Hard News
Authors: Seth Mnookin
HARD NEWS
The Scandals at
The New York Times
and Their Meaning for
American Media
S
ETH
M
NOOKIN
RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
Contents
For my parents
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
—Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, 1787
This was not exactly the truth, but then, what is, exactly?
—Howell Raines,
Whiskey Man,
1977
I
NTRODUCTION
The first newspaper printed in America lasted only one issue.
Publick Occurences, Both Foreign and Domestick,
was printed in Boston on September 25, 1690, but it wasn’t until a century later that newspapering in this country truly got going. By 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, there were 43 papers, and by 1787 the young American government had formally recognized how important a healthy press was to a healthy democracy: The First Amendment to the republic’s new Constitution famously promised that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Encouraged, the press mushroomed. By 1814, there were 346 domestic newspapers; by 1880, there were 11,314.
While America has always enjoyed a more or less free and healthy press, the commonly accepted practices of journalism have undergone a radical transformation between its beginnings and the present day. For the first century of the country’s existence, the notion of a uniformly “objective” press seemed quaint and naÏve. While some papers strove to be fair-minded and accurate, many others chose sensationalism, or political expediency, or tawdry slander. By the end of the nineteenth century, a pair of irascible (and incorrigible) press barons, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, had turned their bitter newspaper rivalry into a lesson in warmongering and dishonest reportage, creating scandals for the express purpose of embarrassing the competition and disseminating jingoistic propaganda. (Hearst, in his inimitable way, would later brag that he had all but started the Spanish-American War. He wasn’t far off.)
It was into this world that the modern-day
New York Times
was born. In the late 1800s, the
Times
was a small, struggling broadsheet, minuscule in comparison with Hearst’s
Journal
or Pulitzer’s
World.
The paper made a name for itself by seizing an underrepresented market niche. By emphasizing judicious reporting (and official proclamations), the
Times
transformed itself into a true paper of record, one avowedly uninfluenced by public opinion and dedicated to reporting the truth. Over generations, the paper earned a hard-won and much-cherished reputation for being fair and impartial. Readers, in turn, came to trust and rely on the
Times
with an almost religious fervor and, in doing so, helped to make the
Times,
and the sort of journalism it had created, the standard to which all other newspapers would have to compare themselves. More than any other single source, the
Times
would come to represent the closest journalism could get to unvarnished truth.
—————
T
ODAY
,
The New York Times
is the most important newspaper in America. That’s not to say it’s always the best.
The Wall Street Journal
is frequently more eloquent.
The Washington Post
often leads the pack on political stories and of late has been both nimbler and more authoritative. For the last several years, the
Los Angeles Times
has produced a more purposeful news report, and in 2004 it thoroughly dominated the Pulitzer Prizes. But
The New York Times
—by dint of the talent of its staff, its location in the world’s media capital, and its decades-long position as the bible of the American elite—is the institution that represents the pinnacle of its field.
Whether or not it will remain so is an open question. In an increasingly fractured media landscape that is characterized by declining newspaper readership, a proliferation of cable news networks and weblogs, and a blurring of the lines between entertainment and journalism, the
Times
is fighting to maintain the grip it has had on America’s collective consciousness for more than half a century. Ironically, that fracturing is as responsible for the
Times
’s lingering dominance as is its journalistic excellence—these days, the number of media options is so overwhelming that there almost needs to be a default standard-bearer. The rest of the media world, from broadcast news to cable outlets to other newspapers to glossy magazines, still looks to the
Times
to tell it what’s important, what each day’s conventional wisdom will be. Every evening, when the
Times
sends out the next day’s story list on its newswire, it sets the agenda for hundreds of other daily papers across the country. Every morning, the
Times
’s front page comes closer than any other single source of information to determining what will count as major news for the next twenty-four hours.
The New York Times
continues to serve as a beacon for the rest of the media world, and it continues to set the standard to which all other media outlets must aspire or against which they must rebel. The
Times
is like Harvard or the New York Yankees. It so dominates our imagination that it has become an archetype of what it means to be a journalistic enterprise.
That’s not to say the
Times
can, or indeed does, take its position for granted. Aside from the fact that consumers are less likely to read a daily paper today than at any time in the last hundred years, it is also easier to get instant access to news from almost anywhere in the world. A 2004 Project for Excellence in Journalism study on the state of the country’s news media found that “journalism is in the midst of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television.” That five-hundred-page study also spent considerable space addressing how “major news institutions have changed their product in a way that costs less to produce while still attracting an audience.” To continue to dominate the field, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publicly held Times Company’s uniquely powerful chairman and the
The New York Times
’s publisher, has had to try to reimagine what it means to be both a topflight newspaper company and a news-gathering operation. Sulzberger is keenly aware that he sits at the head of a company that his family—and the country—regards more as a public trust than as anything so prosaic as a business concern. For more than a hundred years, the Sulzbergers and the Times Company have operated on the principle that they know how to do one thing well: run a big-city broadsheet. Their dedication to this mission has demanded that they pass up some plum investment opportunities. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Times Company declined an opportunity to invest in Coca-Cola because the soft-drink firm was too far removed from the company’s core business. Just after World War II, it turned down an offer from the government to create a television station in New York City for next to nothing, so that it could focus on newspapering. (The Hearst Corporation, by contrast, eagerly launched television stations when given the opportunity and today is one of the country’s largest media combines.) As media companies were becoming media conglomerates, as family papers like the
Los Angeles Times
were gobbled up by corporations like the Tribune Company,
The New York Times
remained relatively small and enormously successful.
