Why are American newspapers in decline, the circulation plummeting, their reputations in tatters, and their editorial decisions the subject of denunciation?

The decision by New York Times and Los Angeles Times to publish on June 23 the details of the Swift program --details which in the opinion of most serious counterterrorism experts, will help terrorists elude capture—is only the most recent of a long series of press catastrophes that dog the print industry. Disgust at that decision was at least in part cumulative, a widely shared shudder at the self-proclaimed importance of the media generally and the big newspapers specifically. The little people just aren’t buying it anymore –both figuratively and literally, if whispers of the Los Angeles Times’ circulation numbers are to be believed.

There are plenty of pieces denouncing the MSM elites, and I have written my share.

But few try and figure out what went wrong. I visited Columbia School of Journalism in the fall to probe, and came away with some answers written up in the Weekly Standard.

That investigation looked at the future of MSM, not at its present. How did the big papers go off the rails? After the repeated attempts by New York Times’ editor Bill Keller and Los Angeles Times’ editor Dean Baquet to ex plain themselves only dug their collective hole deeper, it began to become obvious that the collapse of media credibility generally, and of the big papers specifically, has to do with a crisis of leadership.

The papers don’t have any. Or rather, that which they have is weak: weak minded and weak willed, prone to aggressiveness followed by obsequiousness. Erratic. Impulsive and self-destructive.

Where does such leadership come from? An examination of the leadership lineage of the four major dailies that are widely and correctly understood to be very left of center in this country –the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times—reveals that much of the dysfunction of these newsrooms may fairly be traced to inbreeding among their elites.

The cloistered word of big papers breeds its own peculiar type of leader, always selected from within the world of the big papers, always carrying forward to the top the same assumptions of importance and privilege, the same world view and indeed the same unusual combination of arrogance and limited experience that defines big journalism. Here are the brief histories of the top leadership posts at the big four:

The New York Times:

Bill Keller (2003 to present): A 1970 graduate of Pomona College, Keller was on the student paper there and immediately went into journalism as a reporter for Portland’s The Oregonian. After stints with The Congressional Quarterly and the Dallas Times Herald, Keller joined the New York Times in 1984 and has been there since. He spent nearly a decade in the Moscow bureau, before returning to New York in 1995 as the paper’s foreign editor. Passed over for executive editor when Howell Raines was promoted to that post in 2002, Keller became an op-ed columnist and senior writer for the paper, and was selected to lead it when Raines left after the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003.

Howell Raines (2001 to 2003)

Raines grew up in Alabama, and is a 1964 graduate of Birmingham-Southern College. He joined the Birmingham Post-Herald the same year, but jumped to the local television station WBRC in 1965. In 1970 it was back to papers, via the Birmingham News, and in the same year, the Atlanta Constitution. In 1976 he migrated to the St. Petersburg Times, and in 1978 was recruited to the “big leagues” of journalism as he called it, and joined the New York Times. He spent the next 25 years as a Timesman, in jobs including Washington, D.C. bureau chief and national political correspondent. He was selected as Executive Editor in 2001, a week before 9/11. He lasted less than two years when the Jayson Blair scandal brought him down.

Joseph Lelyveld (1994 to 2001)

Lelyveld spent nearly 40 years at the New York Times, beginning as a copy editor. Lelyveld told graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism, from which he graduated, that he got into journalism “having discovered that I had too short an attention span for any respectable profession or form of scholarship.” After a stint in the Army, Lelyveld enlisted in the Times and never left until retirement.

Max Frankel (1986 to 1994)

Frankel was also a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, where he also spent his undergraduate years. Like his predecessor, Frankel began his 50 years working for the Times before he received his diploma from college. He never left the paper, and served on its Board after retirement from the newsroom.

A.M. Rosenthal (1977 to 1986)

Rosenthal took over the leadership of the paper after having spent 34 years climbing the internal ladder. Beginning in 1988, he combined his editor’s duties with column writing, and after leaving the paper (after 56 years) began a column for the New York Daily News. He was a 1943 graduate of City College, and had begun working for the Times as a campus correspondent even before graduation. Rosenthal was a foreign correspondent from 1954 to 1967, when he returned to New York and began a series of management jobs that took ten years to get him to the top of the paper.

James Reston (1968 to 1969)

The legendary “Scotty” Reston began his journalism career with the Springfield, Ohio Daily News and the AP in 1934, and joined the Times in its London bureau in 1939. Except for a three year leave of absence during World War II when Reston served in the U.S. Office of War Information, he never left the Times.

Turner Catledge (1964 to 1968)

Catledge joined the Times in 1929, and spent 35 years working towards the top. He never left the paper until his retirement.

The Washington Post

Leonard Downie, Jr. (1991 to present)

Downie joined the Washington Post as a summer intern in 1964, and except for a year’s leave for a fellowship to study urban problems in the U.S. and Europe, this Ohio State graduate has never not been in the employ of the Post.

Benjamin C. Bradlee (1965 to 1991)

Bradlee’s a 1942 graduate of Harvard. He joined the Post in 1948, but left in 1951 to become the assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris, and from there went on to work for a number of years at the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange. Hejoined Newsweek in 1953 and rejoined the Post later that decade. He became senior editor of the paper in 1961, “managing editor” in 1965, and “executive editor” in 1968.

The Boston Globe

Martin Baron (2001 to present)

Baron arrived at the Globe after a brief two years at the head of the Miami Herald. The 1976 graduate of Lehigh University had joined the Herald out of college, but left for the west coast and a series of jobs with the Los Angeles Times in 1979. He jumped to the New York Times in 1996 and spent three years there before heading to Florida.

Matthew V. Storin (1993 to 2001)

Storin began his journalism career at the Springfield Daily News in 1964, and moved to the Globe in 1969, where he was a White House correspondent and and reported extensively from Asia before joining management at the paper in 1982. Storin left the Globe for stints at U.S. News & World Report, the Chicago Sun Times, the Maine Times and the New York Daily News before taking the leadership of the Globe in 1993.

John S. Driscoll (1987 to 1993)

Driscoll has spent decades at the Globe and was a caretaker between the turbulence of the Janeway years and the arrival of Storin. Driscoll graduated from Northeastern University in 1957 and joined the paper after graduation, rising through its ranks in a variety of posts including managing editor of the Evening Globe.

Michael Janeway (1984 to 1986)

Janeway came to the Globe in the late ‘70s after many years at the Atlantic Monthly where he had risen to executive editor and to which he had come from Newsweek and before that Newsday. He headed the Sunday Globe prior to his elevation to the top job 1986. Janeway spent a year as a special assistant to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, from 1977 to 1978.

Thomas Winship (1965 to 1984)

After his 1945 graduation from Harvard, Winship joined the staff of the Washington Post. He joined the Globe in 1956 –his father was editor of the paper whom the younger Winship replaced in ‘65—and stayed until his retirement. Continued...