Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times, by Edwin Diamond
Villard, 424pp., $23
New York magazine media critic Edwin Diamond’s “Behind the Times” is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) inside account of how America’s “paper of record” has tried to become more user-friendly. In it Diamond shows how the introduction of lifestyle-oriented sections, the proliferation of opinion columns, the use of color and the emphasis on upbeat, soft news has culminated in a “new” New York Times that resembles the Gray Lady of old in little more than name. Today’s Times, Diamond argues, is often more driven by marketing research and audience surveys than by the mandates of hard news. If Diamond is correct and the “times are a’ changing” (a phrase he actually uses), things don’t look good for the future of serious newspaper journalism.
The transformation of the world’s most influential news organization is a fascinating and important story; unfortunately, Diamond only rarely emerges from the thicket of Times arcana to draw larger cultural conclusions from the journalistic trends he so ably chronicles. Instead, he takes his mission of telling an “inside” story very seriously, providing a mother lode of fun facts. Thus we learn that as publisher, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger employed the nom de plume “A. Sock” when venting displeasure in his letters to the editor; that lop editors dine at exclusive eateries such as 0so and the Century Club, while less important staffers favor a restaurant in the faded Edison Hotel; that the Arts and Leisure staff once requested a computer device that would hide their stories from then executive editor A. M. Rosenthal; that former restaurant critic Bryan Miller ran up expenses of $125,000 per year. So many trees, so little forest.
Take the Miller factoid, for example. For the money it took just to feed Miller, the Times could have maintained a correspondent and bureau in Africa, something about which, to his credit, Miller felt guilty. Don’t worry, his editor assured him, “we get a helluva lot more bang for the buck out of the food column” — an exchange Diamond follows up with a funny anecdote about Miller’s elaborate incognito quest to write about the restaurant Bellini, since it did not want a Times review and had already once refused to serve him. It’s a great tale of a crack reporter determined to get the story, but Diamond rarely steps back to ask what seems to me the obvious question: What kinds of news isn’t being reported because of the Times‘ culinary obsession? Surely topics with less “bang for the buck” are being ignored so the world will know that Bellini has mediocre food, but we don’t find out what they are.
Perhaps faulting “Behind the Times” for its lack of media analysis is unfair, since the book aspires to the genre of narrative nonfiction, and this criticism isn’t meant to imply that the effort is a failure. A long chapter on the increased space devoted to opinion — the 1990s sports section carried more commentary than appeared in the entire 1950s-era paper — is excellent, as it explains how commentary pieces possess the dual virtue of being cost-effective and “manageable,” and therefore more likely to be an antidote to grim news. In short, opinion journalism is good for business.
In a particularly interesting section, Diamond examines the Times’ much-criticized reporting on the AIDS epidemic under A. M. Rosenthal. After considering all the angles, Diamond concludes that although a number of factors — the perception by junior editors that Rosenthal was homophobic, the emphasis on upbeat stories — may have slowed initial coverage, the story eventually got the attention it deserved. When Diamond actually stops and thinks about his research, the results are insightful and engaging.
Despite the tremendous amount of information here, the media junkie won’t find much new, and the general reader may be overwhelmed by the details. Diamond quotes columnist Anna Quindlen as saying, “We want you to pick up the paper every day and think of wonderful Oz; we don’t want you to peek behind the screen and see actual men and women involved.” While Diamond does an excellent job of describing what goes on behind that curtain, I kept on hoping he would tell us why we are in Oz to begin with.