NYT hoy por Ken Auletta

Con su estilo, el colaborador del New Yorker, desglosa la administración de Sulzberger Jr al frente del diario más importante de los EE.UU. Un texto lleno de ironía que revela como la principal cabeza del NYT está enfrentando uno de los momentos más complejos de su historia.

Ken Auletta
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 is still more a prince than a mature king. Sulzberger’s hair has begun to turn gray and to recede, and yet, like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big,” he seems to be only impersonating an older man. He is often known as Young Arthur, and, behind his back, people still call him Pinch, in contrast to his father, Punch. He tends to draw attention to himself with a loud cackle or an awkwardly offhand remark. He keeps in his office artifacts of his two hobbies—a wooden sculpture of a beloved motorcycle and sculptures of rock climbers.
But his preoccupation has been the Times, which he may have been destined to run from the time he was born. As Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones recount in “The Trust,” their authoritative history of the family, when he was five his parents divorced; he and his sister, Karen, lived with their mother, who soon remarried, and spent two weekends a month with Punch. In 1970, Arthur enrolled at Tufts, where he studied political science and international relations and thought about entering the family business one day. While he was in college, his mother married for a third time and settled in Topeka, Kansas, where he met and fell in love with Gail Gregg, the daughter of a neighbor. Gail, like Arthur, was fascinated by journalism, and two months later she went to Boston to live with him. After he graduated, in June, 1974, they moved to North Carolina, where Punch helped get Arthur a job as a general-assignment reporter for the Raleigh Times and Gail went to graduate school in journalism. They married the following year, and in 1976 the elder Sulzberger helped Arthur and Gail find reporting jobs in London, he with the Associated Press, she with United Press International.
Two years later, starting his apprenticeship in the family business, Arthur, Jr., joined the Times as a reporter in the Washington bureau. He and Gail became friendly with a number of reporters there—particularly Steven Rattner, Judith Miller, Steven Weisman, Philip Taubman, and Felicity Barringer. (Rattner and Miller once shared a summer house with the Sulzbergers and other friends.) Charles Kaiser, then a reporter for the Times, says of Arthur, “He was the charming young father who brought his baby boy to a party on his shoulders. He made a real effort to be one of the boys.” Everyone knew that he might succeed his father, but he did not flaunt his position. After three years in Washington, the young Sulzbergers and their son, Arthur Gregg, moved to New York, where Arthur became a generalassignment reporter on the metro desk. A year later, he became an assistant metro editor, and in 1982 he moved to the business side of the paper. Sulzberger was made assistant publisher in 1987 and deputy publisher the following year, reporting directly to his father. As he came closer to succeeding his father, he began to tell people that he would never tolerate an authoritarian newsroom, as he believed his father had under the executive editor A. M. Rosenthal, and that he would cut off his personal friendships at the paper. (Rattner, who remains a close friend and adviser, escaped the ban, having left the Times in 1982 to become an investment banker.) He became publisher in January, 1992, and, in 1997, when Punch stepped down as chairman, his son succeeded him in that post, too.

Where Punch Sulzberger was reserved, Arthur, Jr., was voluble. Punch did not make his politics public; Arthur, Jr., leaned to the left (he had been vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War, and was arrested more than once at protest rallies). John F. Akers, a former chairman and C.E.O. of I.B.M., who has been a Times board member since 1985, says, “Punch has a dry sense of humor, ironic, sardonic. Arthur’s humor is very different. He’s a little quick with the gun.” Whatever their stylistic differences, they had the same values where the paper was concerned. Arthur, Jr., believed that his father had saved the newspaper by attracting new readers and advertisers, and he admired his father’s courage in defying the Nixon Administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, in 1971.
The new publisher, however, had his own management ideas. He thought that the corporate culture was inbred and in need of more diversity—more women, more minorities, more gays. (Charles Kaiser, who is gay, says, “When he came in, gays in the newsroom lived in terror, and Arthur met them and took each of them to lunch and said, ‘What is it like to be gay here? When I take over, it will no longer be a problem.’ He transformed the institution from the most homophobic institution in America to the most gay-friendly institution.”)
In 1992, Arthur, Jr., named Howell Raines, the Washington bureau chief, as editorial-page editor. He wanted a livelier, more assertive, populist page—a departure for the Times, where the editorial pages had been staid and often predictable. In 1994, he promoted Joseph Lelyveld, then the managing editor, to executive editor, succeeding Max Frankel. When it was Lelyveld’s turn to retire, in 2001, Sulzberger arranged for Bill Keller, then the managing editor, and Raines to compete for the position.
Keller, whom Sulzberger didn’t know as well as he did Raines, was Lelyveld’s preferred candidate and promised continuity. Raines, a more charismatic and high-spirited figure than Keller, though not his equal as a correspondent, appealed to Sulzberger’s sense of mission. He promised to boost business, sports, and cultural coverage, and to attract more readers from USA Today and the Wall Street Journal; he wanted to bring more diversity into the newsroom, and intended to appoint Gerald Boyd, who is black, managing editor. Raines energized Arthur, Jr., in a way that Keller did not. Raines won allies on the business side by promising to raise the “competitive metabolism” of the news staff, suggesting that the newsroom could work harder. In the end, there was little mystery to the race and even less competition: Sulzberger chose Raines; Keller returned to writing, with an Op-Ed column and regular magazine stories.
