The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  This is faint praise. There was an attempt by the business side of the Times Company to thwart his final ascent. On January 22, 1996, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal by Patrick M. Reilly suggested that Arthur, then the Times’ publisher, might not succeed his father as the company’s chairman, and that the company was considering looking outside the family for the next generation of leadership. One or another Sulzberger patriarch had held both jobs for a century, but Reilly’s story indicated that the tradition could very well come to an end. It portrayed Arthur as someone who “sees himself as both a journalist and a businessman,” but who in fact was fully neither. The story was based on highly placed but anonymous sources inside the building, and it quoted Arthur’s aunt Judith Sulzberger, a member of the board of directors, as saying that the job “might go to anyone.”

  Penny Muse Abernathy, who worked closely with Arthur on the business side of the Times before leaving for Harvard, the Wall Street Journal, and then a professorship at the University of North Carolina, remembers walking into Arthur’s office at around 7:30 a.m. the day the article came out. He was crestfallen. “What are you going to do about that story?” she asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, and then made an attempt at gallows humor, suggesting that he might need to try an entirely new line of work. As they were speaking, Punch called. “Dad, can I come see you?” Arthur asked. It was the first time Abernathy had ever heard Arthur call his father “Dad.” Around the office, he always referred to Punch as “the chairman.”

  The effort to end-run the dynasty proved to be short-lived. Many at the paper saw the fingerprints of company president Lance Primus on the Journal story. It had identified Primus as “a top prospect” for the chairmanship, and the article was interpreted as the opening salvo in a putsch—a play by the company’s professional managers to wrest control of the business side of the company from the amateurs. Family won. Arthur formed an alliance with Russ Lewis, who would be named company CEO when Punch retired, in 1997, and handed the top post to his son. Primus was invited to leave.

  3. The Moose in the Room

  Here, in a nutshell, in the words of a longtime staffer, is what is supposedly wrong with Arthur: “He has no rays”—rays, as in the lines cartoonists draw around a character to suggest shine, or power. In the comics trade these lines are called emanata. The emanata deficit is a standard lament by insiders about Arthur, although most Times people need a few more words to make the point.

  No one can plumb another’s depths. Arthur certainly seems clever enough, but try as he might, he fails to impress. He comes off as a lightweight, as someone slightly out of his depth, whose dogged sincerity elicits not admiration so much as pity. While no one blames him for what is clearly a crisis afflicting all newspapers, he has made a series of poor business moves that now follow him like the tail of a kite. He has doubled down on print over the last two decades, most notably with his own newspaper but also spending more than $1 billion to buy the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune. These purchases appear to have been historically mistimed, rather like sinking your life savings in hot-air balloons long after the first excited reports from Kitty Hawk. Back when he had the money to do it, Arthur failed to adequately diversify the Times Company’s holdings, stranding it in an ocean of debt with no flotation device—unlike, say, the Washington Post, which is being buoyed through this industry-wide depression by the highly profitable Kaplan, an education services company that provides test-preparation classes and online instruction. (The Post’s diverse investments were made under a board that included Warren Buffett and like-minded business gurus.) Except for his admirable website, Arthur has failed to expand the Times effectively into other media. Back in 2000 he announced that television was “our next great frontier,” but his one timid step in that direction, a partnership with the Discovery Channel to produce news-related documentaries, was halfhearted (and abbreviated). The Times still lacks a presence in television. Arthur has not missed the boat entirely with digital start-ups—his decision to buy the online information site About.com, which provides assisted Internet searching, has paid dividends—but he passed up (along with a lot of other people) early opportunities to invest in the great search engines, such as Google, which today is sucking ad revenue from the paper while at the same time giving away its content. Arthur’s often repeated assertion that he is “platform agnostic”—that is, he doesn’t care what medium delivers the Times, and is open to all media—is both misguided and revealing. It sounds fancy and daring and forward-thinking but betrays a deep misunderstanding of the forces at play.

  There are other knocks on his leadership. His chosen executive editor, Howell Raines, played favorites in the newsroom, overlooked shoddy journalism, and so alienated his reporters and editors that they forced Arthur to dump him. So goes one version of the story. Not everyone thinks jettisoning Raines was the right thing to do. Raines was shaking things up, presumably with Arthur’s blessing, and when you shake things up you upset the rank and file. As one former Timesman puts it, “If the sheriff of Nottingham gets mugged on his way through Sherwood Forest, and can’t do anything about it, then the thieves are running the forest.” Whichever take on Raines you prefer, Arthur’s reversal looks bad. It suggests either poor judgment or a lack of conviction.

