THE SACKING OF SYDNEY SCHANBERG

...One may criticize anything, Times columnists are given to understand, except the Times itself...

...Rather than reassess the quality of its own journalism on Westway and half a dozen other matters Schanberg had raised during his four years on the column, Times management chose to dismiss a veteran who personifies its own standard of reporting "without fear or favor...

...As a New York City-oriented columnist, Schanberg was a precious anomaly at the Times, which, more than other papers, tends to treat the city beat as a sandbox for cub reporters or a pasture for burned-out cases: mistakes made in Brooklyn don't damage Times access to Very Important People or send tremors through the edifice of the Western Alliance...

...New York Times employees of every rank and station formed lines outside Sydney Schanberg's tenth-floor office for several days after his "New York" column was unceremoniously discontinued early last fall...

...Instead, many Times people were animated by disgust and respect: disgust with the way a 26-year Times veteran, who had risked his life for the paper in Cambodia in pursuit of his Pulitzer prize-winning stories, was being treated by management— and respect for the largeness of spirit and high standards of fairness that animate Schanberg's work...

...Haunted by the lessons of his heroic chronicling of the collapse of Pnom Penh's social order, he saw symptoms of such a collapse in the rapaciousness of New York City's real-estate developers and the lawlessness and growing arrogance of its elites...

...Schanberg's "unpardonable sin" wasn't that he didn't become a William Safire of the left, pointing his observations with worldly irony...

...Schanberg's left-ofcenter views only made the decision that much easier...

...rather, as Times company vice-chairman Sydney Gruson told him on the day Schanberg returned from vacation, he had once too often—in his final column, on Westway, in fact—dared to criticize 15 Times news coverage according to standards the paper claims to uphold...

...By the time a star reporter has achieved the socialization and seniority requisite for a column, he or she is fancied too preoccupied with affairs of state and "serious" matters to muck about in "local" affairs...

...They weren't all there in support of Schanberg's liberal-progressive positions on realestate speculation and city policy toward the victims, nor, they knew, were those positions by themselves the reason for his sacking...

...Schanberg broke that mold...

...His passion for the particular—Smith-Barney's unearned tax breaks and landlords' harassment of elderly tenants— reflected his experience with deepening urban injustice...