The Times was not an exciting read. But Ochs treated its reputation for dullness as an asset, not a liability. He downplayed its editorials, expanded anything having to do with news, financial news in particular. He invested in the paper’s legal coverage and began listing the day’s fires and real-estate deals. Rival papers such as The Sun and the Tribune sniped that the Times had somehow managed to become even more sleep-inducing. By the time they realized that the Ochs strategy was working, he’d surged ahead of them. Even the mighty Joseph Pulitzer felt compelled to bring his New York World around.
What Ochs had realized was that his rivals had undervalued the demand for timely, comprehensive, and trustworthy information. He’d correctly judged that readers, or at least “quality” readers (as they were called), were fed up with sensationalism.
His tidy slogan for the Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—made it clear what he was offering. His rapid turnaround of the Times is one of the great success stories in the history of journalism.
The air of authoritative impartiality with which Ochs and Van Anda imbued the Times is now under assault from both ends of the political spectrum. The right accuses the so-called mainstream media of abandoning neutrality, while the progressive left argues that it should be abandoned. No one is truly unbiased, the left notes, and so journalists might as well declare where they stand. “Transparency is the new objectivity,” this argument goes. Some advocates even profess to believe that ditching forced postures of impartiality will help restore trust in media, rather than erode it further.
But the case for more bias in reporting is very dodgy, and one suspects that it has gained traction mostly because what passes for journalistic evenhandedness these days is a pale imitation of the version embraced by idealists such as Ochs and Van Anda.
In today’s opinion-driven news environment, the other side of the story is often presented more out of a sense of obligation than true curiosity. Some outlets have given counternarratives more consideration than they deserve. Being dismayed by all the false equivalences and foregone conclusions makes sense, but giving up on such an important guiding principle after experiencing the cheapened version of it is like renouncing all forms of air travel after flying easyJet.
It’s worth remembering that, back when Ochs and Van Anda began working together, the model of objective journalism that is now derided as the “view from nowhere” was not the default. Throughout the 19th century, moderation and impartiality were virtually unknown in popular media. Many newspapers didn’t just lean one way or the other politically—they answered directly to party bosses. Standards of accuracy were lower. “Buncombe and fraud” were facts of life.