The Trust : The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times

Rating:
Summary: The story of the family dynasty behind the headlines
Review: I listened to this book on cassette tape, which is an abridged version of the book. It's very interesting, well presented, and professionally recorded, spoken by Steve Tom, who has a pleasantly authoritative voice. It comes on four tapes, recorded front and back. Total playing time is about 6 hours. There's no accompanying music, as is the case with many fictional books on tape, except for the transitions that ends one side and begins another.

The book tells the story of how Adolph Ochs, shortly after the Civil War, started both a newspaper and a family dynasty that became the New York Times. Their family tree, their Jewish culture, and their approach to the paper, which has been described by many others, is told here with names, anecdotes, and quotes.

The abridged version of the story (I haven't read the book) spends more time with the concern of which member of the each successive generation would assume control, and less with editorial decisions than you might think. The earliest stories of Adolph Ochs are an insight into the financials decisions that helped him achieve the coup of siezing control of the paper, and his marriage to the daughter of the rabbi who was leading the Jewish Reformation movement in America in the late 19th century lends insight into the family culture.

The cassette box indicated that this story explores such significant events as the Holocaust, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate. Each is mentioned on the tape, but I found that only the Pentagon Papers story had any significant treatment. As to the others, if you weren't paying attention, you'd miss any mention of them at all. Perhaps the books has more.

A big warning regarding foul language: the first three cassettes had none that I recall, but the fourth cassette, which begins to deal with the 1980's up to the time the book was written, suddenly assaults the listener with a several occurrences of foul language. It's one thing to see these words in printed form, quite another to have the narrator speak them out loud on the tape. The "f" word and "s" word are not only used in direct quotes from the family's exclamations, but are also used to graphically describe homosexual behavior in one passage that is quite graphic. The fourth cassette should be rated "R" as a minimum, if not worse. Consider yourself warned. Don't just pop these cassettes into the car tape deck during the family vacation.

The bottom line: if you're a NYT subscriber, the story told here is probably of great interest to you. If you follow news at all, you probably know of the control that the New York Times exerts in American media, and would benefit from knowing more about the source of much of America's news.

Rating:
Summary: The Trust is terrific!
Review: I think The Trust is absolutely riveting. It's worth reading for the chapter on the Pentagon Papers alone--a drama that has you on the edge of your seat, even though you know what happened! But The Trust is a lot more than that. The decisions behind what runs, and what does not run, in The New York Times are complex and difficult. For the first time--as far as I can tell--the authors, with the skill and caring of fine novelists, show us who these people are and why they do (and did) the things they do. If you want to know how The New York Times came to be what it is, read this book. It's a story of human courage, frailty, jealousy, ambition, loss and success. In short--the story of a family. It's right out of Balzac. I really loved it.

Rating:
Summary: The fall and decline of a family paper
Review: It is not surprising that this book's major revelations have not had greater circulation given the nature of family ownership of the vast majority of the biggest media conglomerates in the country, including the massive Gannett holdings of all forms of media all over the world, the enormous Newhouse "out-of-the-shtetl" holdings of not only papers, but magazines, book publishers and electronic media, the Washington Post, and its TV stations, etc., but you would think that some of them would be discussed a bit more than zero. Unknown in the US is any coverage of what the rest of the world classifies as the "Jewish conspiracy" of media dominance in the US. It appears daily in the major media in the Islamic world as the reason for US support of Israel and the reason for jihad against the infidels. It also explains much of French, German and British hatred of the US, long before GW Bush showed up. This book covers some of this, but not much, and is one of the reasons it does not get more stars. But the book has some great insights such as the following.
Did you know that Punch Sulzberger viewed the current publisher, his son "Pinch" Sulzberger's positions on the Vietnam War to be treasonous because his son said he would cheer on the death of an American soldier over a Viet Cong in Vietnam in a face to face fight? Do you know that the majority of the editorial positions at the Times are held by militant homosexuals, and that one of the editorial writers at the Times is married to a member of the Massachusetts Supreme court who cast the deciding vote on the issue of legalizing gay marriage in that state but never revealed his affiliation in his many columns on the issue? (The Times' own ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, recently said that the Times' coverage of homosexual issues has crossed the line from reportage to advocacy.) Do you know that the Times is a "publicly held" company, but the family has prevented any kind of modern corporate governance with its stranglehold on its preferred stock while at the same time the paper screams about corporate transparency at every other corporation in the US? And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to "The Trust" that guarantees the succession of the male heir to the throne. A corrupt American version of British primogeniture in kingly succession to the Time's monarchy.
But this book also shows why the Times has become a shadow of its former self, is beset by scandal after scandal such as the Jason Blair forgeries (which occurred after the publication of this book) and has resulted in the gradual decline of a formerly great paper. While newspapers are probably doomed in this century, just as the town criers before them, as they are replaced by the internet and cable television news, you can find out why The New York Times is in its death spiral by reading this book. Unfortunately the authors were reluctant to get into the business consequences of the loss of credibility of publications such as the Times with mainstream Americans, but this is still a very worthwhile book. Unfortunately the billions of dollars sucked out of the unsuspecting shareholder of the Times never gets to read about the corruption and moral bankruptcy of current Times management, but this book would be a good place to start.



