Gray Lady Down (38 page)

T
he ghost of Abe Rosenthal, made unquiet by the contrast between the legacy he left behind and the politicized agenda pursued by Sulzberger Jr., continued to haunt the
Times
in the ensuing years—which even the paper’s most ardent defenders had to admit were marked by an aura of decline and fall. Rosenthal had foreseen most of the problems that were in store for the institution to which he had devoted his life. Were he still alive, it is hard to imagine that he would not be feeling a twinge of
Schadenfreude
over the
Times’
current predicament. But being a fierce loyalist, he also would probably feel ashamed that the paper he strove to keep “straight” had embraced
so many dubious multicultural nostrums and drifted so far to the left that on some days it read like a broadsheet version of the
Nation.
Rosenthal would also hate the idea of the
Times
airing its institutional problems so publicly. This, after all, was a man who fought to keep the corrections column as unnoticed as possible and resisted the creation of a public editor long after others in the news industry had adopted one. And unlike the kinder, gentler newsroom that Sulzberger has encouraged, where few seem to suffer for their errors, Rosenthal certainly made transgressors feel his wrath. Some walked the plank; others endured internal exile to some obscure career Siberia.

In Rosenthal’s era,
Times
editors could say with some confidence, “We’re not the story. The story is the story.” By 2010 this would no longer be the case. The egregiousness of the Jayson Blair scandal, along with a string of other institutional humiliations that followed, made that old certitude impossible to sustain as the paper’s internal chaos itself became news fit to print.

So the
Times
entered a cycle in which error caused by its political commitments was followed by fevered public contrition and promises of amendment delivered publicly through “Notes to Readers,” public editor’s columns and long editorial
mea culpas,
often on the front page, explaining how and why the paper committed the journalistic sin for which it needed to apologize. This cycle of real and pretended remorse was also marked by the announcement of newsroom reforms and personnel changes designed to rehabilitate the paper’s credibility and reputation, and to head off more scandal and embarrassment by encouraging, as one internal report put it, “transparency” and “accountability.”

Yet much like the addict who pledges sobriety but can’t follow through, the
Times
falls off the wagon regularly. The newsroom reforms either have not been implemented in the way they were designed, or have been ineffectual, undercut by inertia, obduracy, denial, a persisting sense of institutional entitlement and a fundamental failure to get at the root causes of its dysfunction. Also, the paper has been willing to change in every respect except one: the tone of superiority, the leftish partisanship and embrace of
countercultural values, all of which have been hallmarks of the Arthur Jr. regime.

One change that seemed to hold great promise was the appointment of Bill Keller as editor in chief in 2004. Keller came across as more open to outside criticism, especially from conservatives. In an interview with Nick Lemann of the
New Yorker
in 2005, he seemed to validate many of their complaints. “Conservatives feel estranged because they feel excluded,” he acknowledged. “They do not always see themselves portrayed in the mainstream press as three-dimensional humans, and they don’t see their ideas taken seriously or treated respectfully.”

The spasm of institutional introspection, suffused with what appeared to be a genuine willingness to embrace more varied political perspectives, led to the creation of a special “conservative beat” in January 2004, with David Kirkpatrick in the D.C. bureau the first to cover it. The goals of this new beat were to identify the “thinkers” of the conservative movement, describe “the grassroots they organize” and explore “how the conservative movement works to be heard in Washington,” as Keller later put it. The plan was not only to cover conservatives and their ideas, but to make these ideas explicable to
Times
editors. Kirkpatrick’s beat was discontinued in 2007, however, setting the paper up for the fall it took over its inattentiveness to stories such as the revelations of ACORN corruption in 2009, which seemed to exemplify the paper’s political tunnel vision.

The longer Keller stayed at the helm, the more thin-skinned and sarcastic he grew toward the conservative critique. Even in the
New Yorker
interview where he had acknowledged some grounds for conservative complaint, he also condescendingly claimed that the idea of “the liberal press” was a concept manufactured for political gain. And while many thought Keller would lead the paper in a less partisan direction, the reality was a shrill and intractable hostility to the Bush White House. The impetus
for the attacks may have come from middle-line editors, but the charge was led by Keller himself. In a
New York
magazine profile headlined “The United States of America vs. Bill Keller,” he accused the Bush administration of whipping up “a partisan hatefest” against the
Times,
which had “really pissed him off.” At a
New Yorker
panel discussion in October 2008, Keller was asked about the McCain campaign’s attacks on the
Times
regarding the lobbyist/mistress story. He defiantly (and childishly) replied, “my first tendency when they do that is to find the toughest McCain story we’ve got and put it on the front page just to show that they can’t get away with it.”

Another reform that seemed to have promise was the creation of a public editor—a readers’ advocate or ombudsman, as other news organizations defined the role. The
Times
had historically resisted creating one, Keller said in a note to the staff, worrying that “it would foster nit-picking and navel-gazing, that it might undermine staff morale and, worst of all, that it would absolve other editors of their responsibility to represent the interests of readers.” Yet Daniel Okrent, who became the first public editor, defined the job in radically different terms, indicating that there was a crying need to provide “transparency to readers about how and why the Times does what it does.”

