The New York Times gets a new chief executive

The

position of chief executive of The New York Times Co. is not the easiest to fill.

There are, to start with, the obvious business challenges: Like all newspaper companies, the Times Co. has struggled financially as the Internet has eroded its traditional revenue sources. Its third-quarter results, announced Thursday, were typical: They reported a 9 percent drop in advertising revenues and an 85 percent decline in net income compared with the same period in 2011. Its battered stock price tumbled another 22 percent.

Then there is the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times Co. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is both the company’s chairman and the publisher of the flagship newspaper. Seven other family members work at The Times. No chief executive should expect that they’d be able to make decisions independent of the Sulzbergers. The previous chief executive, Janet Robinson, left abruptly in December, amid speculation that her relationship with Sulzberger had become strained.

So it was with no small relief that, after a lengthy search, Sulzberger announced in mid-August that Mark Thompson, the departing director general of the BBC, had agreed to take the job. Although the BBC has a radically different business model from The Times — it gets most of its money from an annual fee levied on every British television watcher — his tenure as the BBC’s boss included an international expansion and strong digital growth, two areas where The Times could use his skills.

Thompson is scheduled to start his new job Nov. 12. His nameplate is already on his office wall. He is getting to know some employees. Yet, since early October, all anybody has asked about Thompson are those two most damning of questions: What did he know, and when did he know it?

The questions are being asked, of course, in the wake of an enormous sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed the BBC. At its center is Jimmy Savile, who for three decades was one of the BBC’s bestknown personalities, his television shows aimed at the teenage set. He has also been accused of being an incorrigible pedophile; the number of young girls he is said to have molested could run into the hundreds. Although he stopped being a BBC regular in the mid-1990s, his enduring fame was such that when he died last fall, people in his hometown of Leeds lined the streets to mourn his passing.

Soon after his death, a BBC current affairs program called Newsnight began an investigation into Savile’s sexual proclivities. Yet despite getting at least one woman on tape who said she had been molested by Savile, the piece was killed. Then, this month, a BBC competitor, ITV, ran a devastating expose of Savile. The ITV investigation raised subsequent questions about whether the BBC had covered up Savile’s wrongdoing.

Plainly, the answer is yes. What is far less certain is how high the cover-up went. Thompson first said that he never heard the rumors about Savile and that he didn’t learn about the Newsnight program until after it was canceled. Given the Byzantine nature of the BBC bureaucracy, these are plausible denials.

Here is where it gets tricky. Thompson now says that at a cocktail party in December, a BBC reporter said to him, “You must be worried about the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile.” Soon thereafter, Thompson asked his underlings about the investigation and was told that it had been killed — for journalistic reasons. He claims to have inquired no further, not even to ask what the investigation was about.

A few months later, the news broke in the British press that the BBC had, as the Daily Mail put it in a headline, “shelved Jimmy Savile sex abuse investigation ‘to protect its own reputation.’ ” Given the seriousness of sexual abuse allegations, you would think that Thompson and his underlings would immediately want to get to the bottom of it. But, again, they did nothing. Thompson winds up appearing willfully ignorant, and it makes you wonder what kind of an organization the BBC was when Thompson was running it — and what kind of leader he was. It also makes you wonder what kind of chief executive he’d be at The Times.

Arthur Sulzberger is in a difficult spot. He believes strongly that he’s got the executive he needs to lead The Times to the promised land of healthy profits again. Although he declined to be interviewed for this column, he appears to have accepted Thompson’s insistence that he knew nothing about the explosive allegations that became public literally 50 days after he took the Times job. Sulzberger is backing his man unreservedly.

For the sake of Times employees — not to mention the readers who want to see a vibrant New York Times Co. — let’s hope his faith in Thompson is warranted. Otherwise, the BBC won’t be the only organization being asked tough questions about its judgment.