Rating:
Summary: Great book about the family
Review: THE TRUST is an enjoyable piece of writing, from beginning to end. It would be difficult to soldier through its several hundred pages if Tift and Jones were poor. The only aspect I found disappointing is that the book is more about the family than the paper. Of course, the book is billed as a history of the family. However, I felt it focused almost obsessively on the political in-fighting and other family crises that beset the Ochs-Sulzberger clan. That aside, THE TRUST is still the best portrait of the New York Times available today.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: This exhaustively researched and really gripping book tells the story of Sulzberger/Ochs family and their relationship to the New York Times. As the family behind the Times, they were players on the stage of American history for most of the twentieth century. The family itself and the characters in it are fascinating-- the subjects range from Iphegene Ochs frustration that she as a woman would never be considered the heir to the throne, to the way that Adolph Ochs wheeled and dealed his way into building the NYT, to the hard family choices behind the publication of the Pentagon papers, to modern attempts from within the company to break the family power. It's a wonderful glimpse at one of the most powerful families of our time. It's worth noting that this book is not a business case history and that the reader will not find an explicit overview of any of the strategies that made the Times what it is.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly entertaining family biography
Review: This exhaustively researched and really gripping book tells the story of Sulzberger/Ochs family and their relationship to the New York Times. As the family behind the Times, they were players on the stage of American history for most of the twentieth century. The family itself and the characters in it are fascinating-- the subjects range from Iphegene Ochs frustration that she as a woman would never be considered the heir to the throne, to the way that Adolph Ochs wheeled and dealed his way into building the NYT, to the hard family choices behind the publication of the Pentagon papers, to modern attempts from within the company to break the family power. It's a wonderful glimpse at one of the most powerful families of our time. It's worth noting that this book is not a business case history and that the reader will not find an explicit overview of any of the strategies that made the Times what it is.

Rating:
Summary: Grand and compulsively readable
Review: This is a monumental work of multiple biography and institutional history.

It is cumpulsively readable, like a good novel. This book became my trusted companion during many relaxing evening hours and solitary restaurant meals.

It is also admirably crafted. As in their previous book The Patriarch (about the Bingham family of the Louisville Courier-Journal), Tifft and Jones write beautifully and with great skill for handling detail and narrative.

They also have the ability to balance candor and fairness, steering a sober, high-minded course between warts-and-all skepticism and obsequious hagiography. As a reader you sense you are getting a careful portrait of each major character's personality, strengths, foibles, fond traits, and character flaws, while never getting the feeling the authors are doing either a flack job or a hatchet job.

That's not to say certain characters don't come off better than others. For example, the authors seem consistently sympathetic toward the modestly talented, often hapless but usually wise "Punch" Sulzberger, the dominant figure at the Times from the mid 60s through the mid 90s, while casting his wife Carol as a shallow, cold-hearted Nancy Reagan type. But the book rings of truth and authority, and so one generally trusts the authors' assessments.

While this book overwhelmingly is concerned with people, not events, it provides a valuable account of the internal debates over whether and how to publish the Pentagon Papers. It also illustrates the paper's vigorous post-war anti-communism, its cozy relationship with the Eisenhower administration, its internal battles over editorial voice during the political and cultural upheavals of the 1970s, and its generational differences over homosexuality (contrasting Punch's bigotry with his son and successor Arthur Jr.'s determination to make the Times a progressive place for gays to work). Two consistent threads run throughout the book: the Sulzbergers' ambivalence over their Jewish heritage, and their determination to place journalistic excellence and family control of the paper over the business strategems and high profits necessary to please Wall Street.

This book will be of great interest to journalism junkies. But it also commends itself to all lovers of serious biography.

Rating:
Summary: Beside the Times
Review: This massive chronicle of the Ochs-Sulzbergers and their stewardship of the New York Times gets off to a fascinating start, dramatizing Adolph Ochs' purchase of the then nothing New-York Times and detailing his wildly successful efforts to build a paper of note.

But once Ochs vanishes from the narrative, bequeathing the editorship to son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger, the book slowly loses steam. Focus shifts from the newsroom to the myriad Ochs-Sulzberger relatives and their beside-the-Times activities, in response to which a reader can only offer a heartfelt shrug.

In defense of The Trust it has been pointed out that the authors set out to write about the family rather than the paper, but apparently there's little of inherent interest in the Ochs-Sulzbergers outside the Times. Down the backstretch, the authors seem as bored as the reader, dutifully recounting the gossipy infighting among far-flung cousins.

The Trust, excellent as much of it is, comes to seem unfortunately conceived -- the newsroom coverage is exemplary, but the beside the Times gossip grows quickly tiresome.

Rating:
Summary: Shame on Alex Jones and Susan Tifft
Review: Tifft and Jones rip the gown off the old Gray Lady to reveal the hidden secrets of the family that made the New York Times the respected powerhouse it is today. The story of the Ochs/Sulzburger clan appeals on two levels. First, it is the story of the making of the newspaper, the ethical and financial decisions required to make the Times both reputable and profitable. And second, it is a good old scandal story, filled with affairs and family altercations, and Times Square palace intrigues. While the book remains superficial about the journalism, it delves deeply into the characters, who are of course the most fun part of the tale.