Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond Read Free Book Online

John B. Oakes—rendered three separate verdicts. The editorial admonished Bush because he had “failed to speak out” against repression in China, while Semple thought “Bush had done himself credit” in China. Oakes found the administration “floundering” on all fronts.
    February 28 was a routine day at the
Times.
Editors assigned stories, reporters covered events, printers produced a press run of just over one million copies, trucks and route men (and women) delivered the papers to homes, apartments, hotels, newsstands, coffee shops, convenience stores, and street vending boxes in every state in the union. There was nothing in the news columns to suggest anything about these ten thousand men and women who helped put out the paper that Tuesday, beyond the bylines on the stories. The
Times
, for all its thoroughness—andpride of product—hardly ever dwelled on its own processes. Of course, the entity known as “The
Times
” did speak on the editorial page (sometimes in several voices, as in the case of the president’s Asian trip). A diligent reader could also find a small window into the institutional ways of the
Times
by looking for two discreet boxes placed just above the Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue ads on page three. There, under the standing head “Corrections,” the
Times
redressed its errors. Thus, in the paper of March 1, readers learned that a picture caption in the
Times
the day before had misidentified the people shown celebrating the opening of the new Presbyterian Hospital building. The
Times
then gave the correct order of appearance. While the names were of little use without the picture, the paper nevertheless was telling its readers that accuracy counts at the
New York Times
, right down to the identifications of partygoers in group photos.
    The
Times’
“Corrections” tended to run daily. A second box, called “Editors’ Note,” appeared less frequently. In the editions dated March 1, next to the box correcting the hospital caption, the
Times
undertook a more elaborate critique of its journalism. In the
Times
of January 10, the Note reminded any readers who didn’t keep the information at their fingertips, the paper had reported that Eduard Nakhamkin, an art dealer, was trying to “monopolize” the representation of Soviet artists in the United States. According to the “Editors’ Note,” “the article should have reported Mr. Nakhamkin’s view … that Soviet artists are still free to choose other representatives.” Again, an instruction about the paper: Fairness and balance—getting quotes from the story’s subjects—are required in
Times
journalism.
    The
Times
seldom had anything more to say about its own processes. If readers were somehow allowed inside the paper on a typical workday, this is what they would have learned, behind the front page.
9:00 A.M.
    This Tuesday, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher and chairman of the
Times
, had more immediate concerns than Tower’s drinking habits, the rioting in Caracas, and the fate of dissidents in China. Sulzberger was worried about what was happening outside his own door in a city exhibiting many signs of civic collapse. The Times Building occupied the middle of the block of West 43rd Street, approximately halfway between Broadway—the now seedy “crossroads of the world”—and Eighth Avenue,with its twenty-five-cent peep show parlors and hole-in-the-wall theaters offering live sex performances. Sulzberger’s father and his grandfather had worked from the same fourteenth-floor offices at the
Times.
But the owner’s suite was hardly insulated from the increasing street sleaze below. Sulzberger had on his desk the final draft of a letter he was sending to Edward I. Koch, the then mayor of New York, expressing “gave concern” over a series of “twenty-three robberies and/or assaults” on
Times
employees in the most recent fourteen-month period. “The situation worsened last week when one of our electricians was