Raines moved into his new office the week before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and, over the next six months or so, the newsroom excelled and its work was recognized with a record-breaking seven Pulitzer Prizes. Judith Miller shared an award for explanatory reporting with six other reporters for the paper’s coverage. Her reporting on attempts by terrorists to gain access to weapons of mass destruction, and, later, on Saddam Hussein’s alleged hidden weapons programs, was often featured on the front page. Privately, some editors and reporters complained that Miller relied too much on Administration sources—that, in the words of one editor, “she was a vacuum cleaner of information” but “a poor judge of what she had.” Raines and his team generally ignored such complaints and, whether that was the intent or not, W.M.D. stories in the Times shielded Raines from the charge that he was too liberal.

Sulzberger’s first major newsroom crisis began in the spring of 2003, when Jayson Blair’s fabrications came to light. What might have been no more than a major embarrassment at another newspaper caused a firestorm that involved not only Blair, who was dismissed, but also Raines, who was accused of being too hellbent on scoops and, above all, of creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that eclipsed Rosenthal’s last years. Sulzberger defended Raines, who had held the job for less than two years, but, in order to air the issue, he rented a theatre on West Forty-fourth Street and invited the Times staff to question Raines, Gerald Boyd, and himself.
As the three men took their places onstage, Sulzberger was holding a mysterious bag. He told the story of a Times business retreat where a moose had been lurking outside the window but wasn’t mentioned by any of the executives present. He then pulled from the bag a stuffed toy moose, held it up, and urged his employees to discuss any “moose issues”—meaning the most obvious issues that people were wary of confronting. This was the closest that many in the newsroom had ever got to Sulzberger, and the moose gesture was widely viewed as a clumsy prank at the worst possible moment—neither a joke nor a parable. “The day with the moose ended it,” a senior correspondent at the paper said. “That was the day you said, ‘This guy is tone deaf.’ ”
Within weeks, Sulzberger had become convinced that Raines could not rescue himself or the situation, and Raines was fired. For Keller, the Raines era was harmful in a less obvious way, and he remains bitter about it. Keller, who is fifty-six, speaks slowly and deliberately, but his candor can be as jarring as Sulzberger’s humor. The business and news sides of newspapers, he told me last month, always have “an ambient level of suspicion” toward each other. The business side has trouble applying “traditional business metrics to what we do,” he said. “On the business side, there is a tendency to suspect that the newsroom is hiding something behind a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is a perception Howell fed. Of all the things Howell bequeathed to me, somewhere high on that list—maybe higher than Judy Miller—is his claim that the newsroom had become fat and complacent. That plays into what business sides of newspapers tend to believe. I think that was wrong. I think the reason he made that case was cynical. . . . I don’t think he really believed it. I think he thought it would make him popular with the business side.” Keller also said he did not believe that Sulzberger chose Raines for that reason. But he added, “Howell campaigned for the job with the political skills we admire in Karl Rove.”
Raines, in an e-mail response, said, “It was well known throughout the paper that I believed the Times needed to improve its journalism and its business practices. It still does—witness the declining stock price. Any reasonable person who read my editorial page could see that I did not pander to business or economic interests, inside or outside the paper. Bill knows that the cynicism, if any, ran the other way. Joe Lelyveld tried to cast me as a candidate of the business side in hopes of improving Bill’s standing in the newsroom. My own view is that an editor in today’s environment who doesn’t understand the economics of the newspaper business is under-informed.” Lelyveld declined to comment, saying, “I don’t want to get involved in old New York Times debates.”
The newsroom generally likes and respects Keller—he was one of the best foreign correspondents in the paper’s history—but some people had seen him as aloof and, at times, given to strange jokes. When Dean Baquet, a former colleague who had become managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, was trying to hire away some of his reporters, Keller told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that Baquet “has this habit of telling recruits there’s something in the New York water that makes your penis fall off.” A Times editor says of Keller, “He’s a bit of a loner. He spends a lot of time in his office.” Nor did Keller have an easy rapport with his publisher. In the two years that he was a columnist, he told a friend, they rarely spoke. In the months after Keller succeeded Raines, Sulzberger told friends that he thought Keller was holding back, as if he still resented not being chosen the first time. “We started out without much of a relationship at all and with a certain wariness of each other,” Keller told me, but it wasn’t “a question of whether Arthur and I like each other. I think we do.”

