One of the most interesting magazines in this media-driven cityis available to a small but select readership, employees of the NewYork Times. For 45 years, beginning as a mimeographed sheet, TimesTalk has recorded the lives, promotions, retirements and deaths ofthe men and women of the good gray lady of West 43rd Street.
When I was there, Times Talk specialized in reporters' accountsof "How I got that story," from the 1950s tale of finding anofficially "dead" Cuban rebel named Fidel Castro in the mountains,to discovering a leading member of the American Nazi Party and theKu Klux Klan was, in fact, Jewish.
The ones I remember best were by two reporters covering theworld before my time. The great Homer Bigart recounted his effortsto meet an African king fighting colonialism, a monarch who ralliedgreat crowds with a rather mysterious fellow at his side wearing atiger skin."Who's that?" asked Bigart. Someone said: "He is a veryimportant man. He is the stringer for The New York Times."The second one was by Paul Hoffman, a reporter who seemed tospeak all languages and know all countries. He lazily told the taleof lying on a bed in the middle of the hottest of Asian dayswatching a minimally efficient hotel air conditioner slice up smalllizards and eject the slices until each of the reptiles wasreassembled at his feet.Those were the days. Now air conditioners are better andjournalism has become too important to be left to journalists. Anew editor of Times Talk, Eden Ross Lipson, has turned the journalinto a slicker product that deals with the professional and ethicalissues of the information age. The current issue, for example,includes an interesting conversation between Times' editorsdiscussing coverage of President Clinton's "private" life under theheadline "School for Scandal."The participants included Gail Collins of the editorial board,National Editor Dean Baquet, Washington Editor Jill Abramson, andMartin Nisenholtz and Bernard Gwertzman, the men who directelectronic coverage and the paper's Web site.Their first conclusion would probably shock many readers and alot of reporters, too: The Times gave too little rather than twomuch coverage of President Clinton's adventures with women over theyears. Said Baquet: "I would argue that the mainstream press shouldhave done more with (the Gennifer Flowers story) back in 1992."His point, of course, was that the great and good papers playeddown Flowers' allegations of sex with the candidate because she waspaid to tell the story in supermarket tabloids and . . . well, itwas just so dirty. But there seemed to be no doubt among theseTimes men and women that the presidency and the nation might havebeen better served if the big-time press investigated the chargesbefore Clinton was elected rather than after he was in office andother women began to appear with crude but similar accounts.Remember, these are the professional descendants of the men whoconcluded, as did President John F. Kennedy, that the United Stateswould have been better off if the Times had published what it knewabout the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 before that fiasco ratherthan later -- because publication would almost certainly haveprevented the national humiliation on Cuban beaches.They all agreed, too, that if the Internet had existed then,six years ago, the press would have investigated much further, iffor no other reason than now there are more people who callthemselves press. You don't have to be the editor of the New YorkTimes to figure out what that means: If you yearn to be a publicfigure, forget privacy; every detail of your life will becomepublic property -- even in the old gray lady.At the end of the conversation, Abramson said this:"What fundamentally bothers me about this story, though it'sbeen great for business, is the conventional wisdom -- why thepublic hates the story and hates us. I think the public image isthat we were thrilled to do stories about the president's sex life.And that we will ever continue to be thrilled and titillated . . ."That's not true, she said, and I know she's right. We feel thepresident took us down with him -- and we don't know what to doabout it. Even at the best papers, sleaze is a new beat. You don'tlike that? Neither do we, but if we ignore it, next time you willhold us in contempt for covering it up.Universal Press Syndicate
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