Ukrainian American groups, who liken their famine to the Holocaust, prompted the Pulitzer Prize Board to open an investigation on rescinding Duranty’s prize. Arthur Sulzberger hired Mark von Hagen, a Columbia historian, to perform an independent assessment of Duranty’s work, expecting validation. Instead, von Hagen said that Duranty’s reporting showed a “lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime” that was a “disservice to the American readers of The New York Times.” Sulzberger raised hackles when, without explanation, he cautioned that revoking the award was somewhat akin to the Stalinist urge “to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” Von Hagen was furious. Such “airbrushing” had been intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin, he shot back. “The aim of revoking Walter Duranty’s prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.” In the end, the Pulitzer Board voted not to rescind the award. Duranty’s portrait continued to hang on the wall near the executive dining room until the Times moved to its new building in 2008.
Sulzberger’s Financial Missteps. The price of Times stock, which traded at about $53 a share during the Blair scandal, has dropped through the floor, as have quarterly operating profits and ad revenue, while circulation continues to decline. The paper’s bond rating is practically “junk,” and a cash flow crisis in 2009 led it to borrow from a Mexican investor at rates considered almost usurious. Wall Street has smelled blood, resulting in an unprecedented shareholder challenge through which one firm, Harbinger Capital, gained two seats on the board of directors.
Meanwhile, there have been company-wide layoffs and, for the first time, newsroom downsizing. Employee stock options and contributions to the Newspaper Guild’s health fund have been adversely affected. The size of the paper itself has shrunk, with a 5 percent reduction in the space devoted to news.
The dark financial picture—a product of general newspaper industry dynamics as well as bad business decisions—has certainly not helped Sulzberger’s eroded position. According to a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta in 2006, the publisher had become “a particular source of concern,” and in late 2005 a family friend asked, “Is Arthur going to get fired?” A Times staffer told New York magazine that no one at the paper felt in good hands “because people believe [Sulzberger] is an incredible boob.”
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.
four
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
