IT'S been nearly half a century since even a whiff of scandal or implication of misconduct attached itself to The Times' editorial pages. That's what makes the resignation of the section's editor, Andres Martinez, and its aftermath a melancholy rather than merely curious affair.
For the record, a substantial number of my more than 35 years at The Times were spent on the paper's editorial pages -- first as an assistant editor of the op-ed page, then as editor of Opinion and, finally, as an editorial writer. I was 24 when I first joined the section, and I vividly recall how daunting it was to be surrounded by vastly more experienced colleagues, many of them genuinely distinguished. I also remember being struck with how an attention to ethics wove itself through even the most mundane parts of our daily work and by -- what seemed at the time -- a fairly stultifying insistence on propriety.
There was a reason for that.
When Otis Chandler took over as publisher of The Times in 1960, the paper was justifiably held in low regard, and the editorial pages were, by any reasonable measure, positively disreputable. Ever since his great-grandfather, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, had purchased the paper, its editorials had been used mainly for two things: One was to reward the proprietors' political friends (all Republicans) and to punish political enemies (invariably Democrats). The other was to advance the financial interests of the Chandler family and their associates. Otis Chandler was determined to change that, and, working closely with the then editor of the editorial pages, Anthony Day, remade the department and instituted a system of daily checks and balances under which the editorial page editor reported simultaneously to the publisher and to the newspaper's editor. Moreover, the paper's senior newsroom editors -- the managing editor, the associate editor and the national, foreign and business editors, etc., were brought onto the editorial board. (The point was to create a crowd too big to fit into anybody's back room.)
This wasn't done to blend news and opinion. Instead, the broadening of the editorial board was intended to make the process of arriving at editorial decisions as public as possible -- to create transparency, as we now say. If you were an editorial writer proposing a piece for the next day's paper, you had to sit across a conference table from the editor and the publisher and the paper's senior most news editors and defend not only the argument you intended to make but also its factual basis. It was a rigorous, often bracing experience.
