Behind the Times (2 page)

The seminar-room discussions about ethical standards and sexist modes of thought missed the more immediate, practical lesson: specifically, the changed news standards at the
Times.
The headline over
Time
magazine’s account of the
Times’
coverage went directly, if nastily, to this point: “Tarting Up the Gray Lady of 43rd Street,” it read. In his analysis,
Time
writer Richard Lacayo suggested that the Bowman story was part of Frankel’s effort to give the
Times
“
a more with-it image.”

Lacayo was on to one part of the story. The “paper of mandatory reading” during the Gulf war and other global crises had, on the side, developed its own little wild streak. The Florida rape story appeared only a few days after the
Times
ran, on page one, Washington bureau reporter Maureen
Dowd’s uncritical preview of
Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography.
Among the book’s more sensational “revelations,” author Kitty Kelley insinuated, and the
Times
passed on, the hot news that Mrs. First Lady dallied with Frank Sinatra in the White House when Mr. President was away. During the spring of 1991, too, the
Times
ran prominent articles on polygamy in Utah, the popularity of do-it-yourself sex videos, and, on the front page of the Home section, the trend among teenagers to have their friends sleep over (in the same bed). “Each of these features worked
on its merits,” remembered Josh Mills, a Business Day editor who participated in the news conferences at which some of these stories were pitched by the national desk. “But they added up to more of the frequent departures from, shall we say, ‘our conservative voice.’ ” A
Times
metro reporter said she and other reporters found themselves wondering “if the markers were shifted in the middle of the night, and the rules changed.”

Times
journalists make their living in part by trying to connect the dots and visualize the Big Picture. A number of outwardly disparate elements appeared to come together in the spring of 1991: the Kennedys … and sex, the Reagans … and sex, Mormons … and sex, home videos … and sex, teenagers … and sex. Some reporters continued to resist the inference, preferring to believe that the dots did not connect. “I would warn you away from grand theories about downshifts at the
Times
,” said Alan Finder, a metro-desk reporter. “When you run one hundred stories a day, there are
going to be screwups.” Other reporters believed there was no single Big Picture plan but rather Frankel’s more modest goal of making parts of the news report lighter
and more inviting: the read-young, with-it, “user friendly”
Times.
“Reporters kept hearing from their desk editors the phrase, ‘Let’s
liven up this story,’ ” said E. R. Shipp, another metro reporter.

When the new publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and Frankel were asked about the wild streak of stories involving Bowman, Reagan, sex videos, and sleepover friends, they maintained that the “ideas” were usually right but that at times the “
execution” was off. Sulzberger was particularly animated: “While we made mistakes in the way we handled the rape story, a lot of people did do the right thing. Fox Butterfield did right in the information he collected. The national desk did right in its editing and Al Siegal did right in his editing. But somehow, when it all came together, it wasn’t right.” Sulzberger’s editors offered a number of little-picture explanations for their failures of “execution”: misconstrued instructions, deadline pressures, fumbled responsibilities among desks (“I thought you were watching it …”, “Well, I thought
you
were watching it …”). At most, the official
Times
conceded certain vague “deficiencies in editing.” As an “Editors’ Note” in the editions of April 26 explained, while the Florida rape story was presented in such a way that
Times
readers might “infer” the woman’s account was being challenged by the
Times
, “no such challenge was intended, and the
Times
regrets that some parts of the article reinforced such inferences.” “Editors’ Note” boxes appear from time to time in the same space near the bottom right-hand side of page two; they are the top editors’ way of publicly apportioning responsibility for individual or institutional errors of judgment. In the Bowman case, however, the Note clumsily tried to shift part of the blame to the readers—for responding to the article’s cues and making mean-spirited “inferences.” Similarly, at the staff meeting, when a questioner remarked that a lot of people thought the story was punitive and sexist, Soma Golden, the
Times’
national editor, replied that she couldn’t be held accountable for the conclusions drawn by “every weird mind that reads the
New York Times.
”

The Bowman story was no aberration existing in the overactive imaginations of readers. The markers at the
Times
began to be moved and the Gray Lady hustled toward retirement almost two decades before, during the regime of Frankel’s predecessor, A. M. Rosenthal. Abe Rosenthal was an advocate of more aggressive news coverage—when the subject didn’t brush up against one or another of his prejudices. He was initially disparaged for introducing the soft, life-style
sections of the 1970s but they helped win new upmarket readers and improved the
Times’
advertising revenues at a time when New York City had just avoided municipal bankruptcy and was still losing manufacturing jobs. His successor, Frankel, was under pressure as well in the summer of 1991. The
Times’
circulation had reached an all-time high, daily (1.1 million) and Sunday (1.7 million); but the long recession throughout the New York region and the Northeast cut deeply into advertising revenues and made circulation sales all the more important for the financial health of the paper. This truism led outsiders, as well as some
Times
people, to a Big Picture conclusion: In pursuit of circulation, the Frankel
Times
was willing to get down and scratch for the kind of dirt that, in the past, it left to the city’s rude tabloids.

The notion that the
Times
was trying to muscle in on its crosstown competition had a certain surface plausibility. The city’s tabs looked extremely vulnerable in the summer of 1991. The
Daily News
had just emerged from a costly strike, only to fall into the dubious embrace of a new owner, the highly leveraged British press magnate Robert Maxwell (within seven months Maxwell was dead and the
News
headed for bankruptcy court). The
New York Post
’s finances were shaky (in a matter of months, too, owner Peter Kalikow filed for personal bankruptcy). New York
Newsday
, while journalistically respectable and bankrolled in part by earnings from the older, established
Newsday
, still had not achieved sustained profitability. From the
Times’
vantage point, why not show a little streak of sex and sensation to attract people hurrying past newsstands or street boxes? Decades before, Adolph Ochs figured out a way to get stories of crime and New York lowlife into his proper pages; he treated them as “sociology.”

