Behind the Times (5 page)

As usual, Frankel had produced a cogent argument, making the intellectual case for the campaign-press’s coverage of sexual fidelity—or more precisely, infidelity. By 1992, however, during Bill Clinton’s race for the presidency, Frankel argued against his own principles.
Star
, a weekly tabloid sold at newsstands and supermarket checkout counters, publicized the claim of Gennifer Flowers, a former television actress and aspiring country-and-western singer, that she had a twelve-year-long affair with Clinton. In fact,
Star
did in 1992 a cut-rate version of what Frankel had proposed to do in 1988;
Star
reporters talked to people who knew the candidate and examined relevant court documents in Little Rock (Flowers’s name was initially made public the year before in connection with a law suit brought against Clinton by a dismissed Arkansas state employee). True,
Star
did some things that the
Times
would never do. It staged a news conference to present Flowers to the world; it produced an audiotape of steamy conversations, apparently between the singer and the governor. The weekly also paid a reported $100,000 for Flowers’s story—cash for trash—and then boasted that it would earn back the money, and more, by distributing a larger press run of the issue featuring Flowers.

Frankel’s
Times
was slow to pick up
Star
’s tale of infidelity. When the
Times’
first story appeared, it was well back in the paper. Just as the prominence that the
Times
gave Patricia Bowman and Nancy Reagan became big news in other newspapers and magazines, so too did the
Times’
burial of Flowers’s story excite wide comment. When Howard Kurtz of the
Washington Post
called to ask about the
Times’
studied disinterest in the
Star
story, Frankel announced: “I’m quite ashamed for my profession.” What really bothered him was the execution, not the idea. “We don’t want to take our news report [on the candidates’
sex lives] from the likes of the
Star
, or from someone whose ultimate veracity we can’t vouch for.”
The
Times
hadn’t done the reporting.
Logically, if Flowers had come forward first to the
Times
, not asked for money, talked to the editors, played her tapes, and given the names of corroborating sources (the ones she supplied to
Star
), then her story would have been “
Times
news.”

Police-blotter stories bedeviled Frankel’s
Times
as much as presidential politics. In
Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax
, a team of
Times
reporters described another adventure of the new enticement
Times.
Together, authors Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A. Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff represented over one hundred years of
Times
experience. McFadden et al. attempt to explain why the
Times’
first account of the Brawley case amounted to no more than “a shallow dip” in a complex story, why no follow-up story appeared for six weeks, and why the editors didn’t pursue the case vigorously for nearly another eleven weeks. “
If the
Times
was sometimes slow to react,” the Brawley team explained, “it was generally because its editors knew that sensational events often proved chimerical. Moreover, they knew all too well how the
Times
, by its unique weight in the news business, could catapult obscure events to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, setting the news agenda each morning for the networks, local television and radio stations, and hundreds of newspapers and magazines. A misstep by the
Times
was more than embarrassing; it could skew the nation’s perception of what was really ‘news.’ ” No wonder the attempts to be young and hip often looked awkward: the Frankel
Times
carried the weight of the entire country on its back when it tried to get down.

And so the
Times
moved unsteadily through both its worlds—uneasy doing enticement news and losing a step in its older role of agenda setter. On May 19, 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a speech in San Francisco two weeks after the devastating “Rodney King riots” down the California coast in south central Los Angeles. In the course of his remarks attributing the riots to a “poverty of values”—fostered by Democrats, Hollywood, the media, and other enemies of the Republic—Quayle complained about the television sitcom character Murphy Brown. The script writers had given Candice Bergen, who played the Brown character, a baby in the final, ratings-wise sequence of the 1991–92 season, without marrying her to the child’s father. According to Quayle, this was an example of how liberals mocked “the importance of fathers.”
USA Today
played the “Murphy
Brown” comments, together with photographs of the vice president and Bergen, on the front page (“Quayle: Murphy No Role Model”). The
New York Daily News
did the same (“Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp”), so did the
New York Post
(“Dan Rips Murphy Brown”). The
Times
ran its account of Quayle’s speech on the front page, with the headline: “Quayle Says Riots Arose from Burst of Social Anarchy.” In the jump of the story on page 20, the
Times
mentioned the Brown reference. On May 20, the television newscasts followed the Low Press’s lead. The next day, the editors of the
Times
hurried to catch up to the parade they used to lead. The
Times
ran a page-one story, plus three pictures, and the headline: “
Appeal of Brown Now Clear at the White House.” Belatedly too, the light bulbs went on in
Times
editors’ heads.

Even when playing catch-up, the
Times
presented itself as a serious-minded collective: self-effacing technicians, dressed in the white coats of the laboratory, diligently pursuing the news. The paper was intended throughout to convey institutional authority. The news pages and opinion columns were set in a dignified typeface, dating from 1967, called—appropriately—8½ point Imperial. Front-page headlines employed far older type styles, such as Latin condensed, a design going back to the
Times
of the early 1900s. The
Times’
sober, “objective” mien was, at best, misleading. The
Times
of May 20, 1992, for example, was a far different paper from the
Times
of twenty-five years before, when the Imperial type was adopted. The modern
Times
was edited with the aid of computers and read by far more people outside New York than in the city. But the new technology and broader distribution systems were perhaps the least of the changes. As we will see, over the past two decades, the
Times
redefined the meaning of news. Led by its editor, A. M. Rosenthal, the
Times
in the 1970s broadened coverage of “soft news” topics and introduced the daily feature sections revolving around upscale consumerism: the so-called sectional revolution. The “new”
New York Times
, the paper’s promotional slogan boasted. Some critics viewed the changes as frivolous, a violation of the
Times’
traditional mission. But the new sections attracted younger readers and vastly improved the
Times’
advertising revenues at a time when both the New York economy and the Times Company were financially strapped.

