Behind the 'Times'

...And unfortunately for the Times, as Talese reminds us, such deals have occasionally been made—not in the obvious ways, but in the subtler, more devious compromises men make with their consciences when they find themselves handling sensitive news...

...It threads through the narrative with touches of grandeur and pathos, moving from his first encounter with Margaret Truman...

...When the Times chooses to examine a piece of news in depth, starting its report on page 1 and continuing with an entire page inside, the subject takes on unpredictable importance within a few hours...

...Yet the Times seems to have more critics than ever...

...Language is used more freely than the late Adolph Ochs could ever have dreamed possible...

...Television network executives leap on their public affairs people, demanding to know why a documentary on the subject is not in the works...

...Judged it will be, and with an inevitable harshness...

...The paper also concerns itself somewhat less now with foreign news and more with "cultural" news...

...In a hundred other newspaper offices editors order local versions of the same story...

...Its problem is that the very people who must read the paper to be the kind of people they are, resent having to depend almost completely on a single source of information and opinion...

...Before the article, he and his people had been scratching for publicity...

...The story of managing editor Clifton Daniel is an example...

...There are some 1,700 daily newspapers in the country, but only one New York Times...

...News magazines concoct cover treatments...

...But the newspaper's lofty eminence, the monopoly it enjoys by virtue of its size and wealth and, above all, the talented if occasionally bemused men who devote their lives to it, have made the Times vulnerable...

...her hair, her shoes, her wonderful complexion, never suggested in her photographs, and the dark blue Fontana dress with the plunging neckline, he not resisting the temptation of looking downward and being impressed with what he saw") to the horrendous day when he learned that James Reston had consolidated his domination over the Times once and for all ("Daniel turned pale and swallowed his drink...

...The Sunday Magazine has, in the past several years, emerged as the most influential weekly in the country...

...Nothing is, of course...

...For a while, Time and perhaps Newsweek were such journals...

...And all because of the decision on 43rd Street one day to take the welfare militants seriously...

...This is true even though the Times has changed far more radically in recent years than its austere typography might suggest...

...There are fewer taboos, fewer circumventions of the news than in less eminent publications...

...In every culture, no doubt, there is some unique periodical which important people assume other important people also read...

...But in no other newspaper is so much at stake...

...Does all this matter...

...After it, he was besieged by newspaper interviewers, by requests for national television appearances, and by invitations to participate in panel discussions...

...We are fascinated by the Times because we cannot do without it, from the President of the United States to an upstate newspaper editor, from the embassies in Washington to the embattled campuses around the country, from the sds members who excoriate it as the organ of the Establishment to the college administrators who hope to find in it some solution to their present ordeals...

...Is it really vital to know the people behind the prestigious by-lines, inside the dignified masthead on the editorial page, covering the events, editing the copy, deciding what goes on the front page...

...in another period it was the New Yorker...

...What might appear at first glance to be a frivolous book is in fact a serious and important account of one of the few genuinely powerful institutions in our society...

...lurid subjects are sometimes covered with a lipsmacking detail that might have made Ochs hesitate before reiterating his claim that what in other papers is sex, becomes sociology in the Times...

...Gay Talese is quite right to place his emphasis upon all this when he describes the kingdom that is the Times...

...It is as if some staffer who knew everything unfit to print about his bosses were sitting over a drink in a midtown bar, measuring out anecdotes with a liberal hand, one incident reminding him of another, a name mentioned casually at one moment picked up the next and limned from babyhood to eminence...

...There are surely criticisms to be made, but they are meaningless without an understanding of the private worlds of individual reporters, editors, and publishers and of how these worlds interact...

...Most critics of the American press do not know what they are talking about, because they have not bothered to study their subject...

...Yet even this has a peculiar charm...

...The answer, quite truthfully, is yes...

...All newspaper editors know this is a common assumption among readers...

...The best talent is no longer found writing from Washington and distant capitals...

...George Wiley, head of the National Welfare Rights Organization, told a conference last month at Syracuse University what a single depth piece in the Times had done for his movement...

...For the Times wields a power over public opinion and public figures that no other newspaper, no television network, no individual except the President himself, can possibly match...

...Reviewed by DAVID BERNSTEIN Editor, the Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" Gay Talese, who used to be a newspaperman himself, has written a booklength feature about the New York Times that is the ultimate inside story...

...There it is every day, with all its pounds of newsprint, visible simultaneously on nearly a million coffee tables and office desks...

...His book is long, often lyrical, sometimes disjointed, with the faintest touch of voyeurism and a seasoning of mischief...

...Each one sees in the news story that matters to him something other than an effort to give the facts and the background...

...It is assumed that every story reflects a policy, or is the product of deals with presidents, governors, mayors, corporation officials, civil rights leaders, and God knows who else, about what should be covered or said...

...If they read nothing else, they read the Times...

...Now when his pickets moved into action, the camera crews follow...

...Cabinet members meet with their information assistants, and the White House staff dining room is abuzz...

...Although The Kingdom and the Power apparently grew out of a magazine article Talese wrote several years ago, the marks of haste and repetition abound in the final product...

...Today, unquestionably, the cognoscenti have to read—or at least skim—the Times Magazine to avoid public humiliation...

...Never in the history of modern American journalism has it been truer that nothing is news until the Times prints it...

...In past years, Elmer Davis and Meyer Berger each did an authorized history of the same paper...

...For decades people have been saying that it is not as good as it used to be...

...While newspapers are notoriously reticent about themselves, everybody who worked for the Times seems to have talked to him with awesome candor...

...It is read by Neiman Marcus buyers for the fashion ads, by Marine Midland vice presidents for the financial news the Wall Street Journal might have missed, by young executives-on-the-make, retirees rummaging through the obituaries, housewives grooming their minds for a League of Women Voters meeting, writers, artists, producers, publicists—anyone who matters or thinks he does...

...An interview with Groucho Marx is likely to be written more shrewdly than the dispatch by an old Quai d'Orsay hand reporting the departure of de Gaulle from the Presidency of France...

...Talese's effort reads more like a Who's Who in the Zoo, and has all the fascination of such accounts for other members of the animal kingdom...

...Nor is this enormous influence limited to the news sections...