Reader Responses to Public Enemy No. 1

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger ’03 is, indeed, publisher of the failing New York Times, perhaps not failing in the business sense but in the journalistic sense. The fact that “He has since made news by chiding Trump for his ‘divisive’ and ‘dangerous’ media-baiting rhetoric” shows part of the reason why. Perhaps the Times should cease its unbalanced attacks on Trump. Whatever happened to reporting both sides of issues fairly? Can Sulzberger honestly say the Times’s reporting on gun control has been without favor, fully covering both sides of the subject? How about climate and immigration/the wall? Does the Times use the accurate description “illegal alien” or the phony term “undocumented immigrant” for those in this country in violation of the immigration laws?  Sulzberger certainly has his work cut out for him if he wants to rescue the Times from its failure.

In “Public Enemy No 1,” A.G. Sulzberger is lionized in text and photo as the paladin of a free press. In fact, President Trump did not call the Times or Mr. Sulzberger PE#1. The President tweeted, Feb 2017: “The FAKE NEWS media…is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” He listed, first, the “failing @nytimes.” It is “fake news” the President is calling out.

The BAM story makes not one reference to a single intellectual position or political principle of Mr. Sulzberger. That must be deliberate. Because, you see, the story itself is the political position with Mr. Sulzberger the hero, President Trump the villain. The issues, the evidence, the pros and cons? The story treats all that as settled.

The tactic is but one from the big box of fake news tricks: “Oh! But we weren’t writing about his politics!” No, the very act of publishing the story—with that cover photo, that title—is the politics.

Thank you for Julia Klein’s excellent cover story on A.G. Sulzburger. I was interested to see that A.G. was drawn to journalism (aside from family tradition) by a class at Brown in news feature writing taught by my former Providence Journal colleague Tracy Breton. And then, to see that his apprenticeship in news became a two-year stint at the Journal, where I was lucky to get my basic training with 13 years of reporting. Big survivors like the Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio are important national watchdogs. But local and regional papers like the Providence Journal and Atlanta Journal-Constitution (where I later worked) need to be well-supported. They raise up the next generation of journalists, passing on time-hewn practices and values.

The recent profile of Arthur Gregg Sulzburger ’03 offered BAM an opportunity to cover issues crucial to journalism and American politics (“Public Enemy No 1,” July/August). For instance, on October 31, 2016, the New York Times published a mistaken article titled, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The Columbia Journalism Review observed that from October 31, 2016, to November 3, 2016, the Times published “as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” (“Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media,” Columbia Journalism Review, December 5, 2017). Does Sulzberger think such stories contribute to “the decline of trust in journalism,” as he put it? Has he asked Times staff to analyze their 2016 coverage in preparation for reporting on the 2020 Presidential election? If BAM had asked these types of questions, the result might have been enlightening.