Despite the efficacy of the
Times
’s historic single-mindedness, Arthur Sulzberger has become convinced this conservative road will eventually lead to ruin, a concern that has made him determined to broaden the
Times
’s audience while simultaneously increasing its revenues. Sulzberger considers himself a visionary with a single mission: to ensure that in ten and twenty and fifty years,
The New York Times
will still be the brightest star in the world’s information firmament. He is trying to achieve this goal both by expanding the newspaper’s reach—today almost half the paper’s daily circulation comes from outside the New York City metropolitan area—and by striving to make the Times Company “platform agnostic.” “TV, the Internet, all of that is integral to the growth of
The New York Times
’s brand,” Sulzberger told me in early 2004. “That’s how we’re going to reach more like-minded readers. That’s how we’re going to remain profitable in the years ahead. If print starts to become less of a growth area—which is not happening right now, but if and when it does—we need to be ready. We’re thinking long range here. . . . That means you have to invest in the future even as you’re managing a brand.”
This path of expansion has been, as often as not, tumultuous. Some Wall Street analysts question whether or not, in aggressively chasing after national readers and advertisers, the
Times
has neglected its extremely profitable New York base. Some wonder if it wouldn’t have made more sense to build a national network of premier newspapers instead of trying to force the
Times
on a national audience. (This has been the path of the Tribune Company, which today owns the Baltimore
Sun,
the
Los Angeles Times,
south Florida’s
Sun-Sentinel, The Hartford Courant,
the
Orlando Sentinel,
and Long Island’s
Newsday
—many of which the
Times
itself has, at one time or another, had the opportunity to buy.) Journalists at the
Times
wonder why the company is investing so many millions of dollars in television ventures and the Internet while the newspaper is under what some feel are prohibitory budget constraints. What’s more, Sulzberger’s early efforts to expand the Times Company’s reach have produced decidedly mixed results. In 1999, the New York Times Company acquired Abuzz.com, an online information-swapping portal, for $30 million. In 2001, it closed the company’s offices and took a $22.7 million charge related to the site. In April 2002, the Times Company invested $100 million in the Discovery Times Channel, a digital TV station it co-owns with the Discovery Channel, which thus far has produced a string of well-reviewed programs that relatively few people have seen. Even investments that have been more obviously in tune with the
Times
’s core business have not always unfolded smoothly. In October 2002, Arthur Sulzberger forced
The Washington Post
to sell its 50 percent stake in the
International Herald Tribune
(
IHT
) for $70 million by threatening to start an overseas edition of the
Times.
Sulzberger maintains the
IHT
is needed to expand the
Times
’s global reach, although Europe has historically been a sinkhole for American newspaper companies trying to establish an international presence—the audience can be difficult to define, and the cost of doing business is often prohibitively high. What’s more, the Graham family, which owns
The Washington Post,
was insulted by what they viewed as Sulzberger’s heavy-handed ways.
*1
*2
Whether in agreement or not with his manner or his business decisions, no one disputes that Sulzberger does have a vision. In the late 1990s, just as Sulzberger was reimagining what a newspaper company should look like, he was also thinking about what his newspaper should look like—and searching for an equally visionary editor to help implement his plans. He found Howell Raines. Raines, who had spent much of his twenty-three-year career at the
Times
cultivating Sulzberger’s attentions and affections, was named the paper’s executive editor in May 2001. (He started his new post on September 5 of that year.) The plan was that while Sulzberger was remaking the company, Raines would remake the paper into a true national daily. That meant the
Times
would dominate on every story, regardless of where it was breaking. Pop culture and college sports would get just as prominent play as presidential campaigns and foreign wars. Raines would train
Times
reporters to “flood the zone,” overwhelming the competition with the paper’s supreme firepower and resources. They’d do more quick-hit reports on the hot topic of the week and invest in fewer laborious, time-consuming projects, and they’d do it all with the same number of staffers and without a significant budget increase.
*3
In his well-strategized campaign to become executive editor—a campaign that included battle plans, rehearsed speeches, one-on-one sessions with
Times
business executives, and a dedicated courtship of Sulzberger—Raines had argued that the
Times
was becoming bloated, lazy, and complacent and that he was the only man capable of fixing it.
Before Raines had a chance to begin implementing his vision, though, the world was transformed. In the days after September 11, 2001, when for the first time in a generation the country viscerally realized the importance of being well informed, the
Times
found itself suddenly and urgently necessary in a way it had not been in years. While shrill pundits on both the left and the right were making a mockery of the notion of an objective press, the
Times
proudly demonstrated to the world why it is still crucially important to give equal stories equal weight, to base coverage on news judgments and not personal vendettas or convictions, to never let a compelling story get in the way of the true story. The
Times
’s coverage of the crisis was exemplary, and the paper received overwhelming accolades for its work. This praise was gratifying, but it must also have been confusing to Raines. If, as he had argued, the
Times
had for years been falling asleep on the job, how could he explain its tremendous achievements? For Raines, the answer was simple: The
Times
could not have performed as well had he not been at the helm.