Gray Lady Down (26 page)

A year later, in February 2009, the
Times
gave Ayers another chance for self-rehabilitation in a
Times Magazine
Q&A conducted by Deborah Solomon, which ran under the headline “Radical Cheer.” The interview was pegged to a new book that Ayers had written with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, also a former Weatherman,
relating their “long struggle against racism and social injustice.” Lighthearted, even jokey in her questions, Solomon let Ayers get off a lot of glib one-liners even when the discussion turned to the subject of terrorism. Did he regret his “involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?” Solomon asked. Ayers replied, “Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.”

Another former radical who got kid-glove treatment was Kathy Boudin, who had escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse when it exploded, then went underground for more than a decade, joining up with members of the Black Liberation Army. In 1981, she and her husband, David Gilbert, and several other comrades committed an armed robbery on a Brinks payroll truck, killing one of the truck’s guards and two policemen. After a contentious trial, Boudin pleaded guilty to armed robbery and second-degree murder, and was given a sentence of twenty years to life.

Boudin was denied parole several times, but in 2003 her supporters—led by her father, Leonard Boudin, a civil liberties attorney and former Communist—mounted a campaign to win her freedom. They acted from a subtle script, acknowledging the seriousness of her crimes and the suffering of her victims’ families but emphasizing her exemplary behavior in prison. The
Times
kept the story of Boudin’s parole hearing in the news, in a manner calculated to help win her release. It accented the fact that she hadn’t pulled the trigger in the Brinks holdup, and made her out to be just shy of Mother Teresa in the good works she performed while incarcerated. The paper quoted supporters calling her “the perfect parolee,” and the former SDS president Todd Gitlin saying, “She represents the possibility for redemption.”

At the end of the parole coverage, there was a cutaway to Boudin’s son, Chesa, who at fourteen months had been left in the care of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while Boudin was in prison. Now twenty-two years old, he had gotten a phone call from his mother announcing the parole board’s decision to free her. “It’s quite a birthday present,” he told the
Times
reporters Lydia
Polgreen and James McKinley, who noted that he had recently graduated from Yale and been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. He quickly added that he and his mother were looking forward to beginning “the healing process” with the families of the men killed in 1981, although he did not mention the victims by name. Then he said, with incredible presumption and lack of self-awareness, “I also was a victim of that crime. I know how important it was for me to forgive.”

Shortly after Kathy Boudin’s release, the
Times
ran a front-page profile of Chesa, headlined “From a Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges.” Chesa was part of the “radical aristocracy,” explained Jodi Wilgoren, and had overcome “striking challenges, such as epilepsy, dyslexia and temper tantrums.” His parents missed his “Phi Beta Kappa award, high school graduation, Little League games” because they were in prison. Even so, he wanted to walk in their footsteps: “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I’m dedicated to the same thing.”

Another
enfant radical
who got doting treatment is Ivy Meeropol, a granddaughter of the Rosenbergs who produced an HBO documentary in 2004 called
Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story.
In his profile of Meeropol, Sam Roberts noted that the film “refuses to issue a definitive judgment about the legal guilt or innocence of the accused. Instead, it generally gives the Rosenbergs the benefit of the doubt, by dwelling on their unalloyed idealism.” But Roberts was not so hesitant to whitewash the Rosenbergs. He bashed the U.S. government’s case against them, even while acknowledging that Julius Rosenberg, as well as his brother-in-law David Greenglass, were “atom spies.” The government “framed a guilty man,” Roberts oddly declared. “It also cynically prosecuted Ethel on flimsy evidence to bludgeon the couple into confessing and implicating other Soviet agents.”

Roberts also offered lots of space for Meeropol’s emotional defense of her grandparents, rendered with historical dubious-ness. “If he [Julius] was trying to shore up the Soviet Union to ensure the United States wasn’t the only superpower who held the potentially devastating secret,” Meeropol told Roberts, “then
they—and I say they because she was not the naïve housewife and mother, she would have known and believed in it too—they probably believed they were saving humanity from the destructive force of a single American superpower, and their fears have come true. The notion that if you criticize your government you’re a traitor is also very similar.”

Part of the late 1970s Sectional Revolution, in which the
Times
became a multisection publication bulging with soft news and lifestyle journalism, was a greater use of market research and polling of target constituencies, especially in the area of cultural coverage. The research explained that the
Times
needed to “reach out to a new generation, people whose attention spans were shorter,” as Warren Hoge, the assistant managing editor, told NPR. It needed to replace its older readers with a new generation, one that was educated but “aliterate,” meaning they did not read much. “We have to grab young readers by the lapels because they are less interested in reading,” Hoge said.

Over time, this transformation crowded out coverage of high culture in favor of an oddball, wink-and-nod popular culture. “The entire social and moral compass of the paper,” as the former
Times
art critic Hilton Kramer later said, was altered to conform to a liberal ethos infused with “the emancipatory ideologies of the 1960’s” and drawing no distinction between “media-induced notoriety and significant issues of public life.” The
Times
took on more and more lightness of being. It became preoccupied with pop-culture trivia and
über
urban trends, reported on with moral relativism and without intellectual rigor.