The painful and demoralizing episode involving Judith Miller—Sulzberger’s recent crisis on the news side—began on July 14, 2003, when the syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed the name of an undercover C.I.A. agent, Valerie Plame. Plame is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former career State Department official, who that spring and summer had been questioning the Bush Administration’s assertion that Iraq was seeking material to build nuclear weapons—an assertion that the White House withdrew around the time of the Novak column. Because revealing the identity of an undercover agent violates a 1982 national-security act, the Justice Department began to investigate whether members of the Bush Administration had knowingly done so, and eventually chose Patrick Fitzgerald as special counsel. Among the reporters Fitzgerald asked to testify were two from the Washington Post; Tim Russert, of NBC; Matt Cooper, of Time; and Judith Miller, who had never written about Wilson or his wife but had closely followed the question of Iraq’s weapons program. In the following days and weeks, the Washington Post and NBC came to decide that this was no case on which to make a First Amendment stand, but Time and the Times chose to resist the subpoenas from Fitzgerald’s grand jury; Miller and Cooper refused to testify, saying that they could not break pledges of confidentiality to sources.
The case became a heartfelt cause for Sulzberger, who relied on the First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, as did Time Inc. Thomas F. Hogan, the chief U.S. district-court judge, held Cooper and Miller in civil contempt for refusing to testify. In early 2005, Sulzberger invited officials from Time Inc.—including Norman Pearlstine, then the editor-in-chief; his deputy, John Huey; and Matt Cooper—to meet with him, the Times’ C.E.O., Janet Robinson; its communications chief, Catherine Mathis; Times lawyers; and Judith Miller to discuss strategy. Only Robin Bierstedt, an associate general counsel at Time Inc., and Dawn Bridges, the senior vice-president for corporate communications, showed up, with instructions from Pearlstine to listen politely and make no commitments.
Sulzberger began by saying, “We need people to understand what this means. We need passion.” Bridges asked whether the audience was the courts, the public, or the special counsel. “Everyone,” Sulzberger responded. He talked about holding joint press conferences, and mounting an advertising campaign. Then, with Miller taking notes, Sulzberger pulled from an envelope a bunch of small white buttons with writing in red, blue, and black—“Free Judy. Free Matt. Free Speech”—and passed them around. Nearly a year later, senior executives at Time Inc. still shake their heads when recounting this story. “He wanted to do the right thing, but he seemed naïve,” one executive said. “He was earnest, and he was admirable,” Judith Miller said.
Last February, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously against Miller and Cooper, Sulzberger and Time decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. At the annual meeting of Times Company shareholders in April, Sulzberger said, “When we consider the many complex issues that we face at home and abroad, it is hard to imagine a more inopportune moment to restrain our access to information. . . . When individuals do speak to us, confidentially, they do so knowing we will protect their identity.”
Miller still considered Sulzberger to be her champion, but she also had reasons to be wary. Matthew Mallow, a friend of hers who is a senior partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, advised her to get her own attorney, someone with a background in criminal law. Sulzberger agreed to pay for a lawyer, and Miller eventually chose Robert Bennett, of Skadden, Arps, who was Bill Clinton’s personal attorney and had defended him in the Monica Lewinsky case. At the same time, Miller felt growing hostility from Keller and many colleagues in the newsroom. This had started a year earlier, when Keller and Jill Abramson, the managing editor, ran an editors’ note acknowledging that some of the Times’ reporting on Iraq’s W.M.D.s—including several stories written by Miller—was “not as rigorous as it should have been.” Keller and Abramson spent hours going over past stories, trying to judge where Miller’s reporting was thin or just plain wrong. They had telephone and e-mail exchanges with several Times reporters, few of whom were pleased at the prospect of being second-guessed. But Miller, Keller recalled, “was defensive, unrelentingly sure of her positions, and unwilling to be perceived as someone who wrote ‘bad stories.’ ”
Miller, for her part, asked why no one blamed editors like Raines, and others, “who knew all of my sources.” (Raines, in an e-mail, said, “I did not know Judy’s sources. At the time, I followed the customary Times practice of relying on the supervising desk editor—in this case, most often the Washington editor and the foreign editor—to make sure the sourcing on the stories they handled was correct. I questioned reporters directly on some stories out of the Pentagon, but, to my regret, I did not do so on these stories. As many journalism critics have noted, the Times has yet to reveal what editors among present staff members were directly involved in assigning and editing Judy Miller’s stories. Scapegoating Judy or anyone else does not erase their responsibility to tell their readers the full truth in this matter.”) “I should have left the paper after the editors’ note,” Miller says. “The reason I didn’t is that weeks afterward, I got a subpoena. . . . I knew I couldn’t fight on my own.” (A disclosure: My wife, a literary agent, represents both Keller and Miller.)
Miller asked why Keller wouldn’t allow her to do more reporting to uncover why the Times had been wrong. Keller was weary of the battles he had fought with Miller over the editors’ note; even when he thought she had agreed, he said, Miller would return and recycle every argument. And even after he and Abramson thought that they had restricted Miller’s reporting, she persisted. Late one night in 2004, Miller called Keller at home from the home of an Iraqi exile, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. “He was one of the most famous products of Ahmad Chalabi’s intelligence factory,” Keller said, referring to the Iraqi opposition leader. “Someone who had specifically been a source in one of Judy’s discredited W.M.D. stories.” Keller was astonished. “She was calling me up to say, ‘I’m at Haideri’s house. They’re going to deport him. I’m the only one who can report this story.’ It was just unmistakable that she saw her role here as partly the author of a great scoop, but also someone who was way too invested in her sources.” Keller told her to leave Haideri’s house. (Miller refused to comment on this incident.)
