NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs (“Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr. (66) has retired, to be replaced by his son A.G. Sulzberger (37) as of January first. The change was announced last month. A.G. represents the fifth generation of the family to run the Times since patriarch Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896.
Donald Trump welcomed the new Times head this way:
Can’t say I disagree with him.
It also happens that I drafted a post a week or two ago on the subject of the history of the Times. So here it is, with a few additions.
We often talk about how opinion and fact journalism have increasingly merged in the last half-century. That’s a change, one I wrote about at length in my two-part series on Walter Cronkite.
But it’s also important to note that opinion journalism itself has changed, too. For example, not that long ago William Safire used to write for the NY Times, not as its resident token “conservative” who is not really conservative (a la Ross Douthat or Bret Stephens), but as a highly respected long-time (and by “long-time” I mean looooong time; Safire started his column in 1973 and left in 2005) mainstream columnist. He was pretty middle-of-the-road moderate Republican for the most part. In addition, I can’t think of any opinion columnist in the Times of that day who exhibited anything like the left-leaning extremes of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, for example (Walter Duranty was somewhat of an anomaly at the time, and anyway he wasn’t a columnist).
The Times actually started out as a Republican paper but turned Democratic during the last quarter of the 19th Century. In the partisan atmosphere of papers of the time, Adolph Ochs (whom Trump references in his tweet, and who acquired the Times in 1896) decided that a good and rather unique niche to carve out would be that of objectivity. And for the most part, with some exceptions, the paper was fairly objective (at least, compared to today), although always strongly and consistently liberal Democratic.
Prior to Pinch’s coming to power there was his father (“Punch”), who published the paper from 1963 to 1990, when Pinch took over. Under Punch, Abe Rosenthal was executive editor from 1977-1988. Glenn Reynolds wrote about Rosenthal (and about the Times’ history in general) in an excellent 2011 book review, and when you read the following quote from Reynold’s piece you’ll see how far the Times has strayed from Rosenthal’s days:
As [Gray Lady Down author] McGowan makes clear, maintaining this [objective] position took constant effort. Abe Rosenthal, who ran the paper from 1977 through 1986 (and whom McGowan regards as the Times’ best editor), warned that because of the staff’s overwhelmingly liberal political leanings, “you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right, or it’ll drift off to the left.” Rosenthal was also particularly concerned about keeping political opinions out of the culture sections and news reports ”” under his supervision, there were to be no “editorial needles.”
That’s exactly and precisely what’s missing today. Oh, I have little doubt that today’s fact and opinion journalists at the Time are aware that they are overwhelming liberal—how could they not be? But the idea of steering to the right would be anathema, and why would they want to avoid drifting to the left? They are there to speak truth to power, to question authority, to stop people like Donald Trump and to march in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.
Rosenthal certainly made some decisions that most people on the right would consider partisan in the sense of leaning left. But, still, it was better than it later became, paticularly in terms of those “needles.” Here’s another Rosenthal quote:
He once told a reporter who demanded to exercise his rights by marching in a street demonstration he was assigned to cover: “OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus.” We call that “the Rosenthal rule.”
(I’m going to assume that “[make love to]” stands in for the F-word there.)
When Punch was replaced by Pinch in 1992, that’s when a bigger change in the paper’s editorial stance occurred:
Unlike his father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., Pinch was less concerned with balancing either the coverage or the books, and instead began to run the Times as a sort of upscale Village Voice: not a great news organization that tried to tell the truth as accurately as possible, but a snarky in-group publication that told its increasingly homogeneous audience things it wanted to hear. The difference between generations is summed up neatly in this anecdote:
“Walking across Boston Common one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.”
That probably gives you all the information you need to know about Pinch, but I’ll add a bit more:
Fast-forward a few years and Pinch, now firmly ensconced ”” despite resistance from the board of directors ”” as publisher, cancels [Abe] Rosenthal’s op-ed column, leaving Rosenthal feeling “betrayed and heartbroken.” Pinch wanted something new at the Times, and he got it, something that avoided the dumb questions of his father’s generation.
Pinch wanted edge, something with a New Leftish angle, and, above all, diversity. He told critics that if the Times was alienating older white-male readers, then “we’re doing something right.” He hired Howell Raines as editorial-page editor, a man suffering, McGowan writes, from “a lifelong sense of Southern guilt” and “a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision.”
Raines wasn’t interested in nuance, and under his direction, the Times editorial pages became a vehicle for preaching more than for converting. Meanwhile, Pinch was allowing politics to seep into first culture, and then news coverage, all while pushing ever-greater efforts at “diversity” hiring onto the paper’s news divisions.
Now almost all the Times reporters and opinion writers are f-ing elephants and covering the circus, and it’s considered great.
I wanted to know something about A.G., and so I took a look at this recent interview with him in the Times-friendly New Yorker. One statement I found to be of special interest was this:
I’ve always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people…And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into journalism.
That strikes me as almost humorously youthful, because A.G. then goes on to say that he decided to go into journalism shortly after college (Brown). Since’s he’s now 37 and has been in journalism his entire adult life, that means that when he says “most of my life” he’s talking about childhood and his teen years.
Another interesting statement by A.G.—one that’s less personal—is the following:
One thing I’d say about the subscription model that we didn’t expect, which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we serve our readers. That’s aligned our journalistic mission and all of our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way.
Earlier in the interview A.G. had said that, with falling advertising revenue in the media, the paper now relies for 2/3 of its money on reader subscriptions. It used to be that their revenues were 80% from advertising. That’s a big big change, and the way I read the above quote is that the Times has to feed its liberal/left readers more and more red meat.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If the paper pulled more to the middle, those revenue-generating subscribers would drop the Times like a hot potato.
A.G. doesn’t think the paper is liberal. As a frequent reader—and analyzer—of Times coverage (as well as a long-time critic of A.G.’s interviewer, New Yorker editor David Remnick), I’d probably have found the following exchange between Remnick and A.G. amusing if I didn’t see it as dangerous:
D.R.: For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a liberal newspaper. True or false?
A.G.S.: False. And I can send you all the hate mail that I’ve gotten from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign.
D.R.: O.K., but do you really think that it’s possible to argue that the New York Times, by and large, isn’t both populated by people who are left of center, and that the tone of the newspaper isn’t left of center?
A.G.S.: We’re committed to a really old-fashioned notion. It’s a notion that isn’t too popular these days, which is reporting the news “without fear or favor.” Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. What that means to me is reporting on the world aggressively, searching for the truth wherever it leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. I really deeply admire my colleagues’ commitment to that. We strive to understand every side of the story, and to convey it fairly.
D.R.: Do you believe in the notion of objectivity?
A.G.S.: I do believe in the notion of objectivity. I think it’s something you have to work at; I think it’s something that we don’t always get right.
D.R.: I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. Objectivity, to me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. Fairness is another matter. I struggle with that””the notion of objectivity. You think it’s possible to accommodate it?
A.G.S.: You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to me, too, if you want to call it fairness. The point is the discipline of trying to strip away your own biases””whether they come from a worldview or lived experience””and to try to tell a story in a way that’s fair to all the participants in it.
Why did I call that exchange “dangerous”? Both men hold a lot of power through their publications. You may scoff at both the Times and the New Yorker, but they are both still highly influential with a huge number of people whose minds and viewpoints are both shaped by them and reinforced by them. Either A.G. and Remnick actually believe they are objective/fair, or they are lying about it. Fools or knaves, or fools/knaves. As usual, take your pick.
And if the Times actually does become fair and/or objective under A.G., I’ll be happy to say I was wrong.