The change was met by disaffection and derision within the paper’s newsroom. Grace Gluek, who ran the culture desk for a while as replacement editor, was one of the disaffected, and famously once asked, “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this job?” Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the
Daily News,
said the new cultural pages reminded him of a middle-aged woman learning how to disco: “She put on a miniskirt and her varicose
veins are showing.” Gerry Gold, a staff reporter, commented, “We do all these pieces on pop icons as if they are important
artistes.
In fact they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them.”

When the
Times
launched a new Sunday section called Styles of the Times on May 3, 1992, it was geared to the sensibility of the MTV generation and New York’s increasingly visible and vocal gay community. The section carried stories on gay rodeos and on a store catering to skinheads and dominatrices, and odes to talents like Billy Idol and trends like cyberpunk. Styles raised eyebrows throughout the newspaper industry with its first issue, featuring a cover story on “The Arm Fetish,” which according to Tifft and Jones presented a muscular bare arm as a recognizable image for a specific form of sexual activity in the gay community. The story was a public embarrassment for Sulzberger Sr., at whose seventieth birthday party Abe Rosenthal, retired from editing the paper but still writing an op-ed column, said, “I knew we were in a new age when I saw the first edition of Styles of the Times. Not only did it give New York the finger, it gave it the whole arm.”

Facing complaints about Styles from longstanding readers, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sometimes responded sympathetically. To one college professor he said, “Styles isn’t intended for you. You’re too old. It’s for different readers, for those between 30 and 40 years old.” Then he added, “Maybe I’m getting too old for it too.” But at other times he seemed to revel in upsetting the old guard. The real problem with Styles, however, was that it made no money for the
Times,
so after two years it was absorbed back into the Metro section.

Lifestyle journalism and soft news got a big boost under the two-year tenure of Howell Raines (2001-2003), whose obsession with popular culture earned his regime the sobriquet “charge of the lite brigade.” When he took over, Raines wrote a piece for the
Atlantic Monthly
(published only after his dismissal over the Jayson Blair scandal) in which he expatiated on the role that popular culture had to play at the
Times.

The gravitas of the paper has suffered as a result of key appointments in the area of cultural news. One of them was the promotion of Sam Sifton from editor of the Dining section to cultural news editor in 2005. His intellectual pedigree was not in doubt: son of Elisabeth Sifton, a major figure in New York’s publishing community; grandson of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian. But his obsession with pop-culture trivia came across full force in a 2007 online “Talk to the Newsroom” Q&A with readers, where he promised more video game reviews—a promise he certainly kept. In the same forum the previous year, he defended his paper’s coverage of Hollywood celebrities, and when a reader asked “Do you party? Do you rock and roll?” Sifton answered in a tone of desperate hipness by quoting Young Jeezy: “E’rybody know I rep these streets faithfully.”

But the problem at the
Times
was greater than the taste of the editors it hired. As the current editor Bill Keller has said, the
Times
puts out a daily newspaper “plus about 15 weekly magazines,” meaning the various freestanding sections in the paper. These fiefdoms are more and more devoted to lifestyle and less to news per se.

With a revived Style section appearing on both Sunday and Thursday, plus Home and Arts sections, and magazine sections on fashion and design, soft news and lifestyle have come to define the paper as much or more than hard-news coverage. In a somewhat
humorous—and devastating—
New Republic
article of April 2006, about the
Times’
fascination with “lifestyle porn,” Michelle Cottle quoted Trip Gabriel, then editor of both Style sections, as saying that most of Thursday Styles “falls under the general category of coverage about appearance and image and what one sees looking in the mirror.... We are another department of basically consumerist pursuits—about the kinds of things that give people pleasure.” Cottle took it from there: “On any given Thursday, Styles fans are treated to a mélange of articles examining the hottest trends in looking good—everything from virtual personal trainers to ayurvedic massage to butt implants—with a whole lot of couture coverage in between. The front page features two or three longer pieces, including a photo-laden fashion spread and a nonshoppingrelated ‘lifestyle’ piece on topics like parenting or online dating.”

One feature of Styles that seems particularly pointless is the “Critical Shopper,” where a retail experience, usually high-end, is reviewed as if it were a movie, a play or a museum exhibit. In one review, Alex Kuscinski compared the silkiness of a $30,000 mink coat to the silkiness of her pet dachshund, the dog coming up short against a material “so otherworldly I experienced the bizarre sensation of having never touched such material before.” Like the paper’s arts and media criticism, these shopping reviews can also have a political edge, though often a vapid one. Mike Albo made a foray into a hipster chotchke store in Brooklyn called Fred Flare in 2008, and wrote that the place was full of “happy, cheap, eclectic thingies” and an “absurdly happy staff,” who were “like human text messages from Smurfland.” Albo focused on a handmade teddy bear that made his “little blackened, coal-size heart grow and become warm and fuzzy.” He hadn’t realized how starved for light-heartedness he was, but it made sense, he said: “If you feel as if you have been emotionally, professionally and politically run over by a tank for the last, say, eight years, then the well-selected, fun merchandise and carbonated energy of Fred Flare will bring a smile on your cautious, crabby face.”