Bad Times

The diversity report declared that the Times would pay extra to its employees who sit on diversity committees or “lead employee resource groups (E.R.G.s), like Black@NYT, the Latino Network, the Asian Network, the Arab Collective and others.” It attracted lots of social media attention, especially in the wake of the ouster of a star Times reporter who had been the subject of protests by colleagues after uttering a racial slur while leading a Times-branded educational trip for high school students. The incident took place two years ago and was examined by the company at the time, but some of those students recently gave a Daily Beast reporter nasty quotes about it, and the Times seemingly got spooked by a round of Twitter denunciations.

As for the Polk Awards, the Times ran a business-section article reporting that the Washington Post earned four of the prestigious prizes. The Times won a single one, the same number as BuzzFeed, Vice Media, High Country News, the San Francisco Chronicle, STAT, and the California Sunday Magazine. Those publications have a mere fraction of the Times’s reportorial resources. The text of the diversity report seemed to anticipate and attempt to head off the concern that having editorial staff spend too much time in diversity, equity, and inclusion committee meetings might adversely affect the quality of the paper’s journalism. Detailing a set of “cultural inhibitors,” the report said, “Some people make the flawed assumption that there is a tradeoff between diversity and excellence.”

Certainly, there need not be a trade-off between diversity, including the ideological diversity that is increasingly scarce at the Times, and excellence. But as someone entering my fifth decade as a Times reader, I find it hard to escape the sad conclusion that there has been a trade-off between journalistic excellence and the kind of self-devouring, circular-firing-squad-style purification rituals with which the Times lately seems constantly consumed. This is not an “assumption,” flawed or otherwise, but rather a considered judgment based on evidence mounting in black and white in the Times’s own columns. The Times is increasingly giving its audience the purification rituals in place of serious reporting.

This judgment is widely shared. A Pew survey released last year found that 42% of adult Republicans or Republican-leaners distrusted the Gray Lady, a statistically significant increase from 29% in a similar Pew survey taken in 2014.

Take a longer view, and the decline of the paper’s standing is even more dramatic. A former Washington news editor of the Times, Robert H. Phelps, wrote in his 2009 memoir that when he arrived on the newspaper’s national desk in 1955, he thought, “Here was authority — news was not news until it appeared in the Times. Every night the Associated Press carried a list of stories the Times was running on page one, and editors around the country used the advisory as a guide to how they played the news.” The paper’s decline in quality and its changing mission were not the only factors that led to this diminution of influence, but they were factors nonetheless.

The Times might answer such criticism by noting it has many millions more paying customers now than it had then. But the vast majority of those patrons are digital-only. Instead of reading a print newspaper with its finite front-page authority and illusion of completeness, these digital subscribers experience the Times as just another app sending push notifications, or as one of many podcasts to listen to, another newsletter cluttering an email inbox or website to surf.

What is the journalism the Times has produced for readers while its staff has been caught up in one human-resources drama after another? One doesn’t have to be the Polk Award jury to sense that standards are changing fast, and not for the better.

“Gwyneth Paltrow Is Selling Vibrators,” was a headline over one recent Times article. “Have you tested the vibrator yourself?” the Times reporter inquired earnestly. In the same Sunday Times, a different article, an admiring profile of contemporary artist Paul McCarthy, recounted in extensive, clinically precise detail all the ways McCarthy has combined his genitalia and food or condiments to make his art.

That same Sunday, yet a third Times article depicted organic vegetables as a kind of racist plot:

“Indeed, there’s a troubling historical connection between organic food and white ethnonationalism, drawing on the language of purity and a gauzy, idealized notion of a nativist relationship to the land, which must be kept unsullied by industrial pesticides or ‘foreign substances,’ in the words of the Nazi scientist Werner Kollath, who during the Second World War promoted the slogan ‘Lasst unsere Nahrung so natürlich wie möglich’ — ‘Leave our food as natural as possible’ — alongside forced sterilization and eugenics. At the beginning of January, one of the far-right insurgents arrested after the invasion of the United States Capitol was reported to have demanded organic food in jail, in order to keep from getting sick.”

Indeed, indeed.

There’s a certain pathos in watching a formerly serious newspaper descend into what seems like a parody of something produced by high school newspaper students trying to figure out what the most shocking thing they can possibly publish is on a week when the teacher-adviser-censor is out sick. One feels sorry for the journalists that they have no good editors to protect them, or that the good editors are busy writing diversity reports or attending meetings of the Arab Collective rather than editing. The lack of adult supervision is visible right there on the pages, behind the vestigial, anachronistic “All the News That’s Fit to Print” slogan on page one.

“This past summer and fall, as my marriage was very quietly imploding, I spent what little free time I had jogging around the park near my Brooklyn apartment, trying, I guess, to figure out my own story, 3.3 miles at a time,” is a sentence that somehow got into a Times arts section column about a four-part documentary regarding filmmaker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow. Another Pulitzer Prize-winning Times columnist confessed in print, “I do take occasional unmasked, distant walks with one or two friends. They help keep me sane as we head into a long, very hard winter.” Let us all hope for the columnist’s self-assessed sanity.

