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In 1968 the New York editors moved to replace Washington bureau chief Tom Wicker with James Greenfield. James Reston and the bureau took their objection directly to publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and the appointment was reversed, leaving Greenfield without the job. The episode shows that inside the Times, personal standing and direct access to the owner could override the formal chain of command.
If you report on journalists with the same scrutiny they apply to others, the neutral institutional voice gives way to the people behind it. You see rival egos, regional loyalties, career anxieties and personal temperaments deciding what becomes news. The impersonal authority of the printed page conceals ongoing human conflict over who controls it.
The Times demanded that its staff subordinate personal identity to the paper. In return it gave them a prestige that belonged to the institution rather than to them. Because that status was borrowed, even powerful editors could be sidelined or discarded while the paper carried on unchanged. That made loyalty and anxiety twin features of working there.
Control by the Ochs-Sulzberger family insulated the paper from purely commercial pressures and kept Adolph Ochs's founding ideal of sober, comprehensive news alive across generations. The same dynastic structure meant ultimate power flowed through family succession and proximity to the publisher. This was shown when the young, underestimated Arthur 'Punch' Sulzberger unexpectedly took over in 1963 after Orvil Dryfoos's death.