Keller was also having second thoughts about the legal case. The doubts started, he says, in the fall of 2004, when it became clear that the Washington Post did not see Fitzgerald’s investigation as a First Amendment issue, and that the Post’s longtime national-security reporter, Walter Pincus, was going to coöperate. Keller described Pincus as “a guy who lives and dies on anonymous sources, and who I could not see doing something to ruin his credibility with people who tell him stuff—that gave me pause. But I breezed past it.” A second pause came after the Court of Appeals ruled against the Times. He said, “At that point, I should have gone into the room and said, ‘Listen, guys, the lawyers aren’t very optimistic. There is even some potential danger that the Supreme Court would seize on this case for an opportunity to make things even worse” for the press. “I never made that pitch,” he said. The reason? “An object in motion,” he said, “tends to stay in motion.”
In retrospect, it seems that neither Keller nor Sulzberger asked enough questions about Miller’s interaction with her source, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, or with her editors. The Supreme Court declined to review the Appeals Court ruling, and, three days later, Norman Pearlstine complied with a subpoena to turn over Time Inc.’s e-mails and records; in July, Cooper said that his source had released him from any confidentiality pledge, and he appeared before the grand jury. Sulzberger said that he was “deeply disappointed” in the Time decision; Miller, still refusing to testify—with Sulzberger’s continuing support—was ordered to report to the Alexandria Detention Center, in northern Virginia, until she testified, or until the term of the grand jury expired, in late October.

In Robert Bennett’s view, Sulzberger caused problems for his client. “I don’t know what advice he got from his lawyers, but he was very gung-ho,” Bennett said of Sulzberger. “He was pushing Judy”—to not bend on principle. “When I raised issues—‘Shouldn’t we check on the waiver thing?’ ”—that is, on whether Libby genuinely had no objection to Miller’s revealing her source—“they were resistant to raising that issue.” Bennett was astonished that Keller and Sulzberger had not inspected Miller’s notebook. He said, “How could the Times have embarked on this venture without knowing all of the facts?” Floyd Abrams, the newspaper’s attorney, rejects the suggestion that he and the Times and Miller were swept up by a righteous stand on behalf of an abstract principle; he said that he had briefed Keller and Sulzberger on the notebook’s contents. “The first time I met Judy on this case, the first thing she said was ‘Somebody has to fight back against Fitzgerald,’ ” Abrams said. “I’m not trying to escape responsibility, but Judy was a very active client. It seems to me that if you don’t continually ask, ‘What is the principle you’re trying to establish?,’ there is nothing left to defend.” Miller’s legal fees eventually cost the company about $1.5 million, a senior official said.
By late August, Miller, who had spent nearly sixty days in jail, had become frustrated with the Times; she was upset that the paper had not run more stories about her imprisonment, although it did publish fourteen editorials championing her cause. Meanwhile, Bennett warned her that Fitzgerald could keep her in jail longer by impanelling a new grand jury, or by bringing a criminal-contempt action. Bennett had argued that he should ask Libby if he would release Miller from her pledge of confidentiality, and should “reach out to Fitzgerald to see if he would narrow his scope to one source.” After studying Miller’s notebook, Bennett concluded that there was only one source—Libby. When Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questions accordingly, that made it easier for Miller, who said, “We feared Fitzgerald wanted my entire notebook, and all my sources.” Miller says that Bennett, with Fitzgerald’s encouragement, arranged a telephone conversation with Libby, and became convinced that Libby genuinely wanted her to testify. If Libby hadn’t waived the pledge of confidentiality, she said, “I would have stayed in jail.”
When Miller was released, on September 29th, Sulzberger arranged for her to stay at the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown, get a massage and a manicure, and have a steak dinner. Bennett objected, saying that he wanted to prepare her immediately for the grand-jury session the next morning. Sulzberger insisted that she deserved a celebration, and Miller sided with him. At the dinner, which was attended by Sulzberger, Keller, the former Times Op-Ed columnist William Safire, Miller, and her husband, the former Random House editor Jason Epstein, the publisher presented Miller with a bronzed Times medallion. “It was very special,” Miller told me, eyes tearing as she recounted the moment. “Very few of them were given.” Sulzberger now describes the medal as “a trinket,” one that his father sometimes gave to retiring Times employees; it appears that by this time Arthur, Jr., saw Miller, who had been at the newspaper for twenty-eight years, as an ex-Times employee.
There was no discussion at dinner, or in the coming days, of Miller’s future at the Times. Miller assumed that after a decent interval she would return to the newspaper. She did not know that Sulzberger, Keller, Jill Abramson, and Janet Robinson had held a series of discussions while she was in jail and, according to two of the principals, decided that her career at the Times was over. “The decision was that she was not going to work with words again,” one of the participants said. Another person recalled that they “were all in agreement that she could never again be a reporter for the Times, and that the best course would be that she should leave the paper.”