During his tenure, from December 2003 to May 2005, Okrent issued sage and penetrating critiques of his own paper. People on the right who hated the
Times
were nonetheless “as much a constituency as anyone else,” he thought. “Closing one’s ears to the complaints of partisans would also entail closing one’s mind to the substance of their arguments.” To many, Okrent’s most important achievement was affirming the criticism that had brought withering scorn from the paper—that it had a bias toward the cultural left. Those who thought the
Times
played it down the middle on controversial social issues, he said, were “reading the paper with [their] eyes closed.”

For saying this, Okrent took his lumps from
Times
reporters and editors—confirming I. F. Stone’s insight that “persuading others to virtue is an unendearing profession,” he remarked. When Okrent left, he wrote of his “18 months of bruised feelings,
offended egos, pissed off editors and infuriated writers.” Some reporters and editors simply refused to cooperate with him, such as Joe Sexton, editor of the Metro section, who thought the creation of the public editor position was a “profound mistake,” says Okrent. Another antagonist was Katherine Roberts, editor of the Week in Review, who thought some of Okrent’s questions were doltish and his columns, which appeared in her section, too long.

Okrent’s successor, Byron Calame, got his share of guff too. When he corrected Alessandra Stanley’s claim that Geraldo Rivera had “nudged” a Hurricane Katrina rescue worker out of the way so he could showboat for the Fox News cameras, Stanley acidly told
Women’s Wear Daily
that Calame was like Kenneth Starr, except that “what he was writing about isn’t a presidency. It’s spelling and ellipses and semicolons.” Stanley was a fine one to belittle Calame. In 2005 her correction rate was so bad that editors assigned her a personal fact-checker. Clark Hoyt, the third public editor, had to deal with some attitude as well. In his farewell column in June 2010, he wrote, “On my first day on the job, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, sat opposite me in a little room off his office, clapped his hands on his knees and said with a laugh: ‘Well, you’re here. You must be dumber than you look.’”

Another newsroom reform was the creation in 2006 of a “standards editor” who would coordinate journalistic practices and ethical guidelines involved in all
Times
newsgathering operations. This involved supervising the overhaul of policies governing the use of confidential and anonymous sources—the use and misuse of which had gotten the paper into so much trouble during the Jayson Blair scandal. A confidential source could now be cited in the paper, the new guidelines said, only if at least one editor knew the source’s name. These policies were further strengthened after source-related problems surfaced in Judith Miller’s reporting on WMDs and in Plamegate. No one at the
Times,
not Sulzberger, not Keller, knew Miller’s Plamegate source—a situation that the former Rosenthal acolyte Pranay Gupte told me would never have happened when Abe was in charge. Putting some teeth back into the anonymous-sourcing policy would, executives hoped, get
more information “on the record” and provide a fuller sense of the motivation of sources in offering information without identifying themselves—in essence, why they were entitled to speak from the shadows.

Yet these lofty ideals were discarded the moment the
Times
got a chance to publish what it regarded as a killing blow to John McCain’s presidential candidacy, with a story about his “mistress” based on a number of unidentified sources. The paper violated its own policy again a few months later when it ran a “blind” story about Caroline Kennedy’s nanny and tax problems as she was being considered to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat for New York. It was later disclosed that these issues were old and minor, and were part of a smear campaign engineered from the office of New York’s governor, David Paterson. During this episode, the paper got hoaxed in a letter to the editor by someone claiming to be Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris, saying that Caroline Kennedy had “no qualification whatsoever” to be a senator. Her appointment would be wholly “dynastic,” representing a “drifting away from a truly democratic model.” The “mayor” concluded: “Can we speak of American decline?”

Other hoaxes, also originating in reliance on dubious sources, occurred on April Fool’s Day, 2010. David Goodman, a
Times
staff blogger, ran with a claim by a legal blogger named Eric Turkewitz that he had been appointed the official White House legal blogger. Turkewitz later said he was hoping to catch fast-and-loose political bloggers, but instead suckered “the vaunted New York Times.” The same day, Andy Newman relied on a source who was an occasional
Times
guest blogger for a story about a theater troupe planning a project involving more than a thousand people riding the subway nude from the waist down. The event turned out to be completely fallacious.

The paper also announced that it was going to be more watchful and more punitive about plagiarism. But when Maureen Dowd cribbed material verbatim from the Talking Points blogger Josh Marshall, in a May 2009 column bashing Dick Cheney’s defense of what Dowd called “torture,” she didn’t even get a wrist-slap.

The admissions of error and resolutions to improve kept rolling in. A 2005 report titled “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust,” produced by what was called the “Credibility Committee,” said that
Times
news coverage needed to “embrace unorthodox views and contrarian opinions and to portray lives both more radical and more conservative than those most of us experience.” The paper also needed to “listen carefully to colleagues who are at home in realms that are not familiar to most of us,” especially religion. The
Times
should strive to create a climate in which staff members feel free to “propose or criticize coverage from vantage points that lie outside the perceived newsroom consensus.” And it should “encourage more reporting from the middle of the country, from exurbs and hinterland, and more coverage of social, demographic, cultural and lifestyle issues.”

The committee also recommended an expansion in the diversity of the hires it made, with an accent on more conservative journalists: “Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that [the
Times
is] missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.” Likewise, Bill Keller told an interviewer that he wished for “more journalists with military experience, more from rural upbringings, more who grew up in evangelical churches.” In a 2005 column headlined “A Slap in the Face,” Nick Kristof warned that the
Times,
and American journalism generally, could wind up on the wrong side of history if it didn’t correct a failure to hire “red state evangelicals” and people who knew a “12 gauge from an AR-15.”