In fact, the marketing-conscious
Times
disdained one-shot impulse buys. That was the tabs’ desperate tactic. The
Times
of the 1990s didn’t need raw circulation numbers; it needed specific subscribers in order to sell a carefully tuned demographic profile to advertisers. When the
Times
had the chance to pick up tab readership during the
News’
1990–91 strike, the Sulzbergers deliberately chose not to do so. The
News’
circulation dropped by almost two-thirds from its prestrike levels of 1.09 million, largely because the
News
management couldn’t get the papers delivered (the striking unions’ legal picketing—and their extralegal acts of intimidation—insured that result). Opportunity knocking, the
Times
made no effort to open the door to let in any of the hundreds of thousands of
News
readers bereft of their morning
paper. From the upmarket vantage point of the
Times
, these readers deserved to be kept outside; they were the great unwashed. No one said any of this, of course; but the
Times’
inaction spoke louder than any words: Arthur Sulzberger ordered no more than 35,000 extra copies printed daily during the strike. That way, a
Times
man explained,
Times
readers who bought the paper at newsstands were assured of getting “their” copies even if an uninvited
News
reader had, earlier, bought a newsstand
Times.
The
Times’
desired demographic mix was saved from contamination. “We are
never going to be the
Daily News
,” Arthur Sulzberger said cheerfully. More cheerfully still, he added: “Why would we ever want to be?”

In the summer of 1991, however, the
Times
did worry about some rivals farther from home. A significant amount of its circulation growth in recent years came from well beyond New York, from sales in the Northeast corridor running from Boston to Washington, and from the
Times
national edition, which reached a circulation of 250,000 in 1991. To some extent, the
Times
competed for readers’ and advertisers’ attention with the two national dailies, the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
; with strong regional papers like the
Washington Post
and the
Chicago Tribune
, and with the newsweeklies. Yet this competition didn’t sufficiently explain the
Times’
jumpiness, either. A totally different kind of “competition” was making the
Times
nervous: Arthur Sulzberger worried less about the
Times
losing readers to another newspaper than he did about readers losing the
Times
-newspaper habit. The extensive market research commissioned by the publisher’s office was full of warnings about the enemy of inattention. According to these surveys, endlessly quoted around the building, Americans under forty like to spend their time “omnidirectionally”—stretching and watching morning television, or listening to the radio while driving to work. The act of reading a newspaper is, sadly, unidirectional: It requires some single-minded engagement. Such fears about the end of newspapers were not confined to the proprietors of the
Times.
The same month that the Reagan and Bowman stories appeared,
presstime
, the publication of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, commended to members a report on how newspapers are changing “
to entice readers.” (Shortly thereafter, the ANPA changed too, renaming itself the Newspaper Association of America.)

Editors accustomed to looking at their handiwork with feelings of reverence weren’t likely to be put off by the challenge of enticing
omnidirectional thirtysomethings: the awe-inspiring
New York Times
can handle it. But enticement journalism turned out to be trickier than expected for Frankel and his editors.

The news desk was, as usual, slow off the mark in handling Palm Beach with tab-type stories. The first accounts of Bowman’s charges and the pretrial police investigation were played far back in the paper, under a sedate, one-column headline (an A head, in
Times
talk). The national competition, such as the
Miami Herald
and the
Washington Post
, was consistently ahead during the first week of the story. In the city, the
New York Post
—financially hobbled, its depleted reporting staff restricted to four-day work weeks—beat the
Times
to the “news” that there was a second woman at the Kennedy mansion the night of the alleged rape. Better yet for newsstand purposes, the woman claimed she spotted Senator Edward M. Kennedy without his pants on. The
Post
teased the headline “
Teddy’s Sexy Romp” out of this scooplet—and sold 20,000 extra copies on the streets of New York that afternoon. The
Times
remained immobile until the Bowman narrative began to create that critical mass of sexual titillation, celebrity voyeurism, and TV frenzy that makes certain stories “hot news.” Others took the lead with the sensational details. Slowly, the
Times
committed its resources; Soma Golden later remarked that, personally, she found the whole case “a bit unsavory … but competitively you’ve got a story that everyone’s on.”

Frankel’s
Times
may weigh in late on hot news, but once it does so, the results must be authoritative, with the most diligent reporting, magazine-quality presentation, and the resonant “sociology” of it all. The pattern was set the year before, in the
Times’
treatment of the Tawana
Brawley rape case and the Father Bruce Ritter scandal. In each case, Frankel and his editors let weeks go by while other news organizations reported on the day to day developments. Then they assigned teams of four or more experienced reporters to the stories and gave them all the resources they needed, with no firm deadlines to report back. The teams produced fresh, exhaustively sourced information, and the articles based on their researches ran well over two thousand words each, the length of a magazine cover story. These were “blockbusters” that “settled” the cases, at least to the
Times’
satisfaction. The Brawley story concluded that the black teenager invented her tale of rape by a gang of whites. The Ritter story decided that the
Catholic priest, the revered founder of Covenant House for troubled young runaways, had extracted homosexual favors from two of the teenage residents. Other news organizations had earlier come to the same conclusions in each case, but their reports lacked the force of the
Times’.
Ritter, for example, denied the charges against him when they initially appeared in the
New York Post
, and continued with his ministry. Several weeks went by, the
Times
story was published—and, literally in a matter of hours, Ritter left New York for “study and prayer” under instructions from his order. End of the Father Ritter story.