Good morning. Pope Leo celebrated his inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square. A Mexican Navy sailing ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge. And tornadoes have killed at 27 people across the central United States. More news is below. But first, an interview with the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, about journalism and democracy.
Free press, free people
Every day, this newsletter brings you the best of New York Times journalism — scoops, investigations, reports from inside war zones or natural disasters, interviews with powerful people and quirky characters, stories that help explain our messy, complicated, frustrating and occasionally delightful world. Sometimes we take for granted what makes that possible. The freedom to ask tough questions. To go where news is happening. To tell the truth even when it makes people mad. Last week, our publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, gave an important speech at the University of Notre Dame about how these freedoms of the press underpin our freedoms as people — how journalism helps hold up democracy. You can — and should! — read the whole thing here, but I also asked the big boss a few questions about it. We usually think of threats to journalists and state control of the media as the scourge of authoritarian societies. How can this be happening here, home of the vaunted First Amendment? There are two very different types of journalistic repression. The more dangerous and dramatic occurs in places like China and Russia, where journalists have their work overtly censored, or are even jailed or killed over it. But there is a subtler, more insidious, playbook for going after journalists in democracies. Selectively using investigatory or regulatory powers to punish journalists and news organizations, for example. Filing frivolous lawsuits against them. Targeting their owners’ unrelated business interests. The goal is to make it harder for journalists to ask questions they don’t want to answer or to make public things they would rather keep secret. You’re right that the United States has long seemed uniquely insulated from such pressures. Our country played a bigger role than any other in establishing a free press. It’s actually the only profession explicitly protected in the Constitution. And presidents of both parties have consistently championed press freedoms at home and around the world. Now, that tradition is at risk. By now, do you mean since President Trump returned to office? In his first term, President Trump complained about coverage and called news organizations every name in the book. Already in his second term, we’ve seen a meaningful shift from words to action. You could see that shift coming. Last fall, I wrote an essay in The Washington Post about how the press had been undermined in so-called eroding democracies like Hungary, India, Brazil and Turkey. It became clear that there was an unofficial playbook — and that people in Trump’s circles were studying it. Now it is unmistakably here. You shared a powerful story about a student journalist at Notre Dame who was critical of the university president. When that same journalist was kidnapped by North Vietnamese soldiers, the president — a priest named Father Ted — appealed to the pope for help getting him out. What moved you about this story? Because things like press freedom can feel abstract, I was looking for a human way to talk about accountability journalism. This student journalist was a real headache to the university — reporting things the administration definitely did not want out in the world. But the president still recognized the importance of his role. Father Ted seemed to understand implicitly that powerful people like him needed to be asked tough questions, even if it’s no fun. “We’re not the resistance,” you wrote. “We’re also nobody’s cheerleader.” Good sound bites. What do they mean? We’re independent. Our loyalty is not to any team. Our loyalty is to the truth and a public that deserves to know it. As it relates to the president, our job is to cover him fully and fairly. That doesn’t change if he calls us the “enemy of the people” or, for that matter, “a great, great American jewel.” This is a position that’s getting harder and harder to maintain, no? Yes, absolutely. We live in a moment of growing tribalism and polarization. Sadly, most media today make these divisions worse by telling each group what they want to hear. If you look at cable news or the podcast or newsletter ecosystems, that’s mostly what you’ll find. People parroting their group’s conventional wisdom or partisan talking points. Hyping convenient facts and downplaying inconvenient ones. And look, there is obviously a giant audience for all that. But I believe there is also a giant audience of people who want the full story, people willing to be challenged with information they didn’t expect or even want to hear. Our commitment to this model of independent journalism is the anchor of my family’s long history with The Times. My great-great-grandfather Adolph Ochs pledged in 1896 “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.” You still hear those words around the office. After you became publisher in 2018, you had what you’ve described as a “civil meeting” with President Trump in the Oval Office — two, actually. What would you tell him if you were invited back now? I felt it was important to push the president to understand that his attacks on the American press were actually making the work of journalism harder and more dangerous all over the world. I was not naïve enough to expect to change his mind. But I did want it on the record that he was warned about the consequences of his actions. That means everything he’s done since, he did fully aware that his words are being used to justify repression of journalists in places like Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Israel and elsewhere. He’s proud of popularizing the term “fake news.” Well, it’s been used since to justify crackdowns on journalists in dozens of countries. As to your more specific question, I’m not interested in social visits with the president. I’d rather he sit for an on-the-record interview with our reporters. What scares you the most about the current environment? The news industry is facing several giant challenges all at the same time. The collapse of the business model. The dominance of the tech giants over how people engage with information. A fractured and distrustful public. Now, on top of those challenges, we’re facing the most direct assault on the rights and legitimacy of journalists that we’ve seen in at least a century. So it’s the sheer volume of pressures that worries me, especially when so many news organizations, particularly local ones, are vulnerable. As you wrote in the piece, a record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. In the U.S., a third of newsroom jobs have disappeared since 2010, and newspapers are closing at the rate of a couple a week. So what gives you hope for journalism in these dire times? More than anything, I am encouraged by all the great journalism my colleagues are doing. Our reporters are running every day at full sprint to keep up with the incredible fire hose of news. I think that really matters, because everything this administration does should be put on the record. To be shared with the public. Information is power, right? And these reporters are also circling back to the major stories in that fire hose, to tease out what happened and why it matters, to illuminate patterns and expose misconduct. We have more investigative reporters at The Times now than at any time in our history. Our Washington bureau is much bigger. And these reporters are asking the tough questions every day to make sure that people in power are telling the truth, acting legally and serving the public interest. That’s why press freedom matters. It’s less about the right of the press to find stuff. It’s about the public’s right to know it.
Pope Leo XIV
Trump Administration
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