Gray Lady Down. William McGowan

      Sulzberger Jr. regarded such unpleasant experiences as road bumps on the way to putting his personal mark on the editorial voice of his paper and bringing it into the new age. One of the first moves he made was to hire Howell Raines as editorial page editor. Unlike his father, who had tried to mute the editorial page’s stridency, Arthur Jr. wanted to make it more outspoken, edited by someone who reflected his own taste for confrontation and countercultural values.

      Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Raines had sat on the sidelines during the mid-sixties civil rights demonstrations there, leaving him with a lifelong sense of Southern guilt and a determination never again to shrink from declaring his beliefs and opinions. Embracing a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision, he once declared that “Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.” According to Tifft and Jones, Arthur Jr. saw in the passionate Raines “a kindred spirit, a contrarian whose values had taken shape during the sixties, who viewed the world as a moral battleground, who relished intellectual combat, and who wasn’t shy about expressing his convictions in muscular unequivocal language.”

      Under Raines, the editorial page assumed a caustic, take-no-prisoners tone reminiscent of the days of the ultra-liberal John Oakes. The page also became a platform for the new publisher’s preoccupations, focusing, sometimes obsessively, on diversity, gay rights, feminism, the history of racial guilt and other fixations of the cultural left.

      Some of the editorial writers whom Raines inherited were not happy with the change, contending that there was more “shrill braying” than “sound argumentation” on the page. Now in retirement, even Max Frankel wrote that “mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” Timothy Noah of Slate said that Raines’ editorial page “routinely attempts to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt.” Michael Tomasky, then at New York magazine, accused him of “using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.”

      Sulzberger also made Raines part of an informal “brain-trust,” composed of the executive editor and selected senior corporate managers, to plan the paper’s future. This gave Raines power and influence over other parts of the Times that no other editorial page editor ever had. It also had the effect of weakening the firewall between news and opinion, particularly on the publisher’s pet issues, especially that of diversity.

      Sulzberger Jr.’s effort to reinvigorate the editorial page also involved a substantial change among op-ed columnists. Packing the roster with his personal and political favorites, he added Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to Anna Quindlen, who had secured her place several years earlier when Arthur Jr. was deputy publisher and had become an important ally. According to a growing cadre of Times critics, the problem was not that Sulzberger Jr. hired liberal op-ed columnists, but that he hired them in a vastly disproportionate ratio to conservative voices. At one point after Sulzberger abruptly relieved Abe Rosenthal of his column in 1999, William Safire was the only conservative on the op-ed page. Sulzberger’s choices were also markedly narrow in journalistic experience. Of the four aforementioned, none had spent any time as a foreign correspondent, and the national-level reporting experience of the group as a whole was limited. It seemed that Arthur Jr. chose most of his columnists on the basis of how much they agreed with his own sixties-era values and with the P.C. agenda he embraced.

      Had Sulzberger merely allowed Raines to sharpen the combative edge of the editorial page, and turned the op-ed page into a mirror of his liberal politics and self-consciously iconoclastic values, his innovations might have been defensible. But he also initiated changes that encouraged the infiltration of opinion into the news pages. He did so chiefly by increasing the number of columnists on the inside pages; by relaxing or ignoring rules that had barred television, film, theater and literary critics from injecting their politics into reviews; by increasing the amount of space devoted to news analysis and other forms of explanatory journalism; and by expanding the importance of popular culture in the news mix.

      Up until well into the 1960s the Times had had very few columnists; by the early 2000s there were four dozen, scattered throughout the paper. In late 2009, there were eighteen “cultural critics” alone, courtesy of the expanded coverage of popular culture. Had someone like Abe Rosenthal been there to keep a weather eye out for critics using their perch to introduce political or social commentary into what were supposed to be “straight” reviews, the boost in the number of critics and “inside” columnists would not have been such a problem. But the new Timesmen and Timeswomen were encouraged to write with “voice.” Given the ideological proclivities of the people hired by Sulzberger, that meant a liberal voice as well as political posturing.

      And so, writing about Goodnight and Good Luck in his 2006 Oscar predictions column, David Carr called the film “A well crafted look at a time in American history when anything less than complete fealty to the republic was seen as treason, which sounds familiar to some movie goers.” In a review of Sophie Stoll (2006), a World War II German period film about the fate of civil liberties under the Nazis, Stephen Holden said, “It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?” Holden also hailed Oliver Stone’s documentary about Hugo Chavez (2010) for depicting the anti-American Venezuelan dictator as “a rough-hewn but good-hearted man of the people whose bullheaded determination is softened by a sense of humor.” The television critic Anita Gates lauded a British show called Cracker for providing “the punch of confirmation that much of the rest of the world may indeed despise the United States for what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.” The choreographer Bill T. Jones’ performance piece Blind Date (2005) was praised by Ginia Bellafante for questioning “the expediency of war,” for reflecting on “limited opportunities for the urban poor,” and for remarking on “the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.”

      The biggest erosion of the wall between news and opinion, however, came in the elevation of Howell Raines to the position of executive editor in 2001. The Times now practically dropped the pretense of objective reporting altogether, opting for crusading zeal and advocacy on a level heretofore unseen in the paper. Besides bringing dogmatic political opinions to the job, Raines blurred the line between news and opinion by putting editorial department staff into key newsroom positions. For example, he made the columnist Frank Rich an associate editor, with responsibilities for cultural coverage. Rich had been moved from the op-ed page to the Sunday Arts section, then back to the op-ed page on Sundays with a much bigger platform—usually at least half a page. What the new position meant was that Rich was not only opining on various subjects linking culture and politics, but also determining how the Times was covering arts and culture.

      Robert Samuelson of Newsweek commented on the changes that came to the Times with Howell Raines’ promotion:

       Every editor and reporter holds private views. The difference is that Raines’ opinions are now highly public. His [editorial page] was pro choice, pro gun control, and pro campaign finance reform.... Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines’ positions compromise the Times’ ability to act and appear fair-minded. Many critics already believe that the news columns of the Times are animated—and