Gray Lady Down: How the New York Times Broke Faith With America
by William McGowan

The story of Jayson Blair and the chaos he sowed at the New York Times is a cautionary tale for the American media and for a public concerned about the accuracy of the news it consumes. Revelations of Blair’s long pattern of egregious plagiarism, outright fabrication, dateline fraud and other forms of journalistic deception rocked the Times to its foundations, led to the dismissal of its two top editors and represented what publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. conceded was the “low point” in the paper’s 150 year history.

The Times management called the Blair scandal an anomaly that shouldn’t stain the paper’s reputation or raise questions about racial favoritism. (Blair was an African-American hired under a special minorities-only internship program.) But as William McGowan shows in this hard-hitting inquiry, the episode was symptomatic of a long institutional and intellectual downward slide that has set America’s most important news icon at odds with its journalistic mission—and with the values and perspectives of much of mainstream America. That downward slide continues, McGowan argues, manifested in ideologically skewed reporting that favors a liberal political agenda on issues like race, gay rights and illegal immigration, as well as a partisan hostility to the War on Terror, as seen in recent disclosures of classified intelligence information that many have called “treasonous.”

Using the recent death of legendary former Times editor A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal—celebrated at his May, 2006 funeral for presiding over the Times’ “Golden Age” and for keeping the paper politically “straight”—McGowan examines the past two decades at the Times since Rosenthal retired. McGowan focusses on figures such as publisher Sulzberger and Sulzberger’s principal personnel and policy decisions, to understand how an “irreplaceable national institution” could turn into the butt of late-night Letterman and Leno jokes. How did the Times become so suffused with intellectual orthodoxy and so committed to a tattered political correctness, becoming “a liberal caricature” as Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wollf has described it? Who is responsible for squandering the finest legacy in American journalism? Can the Times recover? And what are the consequences of all this—for the Times, for the media, and, most important, for American society and its political processes at this fraught moment in our nation’s history? These are some of the questions McGowan ponders in Gray Lady Down, the inside story of what happened to America’s “Paper of Record.”