I confess I’m more fascinated than I should be (and perhaps than you are) by the evolving story of the firing of Jill Abramson by the NY Times.

It has a little bit of everything: the hypocrisy of a newspaper I grew up respecting but which I’ve grown to despise in the last fifteen years, the clash of competing liberal protected victim groups, and most of all the mystery of what really happened. We think we know the general outlines by now, but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a bit we don’t know.

One of the unknowns is what really sparked the final denouement. Even writer Ken Auletta, who seems to be the go-to guy on the story and who points out that Abramson’s fall from grace seemed to happen quite quickly at the end, remains puzzled as to what actually transpired.

Today one of his sources tried to retract a statement she allegedly made to him that could get the Times into hot water because it indicated that Sulzberger may have terminated her in part because she hired a lawyer to speak to the paper about her claim that her salary was less than that of her male predecessor. If true, that would be strong evidence of a wrongful firing, and actionable (although it also seems to be the case that Abramson may have signed an agreement not to sue as part of her settlement).

The paper’s attempt to retract seems absurd on its face. Here’s the original quote in the Auletta piece:

Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.”

And here’s Murphy’s “correction,” conveyed in a later email to Auletta:

I said to you that the issue of bringing a lawyer in was part of a pattern that caused frustration. I NEVER said that it was part of a pattern that led to her firing because that is just not true.”

Murphy would have us believe that there was a whole “pattern” of behavior by Abramson that had caused long-term and repeated “frustration” on the part of management and colleages, that bringing in a lawyer upped the frustration ante that was already high, but that the Times management had carefully constructed a firewall between all that seething frustration and their precipitous firing of Abramson that occurred shortly after the lawyer incident. Nice try, Murphy, but that dog won’t hunt.

My favorite article so far about the whole thing is by Matthew Continetti:

Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way…

What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics””Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor””and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the “inescapably gendered aspect” of the Times’ latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world’s most important newspaper are basically children.

If you’re interested in this story, Continetti’s article is worth reading in its entirety. However, I would add something he leaves out—which is that, when he uses the word “children” to describe the people who operate the Times, the appellation is quite literally true, and not just in the sense that he meant it.

Sulzberger, the main player here, inherited the Times from his father. Like many newspapers, the Times is (among other things) a family business passed down mostly from father to son (although initially through a daughter). As with most such enterprises, the founder is often a person of great drive and accomplishment, and the children often represent a drop-off in the latter if not the former:

Sulzberger was born in Mount Kisco, New York, the son of Barbara Winslow (née Grant) and the previous Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, grandson of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the great-grandson of Times owner and publisher Adolph Ochs.

As such, Sulzberger himself is pretty much immune from firing, and probably knew from the start where he’d end up. Here’s the bio of his father and predecessor, and here’s the story of his grandfather (who, although a Reform Jew, was a noted and vocal anti-Zionist who played down the Holocaust in the paper’s pages during the war).

Here is the family’s first NY Times owner Adolph Ochs, who was a self-made man. Note the irony in the following [emphasis mine]:

After borrowing money to purchase The New York Times, [Ochs] formed the New York Times Co., placed the paper on a strong financial foundation, and became the majority stockholder. In 1904, he hired Carr Van Anda as his managing editor. Their focus on objective journalism, in a time when newspapers were openly and highly partisan, and a well-timed price decrease (from 3¢ per issue to 1¢) led to its rescue from near oblivion. The paper’s readership increased from 9,000 at the time of his purchase to 780,000 by the 1920s…

Ochs was engaged in crusading against anti-Semitism.

How did the Sulzbergers get into the act? Ochs’ only daughter married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who inherited the mantle and passed it on to his descendents.

Here’s an article discussing the state of the Times’ ownership by the Sulzbergers. Harry Reid may rail against the Kochs, but they can’t hold a candle to the Sulzbergers:

While other families have had more power for a time””the Roosevelts and the Kennedys come to mind””their time of great power eventually waned. By contrast, the Ochs/Sulzberger dynasty has had a seat at the table in every administration since Adolph Ochs helped put William McKinley in the White House. The family has effectively occupied an ex officio cabinet post that has been a family birthright, passed intact from generation to generation. There is nothing comparable in American history.

Ponder that.