Misreading the New York Times: there is plenty to criticize about America's newspaper of record. So why do conservatives make up reasons that don't exist?

• Author: Sleeper, Jim
• Position: Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America - Book review

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America

by William McGowan

Encounter Books, 276 pp.

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American newspapers began dying years ago, not because of the sins of journalists but because of seismic shifts in reader demographics, technology, and patterns of ownership that all but displaced the great press lords and family trusts. Even when the latter still run newspapers (the Sulzbergers' New York Times, the Grahams' Washington Post, the Murdochs' Wall Street Journal), they've internalized the bureaucratic bottom-line mindset of the new media conglomerates that bought out the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times and the Bancrofts of the WSJ.

With little concern for journalism as a civic craft, the new owners are transforming what used to be known as "the public" into an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of consumer audiences, assembled on whatever ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist pretexts might draw eyeballs and, with them, advertisers. As new publishers and editors dumb the news down or tart it up in pursuit of maximum profit, they may just be making their newspapers deserve to die the deaths they were already dying. What, then, should be the public obligations of today's news organizations? And can media conglomerates be induced to care about them? Journalist William McGowan claims to have thought deeply about these questions, so I went looking for answers in his recent book, Gray Lady Down.

But instead of walking us through the near-cataclysmic upheavals that have compromised the Times and, by implication, other papers, McGowan argues that the most destructive force in American journalism is the moralistic worldview of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger dr. According to McGowan, Sulzberger has debased the paper's high standards by trying to propagate the views of a politically correct, elitist subculture that has lost touch with "the American people" as well as with market imperatives. McGowan acknowledges that times are tough for all newspapers, and that some of Sulzberger's business moves failed not because they were ideologically motivated but because they were dumb. In his telling, however, the Times is failing mainly because Sulzberger feels driven to make the newspaper's profit seeking compatible with his peculiarly liberal, rich, preppie, Manhattanite, and slightly guilt-ridden moralism.

McGowan isn't always wrong to charge that Sulzberger's biases have compromised the Times...