They had discussed firing her, but this could have led to endless litigation, which the Times might lose; they could “negotiate a severance deal”; or they could “put her in a job where she would be genuinely contained”—for instance, assign her to the News Service division, part of the business department, and on another floor. The third option was so “draconian”—such a clear and public statement of a loss of confidence in her work as a reporter—that they hoped even its suggestion would “help steer Judy toward a severance deal.”

Keller, meanwhile, did what Howell Raines had done after the Jayson Blair episode: he ordered up a long investigative piece. As had happened before, blame was assigned mostly to the reporter and not to Times editors. The article appeared on the front page on October 16th. It explained that Keller had taken Miller off Iraq and national-security stories but that “she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm”; suggested that she had misled the Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, when he asked her about the Plame leak; and also noted that she had referred to herself as “Miss Run Amok.” Keller, in an e-mail to the staff from Asia—where, to the bafflement of many, he was in the midst of a long-scheduled visit to Times bureaus—tried to explain why the Times had taken more than a year to explain its W.M.D. reporting mistakes, something that might have demonstrated that the paper was not “putting the defense of the reporter above the duty to its readers.” And he created more problems by adding, “If I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense.” What was not known then was that Keller had first sent a draft of this note to Sulzberger and his two managing editors, and no one had flagged the word “entanglement,” with its implications of a sexual liaison—a particularly sensitive issue because of what Maureen Dowd in a later Times column called Miller’s “tropism toward powerful men.” Miller was furious at the insinuation that she was having an affair with Libby. She was almost as angry with the Times’ public editor, Byron Calame, for writing that she had been guilty of taking “journalistic shortcuts,” and had received “deferential treatment” from her editors. Dowd, in her column, concluded that if Miller were to return to the newsroom to cover “threats to our country” the “institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.”
While Sulzberger couldn’t have been expected to censor the Dowd column, Miller’s friends wondered why he didn’t ask someone to change the headline, “WOMAN OF MASS DESTRUCTION.” (Sulzberger told me, “I did not know of Maureen’s column on Judy before it ran.”) When the Times wanted Miller to write a first-person account of her grand-jury testimony, as Matt Cooper had done for Time, she objected, saying that Robert Bennett had advised against it, because it might antagonize Fitzgerald. Keller himself, she said, told her that she had to. By this time, Miller had stopped calling Sulzberger “my savior.” Although she will not criticize Sulzberger or discuss aspects of what happened, she does say, reluctantly, “He was there solidly—until he wasn’t.”
For a time, Miller apparently did not realize that Sulzberger had turned on her, but, soon after the October 16th account appeared, Matthew Mallow said, “Arthur told her she was not coming back as a reporter.” Before Miller would leave the paper, however, she demanded a significant severance package; the publication of a letter to the editor in which she would clarify her position and take issue with assertions made by both Keller and Calame; and a public apology from Keller. If Keller did not retract the “entanglement” claim, she threatened to sue him and the Times for defamation.
Keller made public a personal letter he had written to Miller in which he regretted choosing words suggesting “an improper relationship” with Libby, and asserting that she had “misled” Taubman, but he also noted, without elaboration, “I continue to be troubled by that episode.” In the end, by mutual consent, neither the Times nor Miller would discuss the terms of her agreement.
The day after Miller’s departure was announced, last month, Sulzberger appeared for an hour on the Charlie Rose show, and deflected Rose’s questions about Miller and Times mistakes. He said that morale at the paper is “doing just great,” we need “to move on,” “We’re now past it,” “That’s over now”—prompting Jack Shafer, the media critic for the online magazine Slate, to write, “Sulzberger’s jabber differs not one whit from the standard bullshit—‘Move along folks, there’s nothing here to see’—issued by every politician and corporate leader who finds himself trapped in the media’s crosshairs.” Sulzberger kept trying to steer the discussion to the First Amendment: “Let’s go back to why Judy went to jail. Because this has become so intertwined. And it almost makes her time of eighty-five days in jail seem as though it was a sideshow, when it was the main ring.” When it came to Miller herself or the newsroom, though, Sulzberger kept avoiding questions, so insistently that at one point Rose, who is usually a model of bonhomie, practically exploded with frustration.
Several days later, I met Judy Miller for breakfast. She wore sunglasses, and looked pale and unusually thin. Gesticulating with both hands, she said, “I don’t know what the list of alleged journalistic shortcomings are, because the ones the Times listed have now all been shown to have been bogus, or the result of spite—envy—by former colleagues . . . or were apologized for or clarified by Bill Keller when I left. I mean, I did not ‘mislead’ anyone, it turns out. I did not have, quote, entanglements with Scooter Libby. The journalistic, quote, shortcuts I was alleged to have taken”—agreeing to identify Libby, who had once worked on Capitol Hill, as a “former Hill staffer”—“I never took. So the question is: What did I do? What did I do? I interviewed Scooter Libby and I got information for a story I wanted to do that I never wrote, was not permitted to explore. So I went to jail to protect a source, and then I came out of jail because I was persuaded he wanted me to testify.”