Or maybe the right analogy isn’t a high school newspaper but a Soviet propaganda organ, or a neighborhood newsletter for Brooklyn progressives, so predictably doctrinaire as to be dull. A review of a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, extols “the rich delights of collards in shrimp sauce as prepared by Telly Justice, a trans woman who is planning to open ‘a restaurant by queer people for all people’ in Brooklyn, to be called Hags.” What is delightful, the taste of the collards or the gender identity of the cook? Bet if the collards had been inedible, the Times would have been less enthusiastic about sharing the LGBT status of the chef responsible. A full page in the arts section is devoted to a hagiographic profile of an “anti-capitalist” folk singer, age 93, who had a “teenage affiliation with communism” and who proudly displayed an award she got from Cuba in 2017.

There are isolated bright spots. Times reporter Michael Powell has been doing a good job reporting on cancel culture, with, for example, thoroughly reported, finely wrought recent pieces about Smith College and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. Li Yuan has been writing a sparkling column for the business section documenting how in Communist China, “authoritarianism has become much harsher under Xi Jinping.” The Times brought in a recent scoop with a photograph of New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, with a woman who told the paper she was upset the governor put his hand on the small of her back at a wedding. (Though on the burgeoning scandal of Cuomo’s handling of COVID-19 in New York’s nursing homes, the key investigative work has been done not by the Times but by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a small think tank in Albany.)

Former employees, though, insist that the paper stifles independent thought. Donald G. McNeil Jr., the pandemic reporter ousted after his Times colleagues amplified complaints by students on his trip to Peru, wrote that one Times bureaucrat was making “the Times newsroom more like North Korea every day.” Bari Weiss, a writer and editor on the Times opinion page, resigned in the summer of 2020 with a public letter averring that “intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times. … Self-censorship has become the norm.”

Perhaps with that claim of conformism in mind, the Times recently posted a job opening for deputy opinion editor. “We’re looking for an editor with a sense of humor and a spine of steel, a confident point of view and an open mind, an appetite for risk and exacting standards for excellence,” the job description said. The “appetite for risk” phrase in particular generated plenty of snickering, as a substantial risk in any Times position is that some critical mass of Times employees will rise up against you and whatever Sulzberger heir happens to be running the place at the moment will decide to cut you loose. This happened to the editorial page editor, James Bennet, who resigned in June 2020. Before that, it happened to the executive editor, Jill Abramson, who was fired in 2014 after wondering why she’d been paid less than her male predecessor. Before that, it happened to the executive editor, Howell Raines, and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who resigned in 2003 after a scandal over a rogue reporter, Jayson Blair.

One reason Times journalists tend to be so hostile to capitalism is that the form of it they experience is so unusually feudal: They are essentially serfs at the sufferance of fourth- and fifth-generation Sulzberger publishers. A Times news article about management changes in the Times podcast operation observed, “The audio department is overseen by Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor and a member of the Sulzberger family that controls The Times, and Lisa Tobin.” Other fifth-generation Ochs-Sulzberger family members with paid jobs at the company, according to the 2020 proxy statement, included James Dryfoos, Pamela Dryfoos, and David Perpich. Two other family members, Hays Golden and Arthur Golden, are paid company directors, collecting compensation of about $200,000 annually for serving on a board that meets about five times a year.

If my judgment as a longtime reader is that the paper has gone off a cliff, the collective wisdom expressed by the stock market is offering the opposite opinion. The New York Times Company stock price has climbed from a low of less than $5 a share following the 2008 financial crisis to a recent high of as much as $58 a share, valuing the company at more than $8 billion, a frothy 84 times earnings. Back in 2011, when the overall stock market was at a multiple of about 21 times earnings, Times columnist David Leonhardt described the prices as “historically expensive.” There’s substantial short interest in Times Company stock, and the company’s upward share price movements sometimes resemble those of GameStop, AMC, or other legacy stocks benefiting from short squeezes.

Such a high valuation has enriched the Sulzbergers, at least on paper, along with Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican who has a larger economic interest in the Times Company than does the Ochs-Sulzberger family. But the high valuation carries its own risks, too. It breeds complacency and self-congratulations, toward which the Times tends anyway. It might also attract competition, or encourage the family to sell out while the opportunity is there. The Times employed roughly 1,500 journalists in 2020, collected roughly $1.2 billion in subscription revenue from 7.5 million subscriptions, and earned a $100 million profit. The higher the Times stock price soars, the greater the temptation is for someone else to hire a bunch of reporters and editors and try to build something that is better, both as a business and as a journalistic enterprise.

There is a quip that the Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country, the Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country, and the New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. If the papers have different core audiences, they nonetheless compete directly for talent and news, all the more so in an era when technology has made it possible for all three publications to transcend the limitations of print sites and home-delivery routes and reach anyone with a smartphone. Short of a new market entrant, the best hopes for those dreaming of a restoration of Times quality are the robust competition and choice that characterize capitalism.

So the theory goes, at least: A stronger Post and Journal should translate eventually to a healthier Times. But that theory may not apply if the Times decides to drop the pretense of being “mainstream media” and instead moves to embrace fully the business strategy of being an affinity newsletter for political progressives, something you set up for recurring billing on your credit card along with monthly donations to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign. Right now, the paper, as its own media columnist has observed, seems a bit caught in the middle.

And that may not be as brilliant an approach as the current stock price suggests. The real tell that Times management is not quite so confident of its quality or its business strategy as it claims to be is how frustratingly difficult the company makes it for paying customers to cancel a subscription.

Ira Stoll is editor of SmarterTimes.com and author of JFK, Conservative.