We Must Defend the New York Times

If you're mad at the Times, you probably have a point, but hear me out. With the coming threat of Trump Term II, we need them.

Like all aspiring authoritarians, Donald Trump will go after the press. Media outlets are in the uncovering and publicizing facts business, and the facts make him look terrible. He dreams of obsequious state media like in Russia, or more realistically, the ruling-party-dominated press seen in Hungary. Basically a media system that’s mostly Fox News, with outlets seeing their job as making the president look good and stoking anger against his chosen scapegoats, not as accurately informing the public, let alone the classic Fourth Estate goal of holding power accountable. 

The president-elect has already stepped up his threats against the media, especially the New York Times, demanding billions of dollars in damages for publishing things he doesn’t like. Americans who value truth and democracy should do what we can to thwart him.

First, I want to acknowledge that many criticisms of the New York Times have a point, and it will likely continue or get worse. The op-ed page will publish some awful pieces and hold Republican voices to virtually no fact standard, such as when they published National Review editor Rich Lowry lying about real wages this August. They’ll keep publishing versions of the same article from multiple columnists bashing trans people or college students, as if that’s where power in America lies. They’ll find ways to present highly unequal sides as basically equivalent. They’ll “sanewash” Trump’s abuses, such as a post-election “White House Memo” by Peter Baker titled “Trump Takes On the Pillars of the ‘Deep State.’” It casts historically awful nominees to run Justice, Defense, and Intelligence merely as pushing back against “three areas of government that proved to be the most stubborn obstacles to Mr. Trump in his first term.”

I concede all that, and still say we need to defend the Times. The reason is simple: We need to know what’s happening, and they’re in the best position to find out and tell us. With their high-up spot in the media ecosystem, if they fall, other outlets will likely change their behavior to Trump’s liking in response.

The United States is about to experience a government at war with factual reality. Like in Trump’s first term, when he attacked the National Park Service for accurately reporting the crowd size at his inauguration, or changed a hurricane path map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it didn’t adhere to Trump’s lie that areas with a lot of his supporters weren’t at risk. That will accelerate, with government agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics ordered to stop acting as if their job is measuring and publicizing accurate information, and start acting as if it’s to make the president look good regardless of facts.

The New York Times can catch them manipulating data, publicize uncorrupted measurement from outside government, and ferret out actions the Trump administration would rather hide. For example, they recently exposed that Elon Musk privately met with Iranian officials at the United Nations, conducting high-level diplomacy on Trump’s behalf.

This doesn’t take away from the case to support smaller and independent outlets. Among the ones I are support are ProPublica (investigative reporting, in particular of financial corruption), The Bulwark (centrists and NeverTrump conservatives), The UnPopulist (classical liberals), and The Present Age (media criticism). And if you’ll forgive the shameless plug:

But as much as I like those publications, and articles from other independent outlets I come across on social media, their focus is narrower. Many of them do commentary and analysis, not reporting, or at least not broad reporting like the major outlets do. Often they’re reacting to, explaining, criticizing, and referencing things they heard about from the New York Times. We need the regular reporting to do the commentary.

Foreign outlets can be useful for reporting on international affairs, and getting a non-American perspective. I frequently check the BBC, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera English. But they don’t have the central role inside the United States the New York Times has as “the paper of record,” effectively setting the agenda for American political media outlets.

Trump, at some level, sees this too. He’ll target the Times, and the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which ruled that First Amendment protections restrict public figures’ ability to sue media outlets for defamation. Plus as a personal motivation, Trump has been fixated on the Times for decades. He’s always had the money to get into New York City high society, but a vulgarity that made him unwelcome.

The New York Times has the most, and the most secure, resources to resist him, including impressive in-house attorneys. In 2023, the Times reported a profit of $1.177 billion, on revenue of $2.49 billion. The same year the Washington Post reported a loss of $77 million. The Times is also a gaming company, with Wordle, Connections, the crossword, and others driving a lot of traffic and revenue. That means both that canceled subscriptions have little-to-no impact on their coverage, and that they have the money to handle Trump’s maliciousness.

The Washington Post signaled an eagerness to obey Trump in anticipation, as owner Jeff Bezos spiked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and rushed to publicly kiss up when Trump won. The endorsement itself doesn’t matter — I doubt it would’ve swayed a single vote — what matters is the owner intervening to curry government favor. Bezos apparently cares more about his space company Blue Origin, which relies on government contracts, and his main company Amazon, which uses the U.S. Postal Service.  

The Los Angeles Times acted similarly, with intervention from billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

NPR has recently been taking sanewashing to another level, with a tone that ranges from “calm down, it’ll be fine” to one that almost sounds like cheering. NPR gets little money directly from the federal government, but a lot of its operating budget relies on official nonprofit status, which the president can threaten.

ABC, NBC, and CBS are broadcast networks, which gives the Federal Communications Commission greater leverage over them than outlets that don’t use public airwaves. All three are part of conglomerates with interests beyond news.

CNN isn’t broadcast, but it’s owned by Warner Bros.-Discovery, which has multiple financial interests. The outlet’s focus on television means it doesn’t go deep or break news as much as newspapers. They gave Trump considerable airtime to lie unfiltered, have declining profits, and made executive hires that interpreted “restore trust in the media” as “be less political, and when you are, tilt more towards Trump and Republicans.”

I am not telling anyone to reject these media organizations, just that they are all in a worse position to stand up to Trump administration abuses than the New York Times. The Times is its own corporation, with the flagship paper the company’s biggest interest by far. Owner/publisher AG Sulzberger is another rich legacy kid, and deserves his fair share of criticism. But he didn’t intervene to stop scathing anti-Trump editorials, and spoke out before the election about threats to freedom of the press, accurately comparing Trump to Hungary’s openly illiberal, media-controlling leader Viktor Orban. It’s not great to have to rely on rich media owners, but as far as they go, he seems like he gets it, and is less interested in rolling over than many of his counterparts.

So we should do what we can to support the New York Times — which, to be clear, does not mean exempting them from criticism when warranted. This isn’t for the Times’ owners or journalists. It’s for us.