Of her W.M.D. stories, she said, “I was wrong because my sources were wrong”—more than she conceded at the time of the editors’ note. But, aside from faulting herself for being wrong about W.M.D.s and for not doing a better job of explaining her decision to testify, Miller accepted no blame. She did not admit the possibility that her sources, among them Ahmad Chalabi, might have been not only wrong but also skilled at manipulating her. She said she hoped that what she had done “raised the bar and will make government think before putting a journalist in jail. I hope I will be known as a reporter who helped get a federal shield law. I fear that the Times’ betrayal of me may have weakened that.”
Libby, who was indicted on October 28th for perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice, may call Miller and other journalists as witnesses. “If this thing goes to trial,” Keller said, “it could be an ugly spectacle, and not something that will be uplifting or help the credibility of the news profession.” When I asked Floyd Abrams to assess whether the case advanced the cause he has championed, he said that “it was worth fighting,” but he added, “This case is a no-win situation for the press. The only question is how to do the least harm.” He said, “Sometimes we have to force the courts to rule. Only a willingness to fight when necessary makes possible some sort of victory in the courts, or some sort of protection from Congress.”
I later asked Sulzberger what the Times had accomplished. “We stood up for a value that is core to this company,” he said, and added, “I did not embrace this. It was given to us. I just chose not to walk away from it—I didn’t feel the need for a Pentagon Papers case.” He also said, “My job is simple. My job is to work with Janet Robinson and Bill Keller and all of our colleagues and turn this great company, this institution, into something that will flourish in a digital age. I’m going to be judged on that. I’m not going to be judged on this story or that.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., will be judged on his over-all stewardship of the New York Times Company, and, perhaps inevitably, he has now become a target, in much the way that Howell Raines was. On October 25th, Arianna Huffington wrote on her Web site, “More and more, it’s looking like the biggest problem at the Times is not a Judy Miller problem—it’s an Arthur Sulzberger problem.” A Times correspondent, faulting him for being rash in the way he had wholeheartedly supported Miller, said, “Arthur believes in the public trust. I respect him for it. But I keep thinking of Othello, who, looking back on his life, described himself this way: ‘One that loved not wisely but too well.’ ” An old friend said, “He’s not a very nuanced person.” Most people, the friend added, “learn to see things in grays as they get older,” but Arthur, Jr., still tends to see things “as black and white.” And he still, remarkably, seems drawn to corporate whimsies like the toy moose. “That’s a part of my personality, and sometimes I control it better than at other times,” he said. “This is a tough job and part of my defense—and part of me—is that I have a sense of humor. That probably explains my motorcycle. Sometimes it comes out in ways where I should show more seriousness. But I enjoy life and fun. During difficult times, a sense of humor is an important valve.”
Recent events have weighed on him, though. Steven Rattner, who meets Sulzberger at five-forty-five several mornings a week at a gym, said, “There were one or two days he said, ‘I can’t come tomorrow. Too much stress.’ ” Sulzberger has reason to feel that critics have overlooked the principled stand he took on behalf of the newsroom, and also the investment he continues to make in order to produce what arguably remains the world’s finest newspaper.
The Times, for instance, under his leadership, has accelerated its spending on the national edition, and has planned twenty-seven printing plants to be operating by 2006 (up from twenty-one), which would make possible later deadlines and quicker distribution of the paper. The national edition has allowed the Times to become one of the few American newspapers with consistent circulation gains; between 1998 and 2004, while the paper’s local circulation followed the industry trend and fell, nationwide daily circulation rose ten per cent, to 1.1 million readers. Since Times readers tend to be better educated and younger, and have higher incomes than the average newspaper reader, they appeal to advertisers, and the Times is today the only newspaper that generates more than a billion dollars a year in advertising.
At Sulzberger’s prodding, the Times in 1996 started NYTimes.com, the on-line edition of the newspaper. Today, it is the world’s most heavily trafficked newspaper Web site, drawing nearly twenty-two million visitors a month. (The C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, Donald Graham, who has had his disagreements with Sulzberger, says, “The most important thing he is doing to position the Times for the future is developing NYTimes.com into the biggest and most financially successful Web site developed by a media company.”) In 2002, the Times spent seventy-five million dollars to acquire approximately a one-sixth ownership share of the Boston Red Sox, Fenway Park, and the New England Sports Network, which carries the Red Sox games. The same year, the company spent a hundred million dollars to acquire half ownership of a digital cable network—now called Discovery Times—from Discovery Communications.
