The New York Times

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The New York Times

Few family institutions have endured for more than a century and maintained themselves at as high a level of quality as has the New York Times. While other newspapers were wallowing in the muck of the day's news in order to gain an audience, the Times was establishing high standards for journalism and creating for itself an audience of movers and shakers in governments all over the globe. If people wanted to know what their leaders were thinking, they turned to the New York Times.

When Adolph Ochs purchased the New-York Daily Times (as it was originally named when founded in 1851) on August 13, 1896, he promised to produce a newspaper without fear or favor, a newspaper of record, one that published, as the motto on page one has said since February 10, 1897, "All the News That's Fit to Print." So while the Times leads all newspapers with more than sixty-five Pulitzer prizes, it entered the 21st century still owned by the descendants of Adolph Ochs, which is one of the reasons it has maintained itself so well. The Times won its first Pulitzer prize in 1918 for public service. The Pulitzer records say that the Times won the award "for its public service in publishing in full so many official reports, documents and speeches by European statesmen relating to the progress and conduct of the war." Fifty-four years later the Times would win another Pulitzer prize for publishing, in effect, official reports and documents relating to a war, but that Pulitzer would be for the publication of the "Pentagon Papers" and the Times had to go to the Supreme Court to maintain its right to publish.

The early New York Times avoided the yellow journalism of its day and invested heavily not just in reporting on the federal government, but also on international news. It was so thorough, such a paper of record, that one Department of Army official reportedly said that the Times was "too big to read, too important not to." And a former U.S. Navy radioman recalls delivering the daily secret intelligence report and having one officer always say: "Ah, the front page of the New York Times. " The Times, for example, carried a story in 1961 that the United States was planning to invade Cuba. Much to the dismay of reporters and editors, the publisher at the time ordered that the story be toned down so as not to give away government secrets. The story was toned down, the invasion was a failure, and President John Kennedy later said he wished the Times had published the entire story so he might have canceled the invasion and avoided embarrassment. Although it was not the last time that the Times took its cue from Washington, it did signal a shift in how the newspaper responded to government pressure.

The paper's big break was the publication of the "Pentagon Papers," but there were indications of the increasing depth of the Times ' reporting before that. One such signal came in 1966 when a Times reporter, Harrison Salisbury, who had won a Pulitzer prize in 1955 for his reporting on the Soviet Union, managed to report on the Vietnam War from behind the North Vietnamese lines. Salisbury reported, among other things, that U.S. bombs were hitting civilian targets, which until then had not been made clear by the U.S. government. Until then, most Americans had been led to believe that military targets were bearing the brunt of U.S. bombs.

The "Pentagon Papers" were another matter, and when the Times began publishing a series on the papers in 1971, few realized what a tremendous step it was for the paper as well as for the practice of journalism. A government-sponsored secret account of the Vietnam War, the papers showed that many of the war's public supporters had private doubts about the involvement of U.S. troops. And while the papers showed the administration of President Lyndon Johnson in a bad light, the incumbent president, Richard Nixon, paranoid as he was about leaks in his own administration, ordered the Justice Department to seek an injunction keeping the Times from publishing more of the "Pentagon Papers." Thus, for the first time in the history of the Republic did agents of the federal government attempt prior restraint, which constitutionally they are not allowed to do. The Times, joined by the Washington Post, needed to go to the Supreme Court to preserve the right to publish without censorship.

While winning the right to publish the "Pentagon Papers" was a historic legal victory, the Times has won other legal decisions that have strengthened the practice of journalism. Prominent among those was a case that became known as Times vs. Sullivan, also played out in the Supreme Court. This case was triggered when the Times published an advertisement that contained fourteen factual errors about public officials and police in Montgomery, Alabama. The Times lost the case in Alabama state court and appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that because the people mentioned in the advertisement were public officials, they would have to prove that the advertisement was published with a reckless disregard for the truth or with knowledge that it contained false statements. By establishing such a high standard for defamation of public officials, the court strengthened the atmosphere for robust debate on public matters necessary to democratic self-government. Thus the Times, because it forced the issue to the Supreme Court, helped establish a federal defamation standard, which created consistent ground rules for publications, particularly those that are distributed in thousands of different jurisdictions.

Not all of the gravitas of the Times comes in the news sections. The Times established, for example, a book review section that eventually became a Sunday magazine. During World War II, a list of best sellers was added. In the 1980s, one author, feeling slighted because his novel was not listed when he felt it should have been, sued the Times for $3 million, but lost in state court and could not get the decision reversed in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Around the same time as the arrival of the list of best-selling books, the Times began publishing a crossword puzzle, one that would become so challenging that people would brag that they did it with a pen instead of a pencil. However, the newspaper has resisted publishing editorial cartoons or comics. It uses the honorifics "Mr." and "Mrs.," whereas many newspapers use a person's surname on second reference, and the Times was slow to adopt "Ms." because the publisher didn't want it.

Despite the Times' high standards, it has been subject to the same economic problems that other businesses endured, and in the 1970s, under the leadership of one of Adolph Ochs' grandsons, the paper made major changes so it could survive. In fact, it advertised itself as " The New New York Times. " The paper went from two sections to four, with some of those sections changing daily and thus providing readers with different magazines within the newspaper. Of course, the different sections were aimed at attracting specific advertisers and thus had themes such as food and the home and the arts and weekend entertainment. One of the successful sections was named "Science Times," which attracted profitable computer advertising, leading the Times to create a weekly computer section called "Circuits." Special slick Sunday magazines devoted to fashion or travel also appeared regularly and helped boost the paper's bottom line. During these changes, the reporting became better and the topics diversified as the Times went from a paper of record focusing only on policy to one that focused on policy and people. Some have said when the Times covers a topic, it's sociology, not journalism—an indication of the depth and breadth of many of its stories.

Although not perfect, the Times has tried to be a dignified newspaper, befitting Adolph Ochs' motto. When in the 1950s it ran a photograph of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe kissing open mouthed the picture editor was moved out of his job, although he remained on the payroll. When the then vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, a former governor of New York, was photographed raising his middle finger to a group of protesters, the Times did not publish the photo and merely said: "After protesters showed they were able to drown out his speech, Mr. Rockefeller then gestured three times with his finger." Another time, a reporter turned in a story quoting someone as saying "chicken shit" and the desk changed it to "barnyard epithet."

But the paper could be playful. When Latin was dropped as a public school course, it ran an editorial with this headline: "Quatenus Mortua Lingua Latina?" The accompanying 105-word editorial was written in Latin with no accompanying translation. In fact, one might say that the Times lives in the past and never changes. When in 1976 it adopted a six-column format, bringing it in line with the format of most newspapers, the Times ' story concluded with this paragraph: "The Times used a six-column format when the newspaper first appeared on Sept. 18, 1851." In other words, the more the Times changed, the more the Times stayed the same.

But to simplify things that much would be a misreading of this newspaper. While it has been slow to change, it has also been a journalistic leader and often able to do things other newspapers could not. In that regard, the Times is an institution unlike any other in the United States.

—R. Thomas Berner