The case is for libertarianism

An Interview with David Sulzberger, founder and editor of the New York Times, Monday, October 14: “Independence in the Newsroom”

Sulzberger gave an exclusive interview to NPR ahead of the release of his essay, a call for what he terms independent journalism: coverage that’s free of governmental intimidation, corporate influence, partisan agenda and yes, the personal ideologies of the journalists reporting the news.

The idea of independence in journalism has been called into question. Conservatives argue that journalists are too liberal to be independent, while growing numbers of liberals favor a more confidently ideological form of journalism, as was the norm in the U.S. during the 1700s and 1800s and remains common in Europe.

Sulzberger’s public statements arrive after the #MeToo and social justice movements that inspired greater activist sentiment inside major newsrooms, including his own. And those concerns often reflect perspectives considered to come from the left.

Journalists, he tells NPR, “need to have humility, that if you’re following the facts, wherever they lead, they often lead to a question. They can often cause uncertainty. They often lead to a debate.”

He doesn’t want a mealy mouthed approach to know the truth in the age of misinformation. “When the facts are clear, they should be called out clearly and irrately,” he says.

The Times lead the way in reporting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, even though it was known at the time that wasn’t true. He didn’t. The Times and other news organizations didn’t think that the COVID-19 virus was leaked from a lab. (Uncertain, but considered possible by some federal agencies.)

He says such an approach is the best way to win back the public’s trust. A member of the fifth generation in his family, he first trained as a reporter in Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Ore. Once at the Times, Sulzberger became a well-regarded writer (one article was optioned and became Kodachrome, a feature film starring Ed Harris and Jason Sudeikis) and later led an effort to modernize the paper.

In Monday’s essay, he invoked his grandfather’s belief that the Times should present the news without fear or favor.

Faced with that present, and a past defined by media executives who largely constructed newsrooms from a white, male perspective, many journalists ask whether news organizations are built to meet the challenge ahead.

The news is often dominated by relentless, divisive and seemingly existential stories including climate change, heightened political polarization, a global pandemic and a former president who at once attacked the press and overwhelmed it with bombast and lies.

“It’s how we show our biases and values, [by] what story we put on the front page, what story we order a series on, what story we don’t cover at all,” Lowery adds.

He says the focus on sidestepping bias is due to the Times’ desire to present an appealing and non-offensive image to subscribers. The Times is the envy of the news business because it has 10 million paying subscribers, including its crossword, cooking, sporting and consumer product review services. The Times’ reporting shows the concern of parents and some researchers who question the US medical establishment’s care for teens who seek to transition.

He points to the paper’s award-winning stories on the failures of schools, which receive government money, set up to serve Hasidic Jewish children in New York. Some Hasidic and Jewish leaders said the articles could incite anti-Semitic attacks simply by reporting those findings.

“We are living in a country that wants to come together in a pluralistic democracy,” he says. A society that is grappled with all the big challenges it faces needs trustworthy information.

“This is something we hear often from inside our industry and outside it,” Sulzberger tells NPR in an exclusive interview. “Is it enough for journalists to describe the world as it is, or should they try to fix it? Should they fight for a better version of it?

The New York Times chairman and publisher A.G. Sulzberger was born in 1980, just a year before the first millennials. They emerged with their own ideas about how the news business should operate, as cable and online sites pulled journalism toward opinion and advocacy.