The center of the company, though, remains its newspapers, including the Boston Globe, for which Punch Sulzberger paid $1.1 billion in 1993—overpaid, some analysts said at the time. Last year, the Times Company generated just under three hundred million dollars of profits on $3.3 billion in revenues, and ninety-five per cent of its revenue came from print—the Times, the Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and fifteen regional papers, and their Internet offshoots. The Times was active on the corporate side as well. In 2000, it forged a real-estate partnership to build a new headquarters for the paper across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. After a competition, the Times chose the architect Renzo Piano and announced that it would move in 2007. The company had to raise more than five hundred million dollars to finance the building, which put a further squeeze on its resources. In late 2002, with the enthusiastic support of Raines, the Times, which, jointly with the Washington Post, owned the International Herald Tribune, announced that, for sixty-five million dollars, it would buy the Post’s fifty-per-cent stake. Donald Graham was angry; he felt that he had been muscled out of the partnership. Privately, some Post executives compared Sulzberger to the television mobster Tony Soprano. In a public statement, Graham, joined by the publisher, Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr., and the executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., said, “This decision was made with great reluctance and sadness—and little choice. . . . If the Post did not sell, the Times said it would start its own international edition anyway.”
In Sulzberger’s view, the Tribune “was a declining asset”—losing six to eight million dollars a year—and, “with the joint ownership it had, no one was going to take the steps necessary” for it to compete with the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and with the Financial Times. The Times seemed equally certain that the name of the paper should be changed to the International New York Times. “It was surely a strongly held view,” Michael Golden, a Sulzberger cousin who now serves as the Tribune’s publisher and is also vice-chairman of the Times Company, says. But the company had done little due diligence; Golden said that, months after the acquisition, market research revealed that the Times was perceived as an American paper and the Tribune as international. The company, Golden said, has added color pages, more marketing dollars, and about eighteen reporters to the European and Asian Tribune staff, and a Hong Kong office. Because of these investments, Janet Robinson, the C.E.O., says, “the losses are larger than they were”—about twenty-five million dollars this year, an executive who knows the numbers said. Graham so far seems to have got the best of the bargain.
According to Martin A. Nisenholtz, who is responsible for the company’s Internet holdings, online ventures have produced a profit in the past three years. In September, Nisenholtz launched TimesSelect, which charges $49.95 a year for nonsubscribers to gain access to Times columnists and the paper’s archive. There were complaints inside the paper; columnists like Dowd and Thomas Friedman, who had developed large, loyal readerships online, were said to be unhappy about the new arrangement. It is still too early to judge the financial success of this venture; in November, the company announced that it had recruited about a hundred and thirty-five thousand TimesSelect subscribers in its first two months. TimesSelect has been helped by a deal that Sulzberger negotiated in 1994 to reclaim something that the Times had sold: exclusive digital rights to the paper’s archive, which can still be retrieved from LexisNexis. Sulzberger said, “We had basically signed away our rights in perpetuity. . . . We found a window to get out of it, and we jumped through it. Could you imagine us not owning our morgue?”
Since March, the Times has acquired two Internet companies and shares in two others. The largest of these acquisitions was About.com, for which it paid $410 million. The site offers visitors the services of five hundred on-staff “guides” who will answer questions about many subjects. About.com is now the eleventh most visited Web site; in October, it attracted twenty-nine million visitors in the United States. (By contrast, Yahoo! had a hundred and two million.) Last quarter, the Times reported that About.com’s advertising revenues—about fifty million dollars this year—rose sixty-seven per cent over the same period a year before. “About was a hidden gem that people were not focussed on,” Nisenholtz says. But analysts say that About.com is not expected to earn a profit until 2007.

Today, many media experts believe that the Times’ greatest vulnerability is its concentration on newspapers. Unlike the Washington Post Company, which enjoys generous profits from investment in its Kaplan educationalservices division, or E. W. Scripps, which has lucrative cable investments, the Times has been “very risk-averse,” one former Times Company executive said. This executive believes that the company’s insularity comes, inevitably, from the venerable family that oversees the institution and that controls sixty per cent of the voting stock: Punch Sulzberger and his three sisters are the third generation of this family; the fourth generation consists of Arthur, Jr., Michael Golden, and eleven siblings and cousins. Golden sees this as a strength: “Arthur and I, for obvious reasons, can be direct without concern that someone will not like what we say and there will be ramifications for our careers. Using that constructively is valuable for the company.” To strengthen what they refer to as “the family glue,” the various generations meet twice a year and, when there is a crisis, Arthur, Jr., arranges family conference calls.
An investment banker who knows Sulzberger sees another side: “The virtue of a family-owned company is that it takes the long view. The risk is that there is no discipline to force them to operate efficiently. Family ownership can spur risk-taking, as it did when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. invested in satellite television in China or Fox News. Entrepreneurs take risks. The disadvantage comes when you have all that security and not the same drive. Arthur, to his credit, cares deeply about the journalism. But he lacks passion for the business side.” Sulzberger challenges the notion that the Times is not diversified: “We are a company committed to journalism. That is our core strength. That is our hedgehog. We are not in the education or cooking business. You are going to see us make journalism investments. And I include About.com as journalism. About is about information.”
