Pirates can be charming, which is a good thing to remember in pondering the business plans of Rupert Murdoch. My only conversation with the pirate king took place in 2002 in, of all places, an executive retreat for top editors of the New York Times.

We had a conversation there that I've been carrying around like a hot rock ever since. As the paper's executive editor at that time, I was eager to hear Murdoch's critique of Escapes, our new lifestyle section. We had rushed Escapes into print to steal thunder from the debut of the Wall Street Journal's ballyhooed Personal Journal section.

Murdoch allowed that Escapes was all right as an attempt to thwart the Journal's targeting of young professional women, a key readership group for the Times. Then he added some advice about how to conduct a newspaper war: "You ought to hit them where they live," he said of the Journal. "Go after hard business news and beat them on their strength."

I can't shake the memory because it seems obvious to me that Murdoch now plans to do to the Times what he was advising me to do to the Journal. He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times' standing as America's leading general-interest newspaper. But my real fear is that Murdoch or some other unsuitable purchaser will then buy the Times through a combination of financial and psychological pressures on the strong, but hardly ironclad, Sulzberger family trust that controls the vast majority of the company's voting stock. There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don't think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough.

It is an article of faith in the Times newsroom that the Sulzberger family trust, updated in 1997 from a previous agreement, is bulletproof. It may be, against the threat it was designed to counter: a renegade cousin or two stampeding the family into selling. But is it built to withstand repeated proxy battles with hedge funds or investment banks attacking the New York Times Co.'s dual-class stock structure? In recent weeks, New York investor Scott Galloway and his Firebrand Partners, along with the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, have bought huge blocks of Times stock. This points to the trust's vulnerability to converging trends unique to this moment—the financial decline of the Times, predatory investors, Wall Street and family anxiety about stock prices, and the emergence of Murdoch as the most powerful individual in mass communications. These factors could bring us to the point where the unthinkable is possible.

When Arthur Sulzberger Jr. fired me in 2003, I took quite a beating from media reporters on journalistic issues. Since then, I've watched Arthur get roughed up by the financial press for his business decisions. Any tendency toward schadenfreude on my part has been offset by two powerful factors. As a Times pensioner, I want the paper to make money under public-spirited owners. As a reader, I believe a Murdoch takeover of our last independent national newspaper would be a disaster for the trustworthy reporting on which our civic life depends. The Sulzbergers are one of the most admired publishing families ever. Throughout his career, Murdoch has used his newspapers and broadcasting properties in a broadly unprofessional way—as political muscle to advance his commercial interests.

Murdoch, jolly pirate that he is, reportedly sent Sulzberger a handwritten note after buying the Journal. "Let the war begin," it said. Since then, Murdoch has targeted three Times strengths—foreign news, the Washington/politics report, and the Sunday magazine—and suggested he'd invest heavily to beat its news sections. You could call it hitting them where they live. I hope the Times has battle plans to which I'm no longer privy, but from the outside, their response to Murdoch's trumpeting seems way too relaxed.

There's no argument that the Times is financially vulnerable, a fact that calls attention to a small but crucial trapdoor in the family trust agreement. In November 2006, the Times saw fit to print the news that by a vote of six to two, the governing board of the family trust could "change the company's corporate structure"—that is, set in motion a sale of the Times to an outside buyer. This came in response to the attempt by Hassan Elmasry of Morgan Stanley to incite a revolt among the owners of class-A stock, who can elect only four of 13 directors. The family owns the great majority of class-B shares through the family trust, electing nine of the 13 and thereby controlling the paper. In my 25 years at the Times, I never heard it suggested that the paper could be sold without unanimous family consent. Now we know that six of eight trustees out of an eventual 50 or more heirs hold this crucial power, a provocative fact in view of stock performance.