Pinch Sulzberger

Derogatorily known as "Pinch", The New York Times Publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., achieved his lofty position the old fashioned way, he was born into the family that has controlled the Gray Lady since 1896.

Pinch was a long-haired, 1960s radical and an anti-war activist. He had been vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War. He was arrested more than once at protest rallies. He famously declared that in a confrontation between an American and a North Vietnamese soldier he'd want to see the American get shot. His own father, "Punch," who was then the Times' publisher, considered his son's words treasonous.

Sulzberger is part of a generation of reporters who understand their work in a fundamentally different way than reporters before them. For these reporters, the meaningful aspect of their work is the chance that it gives them to "make a difference" in the world. These reporters do not hold as their ideal the relatively modest goal of facilitating public debate. For these reporters, the goal is nothing less than bringing about progressive social change and Pinch has made a deliberate decision to make the Times a vehicle for social change.

In spite of his family's nepotism, Sulzberger ironically believed that the corporate culture was inbred and in need of more diversity -- more women, more minorities and more gays. Upon his ascendancy, Pinch took each of the gay reporters to lunch, asking them what it was like to be gay at the Times. These tête-à-têtes resulted in Sulzberger setting up a pro-gay newsroom at the Times. According to former ombudsman Dan Okrent, the Times had an unofficial but enforced policy of not referring to nor naming any studies that could be critical of gays or gay rights.

In his book, "Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism," William McGowan shows how Sulzberger's diversity campaign destroyed the Times as a newspaper, if not as a political force, leading to the non-reporting or misreporting of stories big and small.

Sulzberger's diversity agenda led to the massive journalism fraud perpetrated by Jayson Blair, the Times' journalist who got caught embellishing, exaggerating, and outright lying in print. Times' Executive Editor, Howell Raines, defending his paper to the Washington Post, said, "Frankly, no newspaper in the world is set up to monitor for cheats and fabricators." Raines was fired for his loyalty by Sulzberger.

Under the leadership of Sulzberger, the Times, never lets facts get in the way of its agenda and has become the propaganda arm of al Qaeda and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Recently Sulzberger's Times has danced around treason, with the release of a top secret National Security Agency (NSA) program, in December 2005. The disclosure of the NSA's electronic surveillance program was timed to promote the release of Time reporter, James Risen's book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations, "State of War" and to influence the Congressional vote on the extension of the Patriot Act.

This latest escapade is a violation of National Security laws and rules. Senator Mitch McConnell told Fox News Sunday, "We're already talking about this entirely too much out in public as a result of these leaks and the New York Times continuing to write about it - and it's endangering our efforts to make Americans more secure."

Michael Barone observed the Times didn't bother telling its readers that the electronic surveillance practice is far from new and is entirely legal. Instead, the unspoken subtext of the story was that this was likely an illegal and certainly a very scary invasion of Americans' rights.

Sulzberger's Times, the leading cheerleader for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson non-story, earnestly wished for the heads of Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney for leaking the name of Plame, a covert CIA operative. It was immaterial to the Times that Plame was neither covert nor an operative and many people in Washington knew that Plame worked as a weapons of mass destruction analyst at the CIA, including Plame's five year-old son, who told everyone within earshot that, "My daddy's famous, my mommy's a secret spy," while Plame, her lying husband, Joe Wilson and the twins waited to board their plane on the way to their winter vacation.

However, the Times and Sulzberger may now be hoist by their own petard. They screamed so loud and so often for prosecutions in the Plame affair that they now can't defend themselves in the NSA matter. Sulzberger is oddly quiet about his treasonous actions and has ignored requests from the Times' Public Editor, Byron Calame to explain his decision to release the NSA story.

Calame called the newspaper’s explanation of its decision to hold for over a year its major scoop on the National Security Agency’s domestic “woefully inadequate.”

He also charged Executive Editor Bill Keller and Sulzberger with “stonewalling” his attempts to get the readers more information, “despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.” He wrote that for the first time since he became public editor last year, those two men “have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making.”

Calame added that he had e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Keller on December 19th, and got no response. He also sent the same questions to Sulzberger Jr., with the same result.