An Inside Look at How NYT's Ownership Meddled with Coverage to Push Their Pet Projects

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http://admin.alternet.org/media/inside-look-how-nyts-ownership-meddled-coverage-push-their-pet-projects?page=0%2C0&akid=10941.187861.56E69D&rd=1&src=newsletter897375&t=13

An Inside Look at How NYT's Ownership Meddled with Coverage to Push Their Pet Projects
Hard evidence from one of America's leading media properties of owner interference and obedience by editors.
September 15, 2013 |

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A study by Daniel Chomsky, a political scientist at Temple University (and nephew of linguist and political scholar Noam Chomsky), sheds some light on how ownership can interfere in media coverage to pursue their own interests, wealth and social status. Chomsky looked at memos written by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who served as the publisher of the New York Times between 1935 and 1961, to the paper's managing editor, Turner Catledge. Focusing on a six-year period starting in 1956, Chomsky examined hundreds of “blue notes”—memos Sulzberger sent to Catledge mostly on blue paper—to see how they impacted news decisions. The file Chomsky studied contained 415 of these blue notes, at a rate of about 60 a year. Although the notes are not the only way Sulzberger communicated to Times staff, they provide tangible evidence of editorial intervention. Catledge would frequently internalize Sulzberger’s complaints, and then relay them to reporters as coming from “a reader.”
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Chomsky categorizes 38% (156) of Sulzberger’s memos as containing some sort of suggestion. He finds that while many of these suggestions received no written response from Catledge, they often resulted in changes in the paper. For example, in December of 1956, Sulzberger asked for coverage of “shocking” Egyptian treatment of French and British soldiers. This sentiment was then reflected in the news coverage of the paper. Chomsky estimates that of 136 suggestions meant to directly appear in news stories, at least 108, 79%, ended up being directly addressed in the paper.

Catledge described his views on the impact of a media outlet’s publisher in his 1971 memoir. ‘‘In the newspaper business you don’t loosely snub your publisher’s pet projects,” he wrote. “Catledge seemed extraordinarily deferential to the owner’s requests,” writes Chomsky. “Of the 107 cases in which a record of a response exists in the file, the editor undertook serious efforts to satisfy the publisher in 105 of them.”

On a handful of occasions, editors at the Times resisted a request from Sulzberger. The publisher asked his editors to run a story on a friend who was organizing a charity event and received resistance from Catledge, the news department, and Sunday editor Lester Markel. Yet the story went on to run anyway, exactly on the date Sulzberger had requested. In another instance, Sulzberger was successful in getting a “profile, two news stories, and a picture” of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, whom a friend of his—the ambassador to Taiwan—was pleading for positive coverage of.

“Sulzberger never suggested a single story dealing with ordinary workers. Unions entered Sulzberger’s consciousness and his blue notes only as threats to society,” notes Chomsky.

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