  He is, or was, big on managerial gimmickry. There is the now infamous moment, at the height of the in-house furor over the serial fabulist Jayson Blair, when Arthur tried to break the ice before a large audience of restive reporters and editors by pulling a toy stuffed moose out of a bag, a favorite device of his meant to facilitate candid discussion—the moose was supposed to represent the core issues that no one dared address. Newsmen, it should be noted, are rarely shy about expressing their opinions, and on this occasion the crowd was about as reserved as a lynch mob. The moose was so silly and so unnecessary, and reflected something so tone-deaf, that Arthur has yet to live it down. One reason is that it was of a piece with other behavior. Times veterans remember with pained expressions the “bonding games” Arthur forced them to play at company retreats in the late 1990s, and the time and effort he demanded they lavish on crafting “mission statements” for the newspaper and the company. “We have it written down and we carry it with us,” Arthur told Charlie Rose in 2001. He handed over the mission statements on camera with a flourish, and when asked later about his proudest achievement came back to this “defining vision of what we are and where we have to go.” The mission statements are now, in the words of one former editor, “stuffed in desk drawers throughout the building.” In his eagerness to champion First Amendment rights he blundered into a losing and ultimately embarrassing fight over his old friend Judith Miller, who went to jail to protect a source, Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, before striking a deal with prosecutors. The fight was widely regarded as a poor one to make into a First Amendment test case, but that didn’t stop Arthur from charging to Miller’s defense. The “Free Judy” buttons he distributed made a ludicrous contrast to his father’s storied battle over the Pentagon Papers. An explanatory mea culpa about the Miller case, written by the executive editor, Bill Keller, suggested that Miller had had an “entanglement” with Libby, which some read as a suggestion that she was sleeping with him. Keller, who had succeeded Raines after the Jayson Blair affair, quickly retreated from his retreat. The episode illustrated a broader perception: no adult was in charge. Whereas Arthur senior had been seen as solid and serious, Arthur junior appeared callow. One of those involved in the Miller episode describes Arthur’s behavior throughout as “childish.” Another word you hear is “goofy.”

  The conventional wisdom about Arthur can be turned on its head. His goofiness might more kindly be interpreted as a winning informality, a healthy antidote to the stuffy, hidebound ways during executive editor Abe Rosenthal’s long reign. So, too, his efforts to unbend and humanize the newsroom’s tyrants, and get them to see the company’s business managers not as enemies but as
partners. No wonder they grumbled! Arthur’s fixation on newsprint is evidence of a devotion to quality journalism amid the growing din of propaganda and digital frivolity; after all, most of the real reporting done in America is still done by newspapers. His eagerness to defend reporters’ freedoms stems from noble instincts, and demonstrates that, for Arthur, the paper’s mission takes priority over its profits. His enthusiastic defense of Judith Miller may have backfired, but the same impulse led Arthur to defy a strongly worded request from the Bush administration—delivered in person at the White House—not to print stories that revealed legally dubious domestic spying, stories that would win a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Arthur’s “political correctness” shows an admirable sensitivity to the rights of women and minorities in an institution where both were long held down or shut out. And might his willingness to back down and fire Raines be seen as a sign not of pusillanimity but of humility and flexibility?

  “Sure, Arthur has made his share of mistakes. But they get recycled all the time, and he rarely gets the credit he deserves for what he’s done right,” says his longtime friend Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter and the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs. “You can’t judge him solely on the basis of success, because no one in the business can claim success in the current situation. You do have to give him credit for good judgment in anticipating the role of the Internet and his deep commitment to the values of the institution. Arthur was talking about the impact of the Internet on newspapers earlier than anyone else in our industry, and the records show that. So you have this strange kind of thing where you have the vision and you have insight, but you don’t get the business side of it right—but literally, without exception, no one has. Arthur has, however, reinvented the newspaper on several levels and positioned it for the future.”

