a pose, expressing pleasure at the reaction. At a dinner, a fellow guest who lamented the passing of hard news was informed by Sulzberger that he was an anachronistic “child of the fifties.” At another public function, Arthur Jr. told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers meant “we’re doing something right,” and if they were not complaining, “it would be an indication that we were not succeeding.”
Styles of the Times eventually tanked, at least in its first incarnation. So many of the original advertisers defected that the Times had to give away ad space. Moss was reassigned to the Sunday magazine, importing a similar sensibility to a long-sturdy feature section that had once been a central forum for debate of the most important domestic and international issues. Soon the magazine featured photo shoots of grown women dressed as little girls, evocative of “kiddie porn,” along with stories about the market in Nazi memorabilia, including items made from human skin, and a Fourth of July photo-illustration of a man with his pants down sitting on an outdoor latrine, waving an American flag in one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other. Sulzberger Jr. backed Moss. But as Tifft and Jones relate it in The Trust, when the magazine ran a photograph of a naked Japanese actress bound with ropes for a film to be made for “Prisoner Productions,” Sulzberger Jr. reached his limit. He sent an angry memo to the magazine’s top editor, Jack Rosenthal, ordered Frankel to publish an editor’s note apologizing for the picture, and “conspicuously” copied his father, even though he was retired.
Besides diluting the paper’s overall gravitas, the push for softer, hipper journalism required an influx of journalists with far less hard-news experience; it called for grad-school-educated “specialists” in popular culture, consumerism and trendy esoterica. Fluff-ball features on junk culture and other trivia like “the return of tight jeans” and “micro plastic surgery,” amid a crush of television-obsessed reports and analysis, caused serious readers of the Times to roll their eyes and cancel their subscriptions. The paper, according to the New York Observer’s Michael Thomas, kept “plumbing the depths of trivialization.”
The fact that the soft news was restricted to the back sections of the paper at first provided a defense. But as editors tried to make the front news section more hip, the paper’s decline in seriousness came increasingly under attack. The barbs were particularly fierce after the Times published a front-page report echoing salacious, uncorroborated details from a Kitty Kelly biography of Nancy Reagan alleging that she had had an affair with Frank Sinatra. Controversy about slipping standards erupted again a short while later when the Times ran another dubious front-page story about rape allegations against a Kennedy cousin, William Smith, which named Smith’s alleged victim, Patricia Bowman, and offered up insinuations about her personal life and sexual past. Many critics read the lurid piece as a classic example of blaming the victim that sprang from a pre-feminist era. Women staffers at the Times circulated a petition and secured a meeting with Frankel in the Times auditorium, where three hundred staff members put him up against the wall. “How could you say that woman was a whore?” one staffer wanted to know.
Sulzberger Jr. regarded such unpleasant experiences as road bumps on the way to putting his personal mark on the editorial voice of his paper and bringing it into the new age. One of the first moves he made was to hire Howell Raines as editorial page editor. Unlike his father, who had tried to mute the editorial page’s stridency, Arthur Jr. wanted to make it more outspoken, edited by someone who reflected his own taste for confrontation and countercultural values.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Raines had sat on the sidelines during the mid-sixties civil rights demonstrations there, leaving him with a lifelong sense of Southern guilt and a determination never again to shrink from declaring his beliefs and opinions. Embracing a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision, he once declared that “Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.” According to Tifft and Jones, Arthur Jr. saw in the passionate Raines “a kindred spirit, a contrarian whose values had taken shape during the sixties, who viewed the world as a moral battleground, who relished intellectual combat, and who wasn’t shy about expressing his convictions in muscular unequivocal language.”
Under Raines, the editorial page assumed a caustic, take-no-prisoners tone reminiscent of the days of the ultra-liberal John Oakes. The page also became a platform for the new publisher’s preoccupations, focusing, sometimes obsessively, on diversity, gay rights, feminism, the history of racial guilt and other fixations of the cultural left.
Some of the editorial writers whom Raines inherited were not happy with the change, contending that there was more “shrill braying” than “sound argumentation” on the page. Now in retirement, even Max Frankel wrote that “mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” Timothy Noah of Slate said that Raines’ editorial page “routinely attempts to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt.” Michael Tomasky, then at New York magazine, accused him of “using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.”
Sulzberger also made Raines part of an informal “brain-trust,” composed of the executive editor and selected senior corporate managers, to plan the paper’s future. This gave Raines power and influence over other parts of the Times that no other editorial page editor ever had. It also had the effect of weakening the firewall between news and opinion, particularly on the publisher’s pet issues, especially that of diversity.
Sulzberger Jr.’s effort to reinvigorate the editorial page also involved a substantial change among op-ed columnists. Packing the roster with his personal and political favorites, he added Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to Anna Quindlen, who had secured her place several years earlier when Arthur Jr. was deputy publisher and had become an important ally. According to a growing cadre of Times critics, the problem was not that Sulzberger Jr. hired liberal op-ed columnists, but that he hired them in a vastly disproportionate ratio to conservative voices. At one point after Sulzberger abruptly relieved Abe Rosenthal of his column in 1999, William Safire was the only conservative on the op-ed page. Sulzberger’s choices were also markedly narrow in journalistic experience. Of the four aforementioned, none had spent any time as a foreign correspondent, and the national-level reporting experience of the group as a whole was limited. It seemed that Arthur Jr. chose most of his columnists on the basis of how much they agreed with his own sixties-era values and with the P.C. agenda he embraced.
Had Sulzberger merely allowed Raines to sharpen the combative edge of the editorial page, and turned the op-ed page into a mirror of his liberal politics and self-consciously iconoclastic values, his innovations might have been defensible. But he also initiated changes that encouraged the infiltration of opinion into the news pages. He did so chiefly by increasing the number of columnists on the inside pages; by relaxing or ignoring rules that had barred television, film, theater and literary critics from injecting their politics into reviews; by increasing the amount of space devoted to news analysis and other forms of explanatory journalism; and by expanding the importance of popular culture in the news mix.
Up until well into the 1960s the Times had had very few columnists; by the early 2000s there were four dozen, scattered throughout the paper. In late 2009, there were eighteen “cultural critics” alone, courtesy of the expanded coverage of popular culture. Had someone like Abe Rosenthal been there to keep a weather eye out for critics using their perch to introduce political or social commentary into what were supposed to be “straight” reviews, the boost in the number of critics and “inside” columnists would not have been such a problem. But the new Timesmen and Timeswomen were encouraged to write with “voice.” Given the ideological proclivities of the people hired by Sulzberger, that meant a liberal voice as well as political posturing.
And so, writing about Goodnight and Good Luck in his 2006 Oscar predictions column, David Carr called the film “A well crafted
