Not exactly stop-the- presses material, Andrew Rossi’s “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” is basically a carefully airbrushed and authorized portrait of the Gray Lady during 14 months when there was serious speculation about the paper’s impending demise.
There are only the briefest glimpses of embattled publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the incoming executive editor, Jill Abramson.
Her predecessor, Bill Keller, sticks around long enough to assure us that the Times has learned hard lessons from scandals involving its former star reporters. Judith Miller helped lead us into the Iraq war with underscrutinized, bad reporting, while editors ignored warning signs that Jayson Blair was making stuff up.
But you have to wonder if the Times is still taking risky shortcuts that could lead to further embarrassments. This superficial documentary astoundingly proposes that the Times’ collaboration with disgraced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (currently out on bail in the UK and fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual-assault charges) is merely a 21st-century, speeded-up version of publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Even if you accept the Times’ claims that it redacted sensitive material, its thirst for Web traffic still led to lending credibility to an organization with dubious motives whose release of secret cables put both our troops and innocent Afghan civilians at risk.
The cursory examination of the paper’s parlous finances virtually ignores the shadowy role of Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecom magnate whose investments have helped bail the Sulzbergers out of financial difficulties, at least for the time being.
The Times’ controversial decision to charge for content on its Web site also gets only a light once-over.
Most of this documentary focuses on the paper’s media desk, a white, male preserve — we’re told that the two women on the premises declined to be filmed — where we watch teen blogger turned reporter Brian Stelter lose 90 pounds over the months while seriously multitasking.
The film’s crowd-pleasing “star” is showboating media columnist David Carr. He’s a tough-talking, self-described former crack addict and alt-weekly veteran who’s one of the paper’s best and most insightful writers.
As someone with a background in news management, I wish the documentary had asked some tough questions. Is it really advisable for the editors to let Carr shamelessly cheerlead for the Times brand at media conferences — while at the same time he’s trashing the competition (including, on occasion, the corporation that publishes this newspaper) in print?
“Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times,” which ends with the paper’s staff gathered for the Pulitzer Prize announcement, is the opening attraction on both screens at Lincoln Cetner’s splendid new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.