  Nine years ago, in an entirely different economic climate, the industry magazine Editor and Publisher named Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Publisher of the Year, and he was hailed as “brilliant” and “visionary.” His investments in satellite printing had pushed the national edition of the Times to unprecedented success, “achieving a 20 percent advertising revenue growth … largely due to national and help-wanted business going gangbusters.” The mistakes he has made with investments and in adapting to new technology are the same mistakes made by every newspaper in America. Most journalists consider Sam Zell, the billionaire who bought the Tribune Company, to be a Neanderthal for his wholesale trashing of the once proud Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and regard Gary Pruitt, chairman of the McClatchy chain, as a well-mannered and passionate defender of journalistic excellence. Yet both are staring at bankruptcy. “Who has gotten it right?” asks one industry analyst. “Arthur has made some bad decisions, but so has everyone else in the business. Nobody has figured out what to do.” In short, you can choose whichever take on Arthur you prefer. As an old football coach once told me, “Write whatever you want: if I win, you can’t hurt me, and if I lose, you can’t help me.” The publisher’s reputation shifts with the wind, and today journalism is leaning into an exceedingly ill wind.

  4. The Wrong Lesson

  Arthur is still often referred to as “young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or as “Pinch,” a despised nickname that puns on his father’s. Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—’When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”

  But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors, who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that wealth is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The Times’ reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he takes in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: journalism sells.

  “This is ridiculous,” says a former business-side executive at the Times. “It flies in the face of logic and reason, this belief that if your news product is so good and so comprehensive the normal rules of business are suspended. Think about it. Think about the inanity of saying that you survived by putting in more news and cutting ads.”

  Arthur repeated this belief proudly in his interview with Rose, describing how Adolph Ochs responded to the lean years after he purchased the paper by expanding its news hole—“We’re going to give our readers more! That’s gutsy!”—and how his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger did something similar during World War II, when newsprint was being rationed: “Major decision, major gutsy decision from him there. Perhaps the critical decision of his time … whether to continue to print ads—revenue, money, profit—or to say, No, we’re going to add more news. He went to news, the Herald Tribune went to ads, and the rest was just a matter of time. By the time the war ended the Times had taken such a huge leadership that it was just a matter of time before the Herald Tribune was to fold.”

  This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers, including Arthur, and published more than a year before he spoke those words to Rose. The authors, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, thoroughly debunked the legend.

  “One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit in, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news. In fact, he devoted the majority of the newspaper’s space to ads, and earned more revenue than he had since 1931. Ad revenue “had actually increased during the period, from $13 million to $15 million, while the amount of money spent on news had slumped slightly from $3.9 million to $3.7 million,” Tifft and Jones wrote.

  Arthur’s grandfather did make one important change during this period, but it was more of a shrewd business move than a principled stand for journalism. While the rival Herald Tribune sat on its swollen profits during the war, Sulzberger used his profits to print not more news but more newspapers, greatly expanding the Times’ reach. That strategy left the Times with a larger circulation than the Herald Tribune after the war. The Times was better positioned to survive. The lesson of the story is not that investing in news pays but that a clever business strategy adapts to a changing market.

  Arthur likes his own version of the story better. He once told in
terviewers that the Times was his “religion”: “That’s what I believe in, and it’s a hell of a thing to hold on to.” Reason has no purchase on belief. Nor does basic business theory.

  5. The Editor as Algorithm

  American journalism is in a period of terror. The invention of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift not just in the platform for information—screen as opposed to paper—but in the way people seek information. In evolutionary terms, it’s a sudden drastic change of climate. One age passes and a new one begins. Species that survive the transition are generally not the kings of the old era. The world they fit so perfectly is no more. They are big and slow, wedded to the old ways, ripe for extinction.

  When Arthur became chairman of the Times Company, in 1997, he dragged his top people to retreats in leafy locations, there to learn better cooperation and to think big thoughts. He was less worried about adapting the Times to a new era than about making his company and newsroom a happier place to work. The underlying assumption was that there was nothing ahead but smooth seas. Many of the newsroom’s hard-bitten veterans found these events revealing. “We were having a retreat,” David Jones, a former assistant managing editor, recalls. “It was a wonderful old inn, business-meeting place, in upstate New York. They were doing games as bonding experiences. One of the games they did was fly casting. And they put three big loops out on the lawn. One was close, one was farther out, and one was farthest. And the idea was to cast your lure and hit inside the loop. The farther away you cast, the more points you got.” The risky way to play was to cast for the big scores; the safest way was to steadily accrue points by hitting the nearest loop.