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 Arthur Jr. took over the publisher’s position in 1991, the Times created more diversity-related managerial incentives and requirements. According to Bill Stockton, the bonus program was changed to reflect how well managers did in minority recruitment, training and retention, with 25 percent of the compensation based on how many journalists of color officially took jobs. Stockton remembered senior-level editorial meetings where Frankel and his second in command, Joe Lelyveld, put the squeeze on their subordinates because of the pressure they felt from Sulzberger. Editors were asking, “Who can we send abroad? Put on the national desk? Make bureau chief?” Stockton recalled, adding, “They were pushing, really pushing. There was pressure all the time.”
But like the effort to hire minorities in the 1960s, the 1980s initiative was hampered by an inability to hold on to minority talent. “The truth,” Frankel wrote, “was that we did have a problem keeping people of color: the most successful blacks were repeatedly tempted by opportunities elsewhere and the least successful were often left wondering whether they were victims of prejudice or cultural alienation.” Meanwhile, dissension was growing on the white side of the newsroom. According to Frankel, the “diversity training” seminars that the Times sponsored were often “delivered by shameless charlatans,” by “peddlers of pop psychology” who were indulged so the paper could “avoid being branded as racist.” These sessions were an occasion for some black employees to demand that racial identifications be abandoned in news reports, even in the case of criminals at large. One editor even wanted a ban on all idiomatic negative uses of “black,” such as “black magic” and “Black Monday,” or even “film noir.” Frankel’s number two, Joe Lelyveld, thought the sessions a questionable expenditure, and withheld money that he thought was better spent in the news budget.
The most controversial and ultimately the most tragic beneficiary of the diversity campaign was the former managing editor Gerald Boyd. Although Boyd was not the Ivy League type historically favored by the Times, he “represented a terrifically hard-nosed black reporter that senior management could relate to,” Bill Stockton maintained. “Someone who could be black but still fit in.” The paper saw tremendous potential in Boyd. According to Stockton, “As Gerry Boyd moved up it became apparent to very senior management that he was their one best hope—their last best hope—to springboard a minority to the top.” The plan, says Stockton, was to bring Boyd to New York and rotate him through various senior managerial positions. “If he did not fall flat on his face, he would be promoted to some top destination.”
Boyd guided the paper’s exceptional coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and edited the year 2000 Pulitzer-winning fifteen-part series on race in America. But many blamed him for egregious and embarrassing miscoverage of a string of race-related incidents in New York in the early 1990s, including the infamous anti-Jewish riot in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 1991. While Jews were clearly victims of the overwhelmingly black rioting, Boyd injected a tone of moral equivalence into the coverage he supervised, angering many New Yorkers.
Boyd’s missteps, however, did not affect his upward mobility. In late 1990, Frankel had called the correspondent to New York and told him, in so many words, that he would be the Times’ Jackie Robinson. Adapting a page from the Branch Rickey handbook, he warned Boyd about “the tough time” ahead, “because a lot of people are going to be saying we’re doing this because of your race—and to a degree we are, and I think you can handle that.” Although he was passed over for managing editor when Joe Lelyveld became editor in chief in 1997, Boyd got the job when Howell Raines replaced Lelyveld in 2001.