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On Nov. 25, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined CBS STAYING SILENT IN DEBATE ON WOMEN JOINING AUGUSTA. It was the 32d piece the Times had run in just under three months on the issue of whether the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament, would admit women as members.
The story spanked the TV network that has a contract to air the Masters for "resisting the argument that it can do something to alter the club's policy," although it was unclear who--other than the Times--was making the argument; as the piece eventually noted, "public pressure on CBS to take a stand has been glancing." "That was just shocking," one Times staffer said on the condition that his name not be used. "It makes it hard for us to have credibility on other issues. We don't run articles that just say so-and-so is staying silent. We run articles when something important actually happens."
A certain amount of griping is to be expected in any newsroom, but the chorus of complaints at the Times has been getting louder. The Masters coverage is so overheated, one staffer says, that executive editor Howell Raines is "in danger of losing the building." Talk of a "command and control" structure--where the power to pick and place stories, shared at the Times among story editors in the past, has become much more closely held by a handful at the top--and grumbling about the ruthless enforcement of an old-boy star system have grown from a low hum to a swelling chorus in recent weeks.
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It's not just the newsroom that's concerned. From conservative activists to everyday readers, many people around the country are noticing a change in the way the Old Gray Lady covers any number of issues, from the looming war with Iraq to the sex-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church to the New Jersey Senate race. Raines, the hard-charging executive editor, has an almost religious belief in "flooding the zone"--using all the paper's formidable resources to pound away on a story. But increasingly, the Times is being criticized for ginning up controversies as much as reporting them out. "This is certainly a shift from The New York Times as the 'paper of record'," says Alex Jones, a former Times media reporter and coauthor of "The Trust," a book about the paper. "It's a more activist agenda in terms of policy, especially compared to an administration that's much more conservative." Or as Slate's press critic, Jack Shafer, puts it, "The Times has assumed the journalistic role as the party of opposition."
For decades the country has looked to the Times to serve as America's de facto historian, writing up every official pronouncement. Over the past 30 years, that mandate has been slowly changing; instead of analyzing what happened yesterday, the Times, with the rest of the country's press, has focused more on telling its consumers what to look for tomorrow. Under Raines, that evolution has become a revolution.
Raines refused to discuss the Times's coverage, and a Times spokeswoman said, "Our coverage judgments are based on news value. That's always been what's driven what appears in our pages." Raines's many admirers argue that his approach led to a record seven Pulitzer Prizes last year, and that he's merely achieving any editor's goal--putting out a paper that has impact and gets people talking.
The criticism of the Times comes at a time when the search for ulterior motives in the media has crescendoed. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, a former Republican strategist, was outed last month for writing a letter to President George W. Bush advising him in the days after September 11 (a revelation that prompted an aggressively snide Times column). And Al Gore recently attacked Fox News and The Washington Times as being shills for the Republican Party.
But it's the Times that drives the nation's news agenda--and therefore presents the biggest target. Every day, when its editors send out a list of the next day's front-page stories, papers around the country alter their lineups--or just run the Times's stories in their entirety. "The Times has so much accumulated reputational capital that stories that are really ideological are presented as accurate news stories, and can mislead the public," says Dave Kopel, a conservative press critic with Denver's Rocky Mountain News.
Conservatives have long complained that the Times has been an organ of the liberal elite, and Raines, with his well-documented lefty politics, is a convenient right-wing bogeyman. "The Times clearly wants their views heard, and their views don't agree with the administration's," one Republican official told NEWSWEEK.
But the paper's recent penchant for shaping the national debate isn't easily articulated by politics or policy. Retiring Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli, who dropped out of his re-election race after being dogged by scandal, believes the Times's enmity helped force him from the race. And President Bill Clinton was ferociously hounded by Raines's editorial page.
If Raines is working in any tradition, it's that of the crusading Southern populist. He began his career in Alabama, and cut his teeth at a time when the Southern papers were still charging the barricades of segregation. On the foreign-policy front, the Vietnam era helped cement his skepticism about government authority when lives are on the line. He once said the Reagan years "oppressed me because the callousness and the greed and the hardhearted attitude toward people who have very little in this society."
Whatever changes Raines is making, he's doing it with the blessing of the front office. His aggressiveness, as well as his news judgment, are seen as a reflection of the ambitions and philosophies of the Times's 41-year-old publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Raines and Sulzberger have had a close relationship for years. While Sulzberger's day-to-day contact with Raines is limited, Sulzberger, who would not comment for this article, is clearly comfortable with Raines's activist ways.
For all the fire the two have drawn, their game plan is working--at least at the newsstand. During a time when many papers are losing circulation, the Times, which has aggressively pursued a national readership, has seen increases over the past six months, with most of that uptick coming outside the New York metropolitan area.
Whatever their track record, it seems clear that the Times's leaders have sometimes gone out on a limb. In August, the paper printed two consecutive front-page stories incorrectly including Henry Kissinger among the "prominent Republicans" opposing war with Iraq (Kissinger had expressed realpolitik reservations but stopped far short of arguing against an attack). After an ensuing flap, the paper assigned a media reporter a story on how the American press was increasingly seen as driving the debate on Iraq.
According to a number of sources at the Times, the reporter, David Carr, went back to his editors and told them the media, per se, weren't driving anything: the only publication injecting itself into the policy debate was the Times itself. (Carr did not return calls seeking comment.) The story never ran. An editor's note, explaining the Times's mistakes, was printed instead. But people were talking.
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