Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond

Robinson’s fanciful arithmetic made it seem that, qualitatively speaking, the audiences for the two papers was roughly the same size. The whole sniffish exercise was made worse by Robinson’s patronizing judgment that the
Times’
Jewish readers were mostly garment workers, and narrow-minded as well, interested only in the deaths of “their own kind.”
    Robinson was soon gone from the newspaper business; the Reids eventually followed, first selling a share of the
Herald Tribune
in 1958 to another member of the WASP Republican establishment, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, sportsman, horse breeder and Eisenhower’s ambassador to Great Britain (as well as a man of personal dignity and good character). After returning to New York in 1961, Whitney pumped millions of his own money into the paper, but the
Herald Tribune
continued to slip behind the
Times.
By 1964 the
Herald Tribune
’s losses had reached an estimated $15 million. While Whitney’s
Herald Trib
faltered, Sulzberger’s
Times
flourished.
    In retrospective accounts, the
Times
unfailingly attributed its success to the superiority of its news coverage in the years during and right after the war—a claim that has largely gone unchallenged. The official story requires considerable qualification.
    Through the 1930s and early 1940s, the two papers were in a rough kind of equilibrium. By the end of World War II, however, the
Times
began to gain steadily relative to the
Herald Tribune
in both the number of its readers and its advertising revenues. The record of those years judged so critical to the fortunes of the two papers was analyzed by the
Times
in a special report published in 1945. The document was not strictly speaking a communication to shareholders in the contemporary fashion: the Times Company stock was held in private hands, almost all in the name of the Ochs trust. But the 1945 document had the same public relations thrust of an annual report, reviewing as it did “what the
New York Times
accomplished” in the war years. The War Production Board, the report noted, had taken 1941, the year America went to war, as its base line for the rationing of newsprint. In that year, the
Times
had a weekday circulation of 455,000 and consumed 100,000 tons of newsprint (in 1990, with a daily circulation of over 1 million and a Sunday circulation of 1.6 million, the
Times
consumed 100,000 tons of newsprint every three months). The Board reduced this ration allotment each successive year; at the war’s end in 1945, the
Times
was receiving 75,000 tons of newsprint. “Alone among major New York newspapers,” the
Times
1945 report noted, the
Times
never requested or received any supply above its quota.
    Yet, good soldier that it was, the
Times
pointed out, it published 8,800 columns of war coverage and other news stories—more than any other American newspaper. Translating those news columns into advertising lineage, the paper calculated that it had passed up the chance to earn over $2 million in additional income. Nor did it stop soldiering on in the service of its readers after the war ended. In the three-month period following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the
Times
boasted, readers could rely on their paper for such important documents as the “Army and Navy Pearl Harbor Reports,” a document running over 117 columns; General George C. Marshall’s Biennial Report (92 columns), and the verbatim texts of the indictments of major Nazi war criminals (32 columns).
    The theme of the wartime paper devoted to expanded news—coverage so thorough that the competition was left behind, in the dust of history—has been taken up regularly in the years since 1945 by historians of the
Times.
For example, Gay Talese, in his tribute to the power and glory of the
Times
, concluded that the decision to increase the size of the paper’s staff and “spare no expense covering the war” may have been the wisest move Arthur Hays Sulzberger ever made as publisher. Talese