Michael Wolff: NY Times "Is One Of The Few Organizations That The Weakened Bush People Are Strong Enough To Go After"...

Vanity Fair August 14, 2006 at 11:23 AM
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It's a different, much less awesome New York Times under attack for its decision to publish secret details of how banks are cooperating with the Bush administration to track terrorist finances. In the past, if you took on the Times, you took on its powerful eastern-establishment base; you took on the media itself. But the base this administration is most concerned with is always its own, and going after the Times--more a label for large parts of the country than a brand, a liberal caricature--seems to thrill it.

During the Bush years, the entire media has been so much easier to threaten because every company is under such relentless shareholder, financial, advertiser, and interest-group pressures--media organizations will do anything not to have politicians and prosecutors sniping at them, too. While the Times--historically, more like a branch of government than a mere commercial enterprise--has often operated as an exception to the rest of the media, it's hard to be a Cadillac in a fading American auto industry, and hard to be even the Times in the imploding newspaper business. The Times's current predicament--its share price has fallen by 50 percent since 2002; almost 30 percent of its shareholders protested the company's slate of directors at the annual meeting this spring--gets closer and closer to that of the Knight-Ridder papers, forced into a sale; the Tribune company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, locked in a more or less mortal boardroom war; and Dow Jones, with its worried family members fretting about a sale of The Wall Street Journal. The Bush people cannot be unaware of this. In such a state of play, the Times is also doing that one thing that so often calls attention to a corporation's weaknesses and vulnerabilities and inflated sense of grandeur--a classic precursor to calamity. It's building a fabulous new corporate headquarters on Manhattan's West Side--a Renzo Piano-designed $850 million tribute to itself.

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