.All is not well at The New York Times business desk. Rumors have it that colleagues of Andrew Ross Sorkin, the paper's hot shot mergers-and-acquisitions reporter, are miffed at his rising status in the company. In late October, The New York Post published a story titled "Angry and Sor(kin)," in which colleagues accused Sorkin of using their reporting without attribution in his new book "Too Big to Fail." They also harp on his ego, calling him a "divisive" and "self-promotional" reporter who's only out for himself.
The insults got nastier yesterday as colleagues, speaking to New York Magazine's Gabriel Sherman, compared Sorkin to discredited Times reporter Judith Miller:
In conversations with me, several compared Sorkin's relationship with the Wall Street elite to disgraced former Times reporter Judith Miller's alliance with Bush-administration officials peddling bogus intelligence in support of the Iraq War. "She got too close to her sources," a veteran Times staffer told me. "It was disastrously wrong and we let our readers down. This is the financial equivalent of that."
In interviews, Sorkin has downplayed the notion that a fight is brewing within the company. "I hate to disappoint you," he told the Post. "But I haven't heard about any flap inside The Times." Responding to criticism that he's become too cozy with Wall Street executives, he told Sherman his style is "sufficiently skeptical, but not cynical."
Now more than ever, Sherman says the Times newsroom is a tinderbox, with tempers running high especially for the veteran reporters:
It's happening at a particularly dire moment, one that gives it added resonance. The Times just announced that it was cutting another 100 newsroom jobs, and no one is completely certain which employees--or indeed, which journalistic values--will survive the ongoing migration to the web.