Some Hits, Some Runs, One Error

By Laurence Zuckerman

When readers of the New York Times glanced at the paper one morning last week, coffee cups rattled and bleary eyes widened. There, across two columns at the top of Page One, was an extraordinary mea culpa: A CORRECTION: TIMES WAS IN ERROR ON NORTH'S SECRET-FUND TESTIMONY. Two days earlier the Times had reported that Lieut. Colonel Oliver North testified that the late CIA Director William Casey wanted to use the profits from arms sales to Iran to set up a covert-operations fund that would be kept secret from Ronald Reagan. In fact, North testified only that the President was unaware of the talks about the account and that North and Casey did not discuss whether it should be hidden from him.

It was right for the Times to admit the error, but the prominence of the correction dismayed some staffers. Craig Whitney, the Times Washington bureau chief, said he felt "immense surprise" when he saw the headline. At the Times's New York City newsroom, where the tiniest changes are often analyzed more carefully than seating plans at the Kremlin, reporters debated the propriety of the correction. All agreed, however, that it was the most remarkable sign yet of the controlling hand of Max Frankel, who became the paper's executive editor in November.

After editors in New York discovered the mistake, Reporter Fox Butterfield, who wrote the initial story, drafted a correction. Whitney and the editors eventually agreed that the error should not simply be noted on page 3, where mistakes are usually acknowledged, but be placed on the bottom of the front page. Frankel, however, decided to put the correction at the top. "We felt we had to tell the world loud and clear, 'We were wrong,' " he said. "We are laying down history."

The correction was another blow to the Times's Washington bureau and Whitney, who was appointed by Frankel. In June, after Whitney had sent a letter to presidential candidates asking for personal documents, plus access to psychiatric records and FBI files, Frankel issued a memo saying the request had gone "too far." A few days later Frankel sent a memo chastising the bureau for "lassitude" in following up Washington Post scoops. Admitted a Times staffer: "Let's face it, we were getting clobbered on the Iran-contra story."

Frankel, who served as Washington bureau chief from 1968 to 1973, points out that there have always been tensions between New York and the capital's reporters. "Creative friction is unavoidable," he says. Some Times staffers speculate that Frankel is particularly sensitive about the paper's coverage of the current scandal because he headed the bureau during the early days of Watergate, when the Post regularly beat the Times.

Since he took over last fall, Frankel has tinkered with both the look and content of the Times. He has increased the number and size of photographs. He rescinded an archaic rule that reporters could have only one byline in an issue, introduced double bylines on a single story, and allowed the word gay to be used to describe homosexuals -- a radical decision for a paper that only last year accepted the use of Ms.

Frankel has beefed up the paper's metropolitan reporting, stressing more coverage of minorities, the poor and AIDS. He has emphasized analytical pieces (a traditional Times strength), encouraged brighter writing, and varied the front page's hard-news diet with softer, more featurish stories. High on Frankel's list of current projects: a revitalization of the Sunday magazine, which many staffers feel has grown moribund. (The magazine was the subject of | a Times correction two weeks ago, after it published a misleading article about how a New Jersey secretary had made it as a novelist. She turned out to be a Harvard graduate who had worked for a New York publisher.)

Frankel has brought a relaxed, open atmosphere to the newsroom. In contrast to the autocratic style of his predecessor, A.M. Rosenthal, Frankel mixes easily with reporters, chatting with them at their desks and often lunching in the company cafeteria. Frankel not only showed up at a recent staff party but boogied on the dance floor. His one controversial edict: banning smoking in the newsroom, which caused grumbling from tobacco addicts but forced Frankel to give up his beloved pipe. Observes retired Times Editor Harrison Salisbury: "He has introduced a more benign and gracious manner of running the paper."

Although Frankel has ordered that henceforth one out of every two reporters hired must be a minority member, many of the paper's 40 black reporters and editors (out of a staff of 1,000) remain dissatisfied. They complain that they are routinely passed over for choice assignments and that the paper fails to reflect fully the views of the black community. "We thought things were going to change," says a minority reporter, "but we really don't see any of it."

Of course, Frankel has been in charge only nine months; if he serves until he is 65, the paper's mandatory retirement age, he has eight more years in which to make his mark. "I'm still learning," Frankel insists. "I'm turning over stones and asking, 'Why are we doing it this way instead of that?' " Frankel has set up several blue-sky committees, in which reporters offer ideas for the paper's future. Last week the paper announced plans for a new $400 million printing plant that will allow for more color pages in its Sunday edition. Times executives stressed that there are no immediate plans to introduce color in the news sections, assuring readers that they will not wake up some morning to discover even more dramatic changes in the venerable Times.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/New York and Alessandra Stanley/Washington