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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Last month at the Chelsea Piers sports complex, a group that included corporate leaders, bankers, and teachers held a black-tie benefit dinner to celebrate Outward Bound, and to honor the winner of the award named for its founder, Kurt Hahn. The speakers talked about Hahn's belief in a person's "inner strengths," recounted gruelling outdoor experiences, and gave solemn thanks for the sort of campfire encounter sessions they had come to value at Outward Bound. Throughout the evening, people greeted each other with hugs, and even tears; but there was silence when the award for furthering "the Outward Bound mission" was presented to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the chairman of the New York Times Company and publisher of the Times. Sulzberger was wryly introduced by a friend--"I found his infectious enthusiasm to be irritating when I was dangling over a cliff," she said--and then Sulzberger, a youthful-looking man of fifty-four, bounded to the microphone. With his hands on his hips, and his jacket unbuttoned, Sulzberger recalled how, when he was sixteen, Outward Bound changed his life. He had felt lost and insecure, he said--a child of divorce, shuttling between two homes--and, alone in the wilderness, with the help of Outward Bound mentors, he learned self-reliance. "I've spent a good portion of my life trying to give back to Outward Bound something it gave to me," he said, and spoke of those "I am so blessed to call comrades," and of discovering "the truth about ourselves." His cousin Dan Cohen, who is his closest friend, said, "He was uncertain, as many of us are growing up. Can we handle ourselves in adversity? He had been bounced around. He sort of found a center in this."
Sulzberger can be just as passionate about journalism and the Times, the newspaper that his family has controlled since 1896. But there his "infectious enthusiasm" sometimes strikes people as immature or sarcastic. Although he occupies perhaps the most august position in the nation's press establishment, he seems to lack the weighty seriousness of his predecessors, among them Adolph Ochs, the paper's founder; Orvil Dryfoos; and his father, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger. This was evident on the afternoon of September 29th, when the Times reporter Judith Miller was released from a Virginia jail, after being held for eighty-five days because she had refused to name a source. Sulzberger and the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, waited outside the prison to greet her, but federal marshals wanted Miller to leave in handcuffs and shackles. Suspecting that photographers were waiting, Miller protested; instead, the marshals put her in the back seat of an S.U.V. with tinted windows. The S.U.V. was trailed by Miller's lawyer, Robert Bennett, in one car and Sulzberger and Keller in a second car. When the marshals stopped to let Miller out, Sulzberger told his driver to pull up alongside the S.U.V. He jumped out and, unable to see through the dark glass, excitedly tapped at the back window. "Judy!" he said. "Judy! It's me!"
"Get away from the vehicle, sir!" a marshal said, according to Miller.
Bennett, a veteran of many of Washington's largest legal battles, was surprised. "I said to myself, 'It sure seems odd for the publisher of the New York Times! ' "
Miller recalled that she was "thrilled to see him," and "so relieved it was over." But, of course, it wasn't over. Within days, fresh criticism of Miller and her reporting began to build at the Times, and within weeks her estrangement from Sulzberger and the newspaper was complete. And it was far from over for Sulzberger, whose business decisions and editorial judgment have sometimes been questioned by associates almost from the time that he took over from his father. Gay Talese, who, in the sixties, wrote the definitive history of the Times, "The Kingdom and the Power," says, "You get a bad king every once in a while."
Twice in the last three years, the Times newsroom has suffered the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, and critics say that Sulzberger has managed the latest crisis as poorly as he did the episode involving the fabrications of the reporter Jayson Blair, which led, in 2003, to the firing of Howell Raines, the executive editor. These newsroom crises have come when the Times can least afford them--during a period of technological and economic uncertainty that has affected the entire industry. The Times' stock price fell 33.2 per cent between December 31, 2004, and October 31, 2005--sixty per cent more than the industry average, according to Merrill Lynch newspaper analysts. The operating profit of the Times Company has also slipped in each of the past three years. Owing to the cost of fuel, newsprint, and employee benefits, expenditures are increasing by between four and five per cent a year and revenues by only about three per cent, a senior Times corporate executive says; this person is worried that "it's just a matter of time until we start losing money."
At a newsroom meeting at the end of November, Bill Keller, in a reference to the Miller case and attacks on the Times from bloggers, said that he was concerned about "orgies of self-absorption that distract us from our more important work," but most of the questions directed at him did not deal with Miller. "The single most unsettling thing people face now is the economic situation confronting the paper, and not knowing what the future holds," Todd S. Purdum, a Washington correspondent, says. (Purdum recently took the job of national editor at Vanity Fair, but he says that the economic situation was not a factor in the decision.) Jennifer Steinhauer, a metro reporter, told me, "I really think the financial issue faced by this company and this industry is the big concern, and not Judith Miller. The health-care fund for Guild employees"--the Newspaper Guild--"went belly up last year, so we had to give up our pay raises to fund it. Our stock options are under water. These are the kinds of things preoccupying people: What's going to happen to this industry?"
For years, the Times was accused of arrogance, yet was admired for excellence; no newspaper has won so many prizes or produced such consistently outstanding journalism. Its devotion to quality and its sense of self brought a kind of corporate swagger--a trait that may have vanished in the face of constant crises and repeated self-examination. Within the newsroom, there is a sense of rudderlessness and a fear that a series of business misjudgments may so weaken the company's finances that the brilliance of the Times, its news staff of twelve hundred, and, ultimately, the historic mission of the company will be at serious risk. In this crisis of identity, some of the criticism is directed at Keller and his team, for what is seen as a lack of forceful leadership, but the publisher has, fairly or not, become a particular source of concern; one Times Company executive who respects Sulzberger's commitment to journalism considers him no more than a business "figurehead." In late October, a family friend asked, "Is Arthur going to get fired?"
On September 12th, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was invited to a publisher's luncheon at which various Times editors and reporters were present. Such events are common in the life of the Times and other major newspapers, but this one had an odd start. A security dog that had earlier been sniffing for bombs got sick on the carpet of the room where the lunch was to be held. The mess was cleaned up, but the stench was still noticeable when Rice and her party arrived. The air-conditioning was turned up high to diminish the smell, but it was difficult to hear above the noise. Sulzberger greeted Rice and, according to the transcript posted on the State Department's Web site, began by asking how she thought the United States was "viewed right now by the United Nations," and whether it mattered. "And before you answer that question, just so everybody knows," he said, "it's pretty loud in this room, so my apologies. The bomb-sniffing dog threw up here." Everyone laughed, but Sulzberger continued to apologize, and, as some of the reporters present cringed, Rice finally said, "Thank you for sharing that."
Several minutes later, during a discussion about the incarceration in China of a Times employee, Rice said that she and President Bush planned to raise this issue when Bush visited China. "Thank you for that," Sulzberger said. "Have you seen Judy Miller lately? Perhaps President Bush can help with that one." Once more, Times editors and reporters winced.
One often hears it said that Sulzberger lacks sufficient gravitas for a man in his position, which is perhaps another way of saying that he...
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