q&A, “Talk to the Newsroom,” Keller returned to the subject in observations laced with ambivalence. “It would indeed be preposterous to argue that The Times does not have a liberal editorial page, or that a majority of the columnists (with a couple of outstanding exceptions) do not tend liberal. But it’s just plain wrong to say that the newsroom is ‘liberal’—in the sense that it toes a certain political or ideological line. Despite what readers might hear from the clamorous partisans of the left and right, reporters have no license to insinuate their politics or ideology into news stories.”

  It was now possible to hear the boots of the party line clicking in unison. In 2008, the political editor Richard Stevenson maintained that his staff “represents all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs and because we all work so closely and in such a fishbowl we all tend to keep one another on the straight and narrow.” And in 2009 the standards editor Craig Whitney demonstrated the paper’s institutional denial when he admitted that most of the paper’s staff had “blind spots (mostly in the right eye),” but said that if “we live up to our vows of political celibacy in the news columns, you shouldn’t be able to say that a news article in The Times has a liberal bent—or a conservative one.”

  A failure to achieve the promised transparency and accountability was very much on display in the egregious coverage of such incidents as the Duke rape case and the Fort Hood incident. But even if the editorial efforts at an internal cleansing had ever really taken hold, they would still be akin to rearranging deck chairs on a badly listing ship. The real problem at the Times comes down to what might be called, for lack of a better term, the armaments of political correctness that crowd its newsroom: the subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Americanism, anti-bourgeois hauteur, hypersensitivity toward “victim” groups, double standards, historical shallowness, intellectual dishonesty, cultural relativism, moral righteousness and sanctimony. Journalists are supposed to have an adversarial relationship to the institutions they cover, but when it turns into a reflexive oppositionalism, at odds with the middle register of American society and its values, there’s a problem.

  Unfortunately for the Times, a failure to correct its biases has converged with a financial crisis of existential proportions, one that dwarfs the downturn of the 1970s when Abe Rosenthal had his nightmares about waking up one morning and there being no New York Times. The fact that it is a time of wrenching change in the newspaper industry as a whole offers no consolation. A series of newsroom embarrassments and a consistent pattern of bias have hurt the Times as a brand, and this, along with a dubious business strategy, has made it more vulnerable to the depredations of Wall Street. This could mean that the Times and its unique corporate governance, with the Sulzbergers dominating the board and the shareholding structure, may not survive in their current form.

  During the flush years of the 1990s and early 2000s, the Times made several bad business decisions that now weigh heavily on its balance sheet. It bought the Boston Globe in 1993 and then tried to sell it, but stepped back after the bids were deemed too low. It passed up an opportunity to invest in Google, and also passed on a chance to buy part of Amazon.com because the move would have alienated one of its biggest advertisers, Barnes and Noble. In an effort to make itself less likely to be challenged by outside shareholders, the paper’s board of directors endorsed a buy-back of Times stock just at the point that its share price started to slide sharply, a move which tapped corporate coffers more than expected. Another blunder was to begin the process of capitalizing and constructing its new corporate headquarters on 40th Street in midtown Manhattan, a $600 million skyscraper that many analysts thought was beyond its means, in the middle of its financial malaise. Worse, it raised capital for the new building by selling the old one on 43rd Street in Times Square, which it was then compelled to rent for three years while the new building was under construction. During this time, the value of the old building increased threefold, leaving the new owner a tidy profit of $325 million when he sold it in April 2007—which would have been the Times’ profit had it structured the deal differently.

  The decision not to charge for website access also turned out to be one the Times would regret, as would most of the rest of the industry, which took its cues from the Times. Although the paper’s Web edition is journalistically dynamic, like most other newspaper websites it can charge only one-tenth the advertising rate that the print edition commands. Advertising revenues in the retail and classified categories have tanked, depressing the company’s stock price and bond ratings. In 2002, Times stock stood at $54; in February 2009 it hit a low of $3.92. (It has rebounded somewhat since then.) In 2008, Standard and Poor’s reduced the Times bond rating to just above junk status; Deutsche Bank, still believing that Times stock was overvalued, advised its clients to take advantage of a “near-term selling opportunity,” as did analysts at other financial institutions. In the first quarter of 2008, the New York Times Company lost $335,000; the first-quarter losses for 2009 were $74.5 million.