In the 1990s, a second shift was under way as Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal in late 1986, made the
Times
more “reader
friendly.” As in the 1970s on Rosenthal’s watch, economic pressures were squeezing the
Times’
profit margins. Worse, a generation of Americans had come of age seemingly with little interest in reading a serious newspaper on a regular basis; according to the
Times’
market surveys, this younger audience preferred to get its news from less-demanding television or such “Lite news” products as the national, all-color daily,
USA Today.
Frankel responded by loosening up writing styles at the
Times
and further broadening news coverage.

Together, these two changes fundamentally transformed the
Times.
They helped create a new
Times
, one no longer tied to its home city, or to its original serious-news franchise: a publication that might be called (though not likely by the
Times’
promotion department)
Not the New York, Not the Times.
This new
Times
was a paper at once softer, quirkier, more individual, more subjective, and untidier than the traditional
Times.
The story of the
Times’
own transition makes for a narrative more compelling than what the
Times
usually reports about other American institutions.

The sun rose at 6:31
A.M.
and temperatures were in the thirties in New York City on February 28, 1989, according to the editions of the
New York Times
on sale the next day. The news coverage that Tuesday was typical of the new
Times.

The weather report, for example, was the only local news on the front page of that edition. The rest of the page was given over to events occurring elsewhere. In Washington on Tuesday, the
Times
reported, George Bush held a series of meetings with uncommitted Democratic senators in an effort to win votes for John Tower, the president’s nominee for Secretary of Defense; Oliver North’s lawyers stalled the trial of the former Reagan aide on a technicality; the FBI announced it wanted to improve its affirmative action record; the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a city is liable for injuries suffered by inadequately trained workers, and the State Department warned the Palestine Liberation Organization to refrain from attacks on Israel. From Albany, the
Times
reported that Governor Mario Cuomo and the Long Island Lighting Company had signed an agreement to shut the Shoreham nuclear power plant, while in Chicago, Richard M.
Daley won the Democratic primary in a vote that split along racial lines, according to exit polls conducted by the
Times.
Abroad, a special dispatch to the
Times
datelined Caracas reported that dozens of Venezuelans were killed and hundreds wounded in two days of rioting over the government’s new economic measures.

Inside the paper,
Times
stories had a similar generic cast. Marian Burros’ “De Gustibus” column noted that Americans were marking the centennial year of the “lowly” hamburger; on the lead business page, James Hirsch reported that the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco company’s effort to test-market a “smokeless” cigarette had ended in failure, and the Living section carried an article about the rise of personal trainers across the country, some of them charging as much as $200 for a half-hour workout. On the first sports page, the main story dealt with the return to Texas of Jimmy Johnson, to become head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. The Yankees also made news from Spring training in Florida, following reports of drinking aboard the team’s charter flights during the past season. Only two local New York teams were in action that Tuesday; on page B-10, well inside the second section, hockey writer Alex Yannis reported that the Devils tied the Bruins, and from Uniondale on Long Island, Robin Finn described another loss by what she called the “amorphous” Islanders, a struggling club with new players at every position. On the editorial page and the Op-Ed page, three separate
Times
commentaries assessed the month-old administration of George Bush, using the president’s first trip to Asia as their starting point. The three pieces—the lead editorial (unsigned), the “Editorial Notebook” by Robert Semple, and an Op-Ed article by John B. Oakes—rendered three separate verdicts. The editorial admonished Bush because he had “failed to speak out” against repression in China, while Semple thought “Bush had done himself credit” in China. Oakes found the administration “floundering” on all fronts.

February 28 was a routine day at the
Times.
Editors assigned stories, reporters covered events, printers produced a press run of just over one million copies, trucks and route men (and women) delivered the papers to homes, apartments, hotels, newsstands, coffee shops, convenience stores, and street vending boxes in every state in the union. There was nothing in the news columns to suggest anything about these ten thousand men and women who helped put out the paper that Tuesday, beyond the bylines on the stories. The
Times
, for all its thoroughness—and
pride of product—hardly ever dwelled on its own processes. Of course, the entity known as “The
Times
” did speak on the editorial page (sometimes in several voices, as in the case of the president’s Asian trip). A diligent reader could also find a small window into the institutional ways of the
Times
by looking for two discreet boxes placed just above the Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue ads on page three. There, under the standing head “Corrections,” the
Times
redressed its errors. Thus, in the paper of March 1, readers learned that a picture caption in the
Times
the day before had misidentified the people shown celebrating the opening of the new Presbyterian Hospital building. The
Times
then gave the correct order of appearance. While the names were of little use without the picture, the paper nevertheless was telling its readers that accuracy counts at the
New York Times
, right down to the identifications of partygoers in group photos.

The
Times’
“Corrections” tended to run daily. A second box, called “Editors’ Note,” appeared less frequently. In the editions dated March 1, next to the box correcting the hospital caption, the
Times
undertook a more elaborate critique of its journalism. In the
Times
of January 10, the Note reminded any readers who didn’t keep the information at their fingertips, the paper had reported that Eduard Nakhamkin, an art dealer, was trying to “monopolize” the representation of Soviet artists in the United States. According to the “Editors’ Note,” “the article should have reported Mr. Nakhamkin’s view … that Soviet artists are still free to choose other representatives.” Again, an instruction about the paper: Fairness and balance—getting quotes from the story’s subjects—are required in
Times
journalism.