new beats to reflect multicultural change and boosted the importance of certain beats already in existence, allowing some to become vehicles for ethnic and racial advocacy. Sulzberger was adroit at telegraphing his diversity priority through his monthly “Publisher’s Award.” The recipients of the cash award were well balanced by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, while the subject matter of the stories was in keeping with the new multicultural orthodoxy.
Arthur Jr.’s vision of diversity encompassed a more expanded role for women. In some early speeches he made the highly symbolic gesture of using “she” as a general pronoun. He also made no secret of his close association with Anna Quindlen, the op-ed columnist who became an unofficial part of his brain trust and was, many thought, on track to become a top editor.
Sulzberger also encouraged more open attitudes toward gays, a sharp break from what were increasingly portrayed in newsroom culture as the bad old days of Abe Rosenthal, who felt it best for gays to stay in the closet. In a videotaped speech he sent to the 1992 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Convention, Sulzberger affirmed newsroom identity politics when he said, “We can no longer offer our readers a white, straight male vision of events and say we are doing our job.” In that same speech, he declared he wanted the Times to extend company benefits to same-sex couples. Afterward, he let it be known that those who discriminated against gays would risk losing their jobs. Even before he became publisher, Sulzberger, in league with Max Frankel, also got his father to drop his opposition to the use of the term “gay” in news reports. Sulzberger Jr. met with openly gay staff members and assured them times had changed. He committed considerable company resources to underwrite panel discussions and job fairs sponsored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and made sure the Times sent sizable delegations to NLGJA conventions and other events.
Accelerated minority hiring and promotions rankled some of the old guard, who complained that some of the blacks, Latinos and women were being moved into senior leadership positions years before they were ready. Others bristled at a generally antagonistic atmosphere, which Peter Boyer, a former Timesman, described in a 1991 Esquire article as “moderate white men should die.” Boyer left the Times to become a staff writer at the New Yorker. Other accomplished midcareer Timesmen left too, taking with them vital experience, institutional memory and a special old-fashioned Times sensibility and culture. Rubbing salt into some of the old guard’s wounds, Frankel, backed by Sulzberger, virtually admitted that the commitment to diversity made double standards acceptable. At a forum at Columbia University, Frankel conceded that it would be difficult to fire a black woman, even if she were less good than another candidate.
The 1991 piece on the Times by Robert Sam Anson in Esquire described a newspaper increasingly dominated by ideology. N. R. Kleinfield, a veteran business and Metro reporter, told Anson that Frankel wanted “a subtle point of view” in stories—code for a more politicized take. Anonymously, one “senior Metro reporter” said “The Times is basically guided by the principles of political correctness. It is terrified to offend any of the victimized groups.” Anson described reporters complaining of being told they couldn’t work on certain stories because they were white, and others admitting that they tailored some articles to liberal political tastes. “Don’t make it too nice” is what one reporter told Anson he was instructed when assigned a profile about a conservative. Anson also cited veteran media insiders, like Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who said the Times now was “not as trusted. . . . People are saying it’s got a line.”
Yet unlike his father, who was bothered by complaints of ideological bias and relayed that annoyance to his top editors, Sulzberger Jr. had little patience with what he regarded as quibblers and naysayers. As legitimate questions were raised about diversity as a force in news coverage, he would hear none of it. Instead, he displayed a righteous, even sanctimonious insistence that he was “setting a moral standard.”
Not surprisingly, the diversity dissidents in the newsroom—and there were quite a few—became skittish. As John Leo of U.S. News and World Report put it, the paper’s “hardening line on racial issues, built around affirmative action, group representation and government intervention,” was difficult for staffers to buck. “Reporters do not thrive by resisting the deeply held views of their publisher.... When opinionated publishers are heavily committed to any cause, the staff usually responds by avoiding coverage that casts that cause in a bad light.” Or as one veteran Timesman told me when I was writing Coloring the News, no one was going to tell Arthur “We’ve gone too far. We’re losing our credibility.” William Stockton, a former senior editor, described the chilling effect of Sulzberger’s agenda: “With Arthur Jr. saying all those things about diversity in public speeches, clearly it was not good for your career to ask tough questions,” he told me.
In his bid to boost readership among a less news-literate generation, Sulzberger Jr. increased the amount of attention given to soft news and lifestyle. “Junior’s paper,” as the Times was now being sarcastically called by some on the staff, also encouraged some reporters to write with more “voice,” which further loosened the definition of news. Soon, features in People magazine style were making their way to the front page, sometimes little different from tabloid gossip aside from quality of writing.
In 1991, the Times hired Adam Moss, a former editor at Esquire, as a consultant to help revamp its coverage of lifestyle and popular culture. The result was Styles of the Times, a bid to appeal to the ad-rich world of downtown chic. Styles of the Times was Arthur Jr.’s first visible move as publisher, and he seemed to sense that it was a high-profile gamble. “Younger readers had better like it,” he joked to some reporters in the Washington bureau, “because all the older ones will drop dead when they see it.” Moss ran edgy, “transgressive” stories on gay rodeos, dominatrix wear, cyberpunk novels and outré celebrities.
The rest of the media took notice. Time magazine wrote of “Tarting Up the Gray Lady of 43rd St.” and likened the Times’ hip affections to “a grandmother squeezing into neon biking shorts after everyone else has moved on to black skirts.” Sulzberger Jr. struck 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