  Historically, the Times newsroom has been insulated from the corporation’s financial condition, with the Sulzbergers’ dominance of the board, and their vision of the paper as a quasi-public trust, allowing the family to put quality journalism over profit. But the current financial squeeze has gone beyond renouncing dividends. It has forced cuts, both in the newsroom and in the news product. The paper is now narrower than before; the “news hole” is 5 percent smaller and the magazine has shrunk by 15 percent. (Meanwhile the editorial column has actually been widened, which might be emblematic of the increased emphasis on opinion and attitude over reporting.) The Times has closed some suburban bureaus, discontinued everyday publication of some freestanding sections like Business, Sports and Metro, and junked altogether its suburban inserts and the City section, although it has retained both the Sunday and the Thursday Style section. Such moves have led to legitimate barbs about a continuing loss of seriousness
along with the ascendancy of soft news, making the world safe for more stories about Lady Gaga and new columns like “Crib Sheet,” which, the Times corporate announcement said, “offers a quick primer on the week’s hot conversation topics.”

  In late 2007, the company instituted a corporate hiring freeze, followed in 2009 by offering voluntary buyouts to reporters and editors to meet a goal of trimming the newsroom staff by one hundred. Failing to meet that goal, it laid off twenty-six reporters, editors, graphic artists and Web producers two days before Christmas in 2009. It has instituted a 5 percent pay cut for editors and all employees on the corporate side. In the meantime, even as it has raised its newsstand price to two dollars a day and five dollars on Sundays, it has ceased contributions to the Newspaper Guild’s health care fund, suspended its stock dividend, and embraced austerity measures such as advising reporters not to call 411 and canceling magazine and newspaper subscriptions for the Metro staff. Pressure from shareholders and some board members prompted both Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the company vice chairman, his cousin Michael Golden, to forgo the stock options that went along with their bonus compensation in 2006 and 2007. (Ironically, excessive executive compensation is one of Sulzberger Jr.’s hobbyhorses, getting considerable space in the Business section.) In November 2008, the company cut its dividend from $0.23 a share to $0.06 a share. In February 2009, the board voted to suspend the company’s quarterly dividend entirely. According to the Huffington Post, the move was “a significant blow” to Sulzberger family members who had gotten used to fat quarterly checks, as well as “a sign of the company’s financial struggles.”

  In 2007, the Times faced a challenge from Morgan Stanley, which was trying to get the board opened to more members outside the family. The Times beat back this challenge but was unable to deter others, most notably in 2008 from Scott Galloway of Harbinger Capital and another hedge fund, Firebrand Partners, which engineered the approval of two new outside members to sit on the board. (Harbinger has since sold off some of its stake, and did not stand any candidates for election to the board in 2010.)

  In the meantime, mounting debt forced the Times to turn to another outsider, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos “Slim” Helu, for a loan of $250 million so it can make interest payments on that debt. The analyst Henry Blodgett described the transaction with Slim as “the corporate equivalent of borrowing money from a payday loan shop.” Whereas the Times had once characterized Slim as a “robber baron,” now it was calling him a “shrewd investor.” When one of Slim’s holdings got involved in a Mexican telecommunications scandal in early 2010, the Times was accused of dragging its feet in reporting it out of deference to its financial angel. And in May 2010, Slim added to his stake after Harbinger sold off some of its holdings.

  Also at the same time, there was increasingly fierce competition from the Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch. By all reports, Murdoch is hell-bent on not only beating the Times but killing it. So he has been remaking the Journal from a “business” newspaper into a general interest publication, an effort described as a “crusade” in an early 2010 New York magazine report. The crusade is as much financial as personal and political. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is, for Murdoch, “a symbol of the Times’ hypocrisy, its smugness and its shortcomings.” Murdoch has pumped money into the Journal when almost every other publisher in America is cutting back. He has also, it is said, slashed rates to grab national advertisers from the Times, and has launched a “metropolitan section” focused on New York City, traditionally the Times’ proprietary domain, as well as a stand-alone weekend book review to compete with the TBR. According to New York magazine, the new metro section has been conceived as “the ultimate Times killer,” as it will “directly challenge the paper of record on its home turf.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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