IN 1988, in the course of a trip to America, Prince Charles of Britain asked to meet not the sons of the country’s leading political families, but Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr.–heir to the New York Times newspaper complex–and Donald Graham of the Washington Post. “The forty-year-old heir to the British throne wanted to meet some of his American counterparts,” Susan Tifft and Alex S. Jones write in “The Trust,” their history of the Times, “and Arthur Jr. and Donald Graham . . . were judged to be in situations roughly similar to his own.” The situation they shared was the rare one of being wholly assured of gaining great power, solely because of their parents and bloodline, with competence barely an afterthought. This is the real problem with the Times, and the source of its current and ongoing troubles: Its Jayson Blair problem is really a Howell Raines problem, which, in turn, is a Pinch Sulzberger problem.

And this problem is not really the new form of preference–double standards to benefit people from an ethnic group that had been oppressed 60 years earlier–but the very old kind that benefits spoiled rich white boys from prominent families, who tend to accede to positions of power, without talent, without being tested, and sometimes without having a clue.