Biographers are often accused of falling in love with their subjects and thereby losing the distance necessary for journalistic objectivity. The object of such affection is usually a person, but in the case of Alex S. Jones and Susan E. Tifft's recently published rumination on The New York Times, it's an entire family, and a complex one at that.

Perhaps love isn't the right word. But there's something close to a paternal/maternal all-forgivingness in "The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times" (Little, Brown), Jones and Tifft's lengthy but readable biography of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan. Even so, the husband-and-wife team has turned out the definitive study of the family that has owned the Times for over 100 years and, remarkably, seems structured to continue that ownership far into the next millennium.

"As far as I'm concerned, there's no better news organization on the earth than The New York Times," says Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former media writer for the Times who now shares an endowed chair at Duke University with Tifft, a former associate editor at Time. There is, he says, "no organization where you can have such an impact, because what you put in The New York Times has an astonishing reach and power."

That reach and power has been accomplished, and is now secured, through the survival of a 103-year old family dynasty — a survival which is not threatened, even in the current wave of mega-mergers, because the Sulzberger family — unlike dozens of other media families (Hearst, Cowles, Gannett, Pulitzer, Scripps, Paley) — has never allowed financial or operative control to leave its orbit.

"One thing that really surprised us is the extent to which The New York Times really reflects this family in its values and the mission that it has," says Tifft. Those values, one learns repeatedly in "The Trust," might be characterized as idealistic establishmentarianism, a revelation that will come as no surprise to readers of the Times' often Olympian editorial page.

More revealing is the fact that the Ochs-Sulzberger clan continues to be able to express its establishmentarianism only because it was led, in its early 20th-century incarnation, by Adolph Ochs, a scrappy Tennessean with a powerful competitive instinct. Ochs played an elaborate, marginally legal game with the few economic resources he was able to assemble from the struggling Chattanooga daily he owned. Through sheer force of personality, he was able to successfully wrestle what he wanted out of New York bankers and financiers: the money necessary to succeed as a newspaper publisher in what was, even at the end of the last millennium, the nation's media capital.

Similar deals with Mammon took place at other critical junctures in the Times' history. Indeed, another one may be taking place even now, as the paper prepares to move its burgeoning empire a few blocks south, to a new site (partially subsidized by tax breaks from the city) in the once notoriously gritty neighborhood which the paper's self-interested civic ministrations have helped "clean up."

"This family has had a good effect on the paper," says Tifft. "Largely because they are not a greedy bunch, they've poured money back into the news operation of the Times. Compare that to a bottom-line operation like [Rupert Murdoch's] News Corp or Gannett for instance, and you come up with a very different kind of picture."

"In 1987," adds Jones, "the stock market crashed, newspapers all across America went into a depression. The New York Times lost 40 percent of its advertising volume — probably more than any other newspaper in the country. In each one of those subsequent five years, The New York Times increased its news budget each year over the last. There's not another newspaper in the country — or the world — that could lose 40 percent of its advertising and still increase its news budget. And that's a family decision."

The Ochs-Sulzberger family may thus fend off bottom-line wolves when it chooses, but it, like almost every family everywhere, spawns vipers within. Some appear in "The Trust" as garden-variety opportunists and run-of-the-mill ne'er-do-wells. But there's legitimate muttering in the ranks as well, specifically from victims of the Times' discriminatory practices over the years. "The Trust" is particularly illuminating on the subject of corporate bias against the advancement of women. Had such bias not been so deeply ingrained and institutionalized, the Times would long ago have had a woman publisher; as it was, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, Adolph's daughter, was reduced to writing pseudonymous letters to the editor while her husband wore the publisher's crown.

Equally interesting is the tale "The Trust" tells of the Ochs-Sulzbergers' conflicted dance around the question of the family's ethnicity. "The Jewishness of the family and how that has affected the news coverage of the Times is a very important aspect of our book," says Tifft.

"Adolph did everything he could not to call attention to the idea that this was a Jewish newspaper," adds Jones, "which meant sometimes turning a blind eye to terrible situations that involved Jews. He was afraid [that covering 'Jewish issues'] would attract the wrath of people who were enemies of The New York Times and would marginalize the Times' authority by saying they were just a bunch of Jews defending other Jews. He had it as a cardinal rule (which did not change until the 1960s) that the senior editor of The New York Times could not be a Jew."

Rarely observant, often not even self-identified as Jews, the Ochs-Sulzbergers nevertheless could not escape the often petty, sometimes catastrophic prejudice toward their ethnicity. The contradictions involved in trying to do so reached a crescendo during the Nazi era. "New York Times publisher Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (son-in-law of Tennessean Adolph Ochs) had encountered discrimination himself as a Jew," write Jones and Tifft. "He was very bitterly stung by the fact that he could not get into a fraternity at Columbia because he was Jewish. He was turned away at hotels because he was Jewish. But he very much wanted not to have The New York Times' authority compromised by being perceived as a Jewish newspaper. And you look back at the stories in those days, The New York Times did cover the rise of Hitler, it did cover what was happening in Europe, but when it came to the Holocaust, it buried the stories. Instead of putting them on Page One, they'd be on Page 12. They'd be short stories instead of long stories. The most telling example is when Dachau was liberated, the word 'Jew' was never mentioned, although the story itself appeared on the front page."

"This was a mistake, and The New York Times apologized on the centennial of the family's ownership explicitly for the way they handled the Holocaust," adds Jones. He believes that this and other examples of the newspaper's abdication of principle (suppression of information about the Bay of Pigs, editorial obtuseness during the Vietnam War) are a result of the publisher's desire to maintain the Times' influence on the political establishment.

"The Trust" narrates how the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, through business acumen and fortuitous conjunctions with newspaper-friendly world events during the Times' years of greatest growth, solidified their institution and its reputation. The book is especially valuable for its insider narration on what a stressful, competitive place such an institution can be, whether one is a family member or not. To succeed at the Times, Jones says, "you'd better have a thick skin, a work ethic that is ruthless, and a sense that you're going to do your work in a very competitive environment." The current 48-year old publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., has, Jones believes, "tried to reduce the feudal baronies, the jealousies and even hatreds that existed. But The New York Times is like the Vatican; it has an incredible culture of scheming and plotting. And it's like a court — this is a dynastic family with great strengths and weaknesses." Beyond that, the Times veteran in Jones believes that "there is something about working for The New York Times that stakes an enduring claim on your life — it's an important part of everything that someone who works there has been through, professionally."

As for the future, Tifft and Jones believe that the Times has inoculated itself through supposedly ironclad internal family agreements against mega-merger absorption. "The big challenge for the Times is not merger and acquisition, because it's going to be in family hands well into the 21^st century," write the authors. "The thing that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says he spends half his time thinking about is whether to spin off a separate Internet company. The real question for The New York Times is whether the news values as they see them can be maintained in that kind of atmosphere."

What are those values? According to Jones, the Times defines what they are through its daily practice — and worries about what they are more than any other media institution in the country. "What they're really worried about now is how, in a world that is not going to be very friendly to newspapers, they are going to have a business which will allow them to spend well over $100 million a year on their newsgathering effort, which is the real crown jewel in this whole enterprise. If The New York Times stock price declines, the family is not going to bust Arthur Jr.'s chops. But if the family starts reading in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal that The New York Times is not what it used to be journalistically, then his job is in jeopardy. That's what the family cares about."

- Larry Bensky, senior editor of the Media Channel, was an editor at The New York Times Book Review from 1966-68.

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