The Times’ other efforts at diversification have not been impressive. Its modest broadcast stations enjoy robust profit margins but provide only a very small slice of the company’s revenue. As for the hundred-million-dollar investment in Discovery Times, one day when I was in Sulzberger’s office he switched on the television set in his bookcase. “Ah, there it is,” he said as a picture appeared. He watched for several seconds, said, “I have no idea what that show is,” clicked the TV off, and explained, “In and of itself, an investment in a cable station, if that was our only reason for doing this, would not be overarchingly compelling. It may be a business to have, but it wouldn’t be strategic.” What is strategic, he said, is “building a television core” into Times journalism, particularly as we move into “a broadband world” where NYTimes.com will supply video as well as text. He did not mention that the national audience for the channel is negligible, and that it is situated in the cable bleachers. One senior Times Company executive describes the investment this way: “No one watches it, and no one will watch it. Very few on the business side liked the deal. It was all Arthur.”

For much of Punch Sulzberger’s tenure as chairman, his trusted business partner was the corporate president, Walter Mattson, and he had a devoted friend in Sydney Gruson, an exnewsman with a fondness for collecting information and gossip, who was vice-chairman and deputy to the publisher. If newsroom morale was low, or a problem or an opportunity loomed, Gruson was there. Many people at the Times, together with some of Arthur, Jr.,’s friends outside the paper, believe that the newspaper’s recent miscues are reminders of the absence of such a confidant.
To help him manage the company and plan for the future, Arthur, Jr., relies on Janet Robinson, a former schoolteacher who joined the company in 1983 as an advertising account executive and was named C.E.O. and president in December, 2004. Sulzberger and Robinson constantly pop into each other’s office and exchange e-mails. “There’s an extremely strong partnership between us,” she says. “We make decisions together.”
Late one afternoon last month, Sulzberger and Robinson, who is fifty-five, sat side by side in a small conference room on the fourteenth floor of the Times Building to discuss the company. It is a comfortable room with views of midtown Manhattan, and on the walls are framed front pages of the Times, including a four-cent edition dated April 15, 1865, and bearing the headline “PRESIDENT LINCOLN SHOT BY AN ASSASSIN,” paintings by Sulzberger’s wife, Gail Gregg, who left journalism and has become a successful artist, and a photograph of Punch. A bookcase contains volumes by generations of Times writers but also books about exploration and the outdoors, including Ernest Shackleton’s “The Heart of the Antarctic” and Richard E. Byrd’s “Alone.”
Sulzberger disagreed with the notion that he is insulated from frank advice. “I think I’m surrounded by incredibly smart people who get the newsroom,” he said. “Janet, in fact, is a remarkable conduit for information from the newsroom for me. I take nothing away from my father and his wonderful tenure as publisher and chairman of this company. But I’ve got to find my own management style. It’s a different work environment, requiring less command and control—much more bottom up.”
“Can I just add one thing to that?” Robinson said. “One of the things Arthur gets great credit for internally is the fact that he’s extremely inclusive in regard to asking opinions from a variety of sources. If he only had one source, if it was only me, or our general counsel, or Bill Keller, it wouldn’t be Arthur. Arthur does his homework and seeks out other views.”
At least one Times executive, however, says that Robinson discourages open discussion, explaining that Sulzberger “seeks opinions but because of Janet Robinson’s style he doesn’t get any.” But Michael Golden believes that Robinson is a superb C.E.O.—“Her mental organization and her drive are dramatic”—and gives Sulzberger the business advice that he needs. The board member John Akers says that Arthur, Jr., like his father, is “smart enough to know what he is good at and what he is not good at.” The son, Akers says, is “very good at creating a collegial environment among the top people at the Times. He knows that he didn’t grow up in the business world, and Punch knew the same thing. They both got very good people to lead the business effort.”
Like members of the Sulzberger family, Janet Robinson talks persuasively about the “public trust” of the newspaper. But financial pressures on newsroom managers have probably never been so fierce. The Times Company has cut budgets, including seven hundred jobs at its various properties this year. Forty-five jobs were lost in the Times newsroom alone, although Keller says that it is now “the same size as five years ago.” But, while the Times, he says, has been treated more “gently” than others, including the Boston Globe, his editorial team is “looking hard” at how to do more for less—“in anticipation that the trend will continue.” At the same time, he worries that “we’re down to muscle.” No doubt, there would have been even deeper cuts had it not been for the profitable national edition.
There also seems to be a growing sense that the Times must unite around its publisher. In recent weeks, Keller and senior editors have begun to speak out in Sulzberger’s defense. Of the Miller case, Keller said, “Yes, Arthur was enthusiastically in favor of going to court. And so was I. In the much larger scheme of things, I’d much rather have a publisher whose first instinct is to stick up for a reporter rather than to drop into a defensive crouch and worry about his ‘fiduciary’ responsibilities. Yes, he has to worry about that stuff.” But, Keller continued, “the fact that his first instinct was ‘We have a reporter at risk’—that’s something we should be proud of.” And although much of the newsroom may be uneasy with Sulzberger’s leadership, his most important constituencies are the board and the family, and conversations with family members suggest that there is a united front. “The family rallies around Arthur in times like this,” his cousin Dan Cohen said.