The new york times has been owned by the same family, the ox alzburgers, for the last a hundred and 20 years or so. It was initially bought by the founder of that dynasty, adolf ox, who was a german jewish emigrant to the us. He set out this mission to create a newspaper that would just bring the facts and do it in what he called parliamentary a language. That roll was passed down through the family, and that quickly made it into a dynasty. What we see with dynasties is that while the founder of the dynasty might be very committed to a particular mission, in this case, bringing the news, gathering the facts,
Michael Shermer speaks with Ashley Rindsberg about his book The Gray Lady Winked in which he pulls back the curtain on the the world’s most powerful news outlet and flagship of the American news media, the New York Times, to reveal a quintessentially human organization where ideology, ego, power and politics compete with the more humble need to present the facts. Rindsberg offers an eye-opening, often shocking, look at the New York Times’s greatest journalistic failures, so devastating they changed the course of history.