Tarting Up The Gray Lady Of 43rd Street

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The New York Times has long had more in common with the Congressional Record than with its distant cousins, the tabloids. It has never had much of a nose, or a tolerance, for either gossip or nonpolitical scandal. So what on earth is going on at the Times these days? Why is the Gray Lady leaning over the back fence and acting like a garrulous matron? Why has she suddenly started kicking up her heels -- occasionally tripping over her own feet? Why are Times readers -- and staffers -- wondering whether the paper is abandoning its old standards, as well as loosening its style?

These questions have come to the fore in recent weeks because of several stories the Times has chosen to run in quick succession. By far the most serious surround the paper's treatment of the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her at the Kennedy family's retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., in March. One day after the NBC Nightly News disclosed her name, with an elaborate justification, the Times abandoned its own long-standing practice of withholding the names of sex-crime victims and followed suit.

Worse still, it identified the woman in an unflattering profile that seemed sure to raise questions about her character. The piece, written by the Times's Boston bureau chief Fox Butterfield and Mary Tabor, reported that the woman had mediocre grades in high school, a daughter born out of wedlock and 17 tickets for speeding and unsafe driving. It quoted an anonymous friend's assertion that the woman had "a little wild streak." For good measure, it detailed her mother's divorce and remarriage to a wealthy Midwestern industrialist.

The controversy over the Palm Beach coverage blew up just one week after the Times had published a front-page Sunday piece by Maureen Dowd on Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan. In its rush to get the book's allegations into print, the paper made little attempt to substantiate Kelley's more purple passages or to question her notions of fact gathering.

After the Palm Beach story appeared, feminists and other outraged readers picketed the paper's headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post -- neither of which has printed the alleged victim's name -- cluck-clucked at their august competitor in editorials for violating journalistic ethics. Even Dan Schwartz, the editor of the National Enquirer, which also did not print the woman's name, was claiming that "I think we took a more ethical standard than they did."