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
More on Politics
International
Other Big Stories
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week on whether a federal judge in a single district has the power to block a policy nationwide. Should judges have that power? No. Nationwide injunctions strike at the heart of the U.S. constitutional order and create economic chaos. The system "transforms courts into de facto legislatures, issuing national policy through preliminary injunctions," Brandon Smith writes for The Hill. Yes. Nationwide injunctions preserve constitutional rights and prevent multiple judges from setting conflicting rules. "It's odd for anyone concerned with efficiency and conserving public funds to complain about a single judge having national injunction power," David Carrillo and Brandon Stracener write for The Los Angeles & San Francisco Daily Journal.
Trump is not the first U.S. politician to sell the prospect of influence to foreign governments, but Congress can make him the last, Casey Michel writes. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on Trump's deal making and Maureen Dowd on the tragedy of Biden.
Believing: A poet traveled to the world's holiest places, searching for a faith. Vows: She wrote about the "36 Questions That Lead to Love." Now, she's married. Your pick: The Morning's most-clicked link yesterday was about a couple who sought a Florida starter home for $500,000. Trending online yesterday: Austria won the Eurovision Song Contest. The singer was JJ, 24, an operatic countertenor; his vocal range resembles that of a female mezzo-soprano. Lives Lived: Steve Kiner was an All-American linebacker at the University of Tennessee who played for three N.F.L. teams. He became well known for his candor about his drug use. He died at 77.
"Original Sin," by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson: Halfway through their measured, occasionally scathing indictment of the inner circle that fortified Biden until the final days of his candidacy, Tapper and Thompson recall a moment from the first presidential debate. Biden was flubbing answers, struggling to articulate basic facts about Covid and Medicare, when Tapper, who was moderating along with his CNN colleague Dana Bash, jotted a note on an iPad they were using to communicate with the control room. It said, "Holy smokes." Minutes later, Bash passed Tapper a slip of paper that said, "He just lost the election." This book unfolds around that note, exploring the slow build of a protective wall around Biden and the forces that tore it down. "Original Sin" comes from the perspective of seasoned journalists — Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios — who told the story of the showdown as they struggled to make sense of it themselves. More on books: The "American Dirt" backlash nearly stifled Jeanine Cummins. Now she has a new book.
This week's subject for The Interview is the historian and writer Rutger Bregman, whose new book, "Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference," is an attempt to entice elites to give up their lucrative jobs and instead dedicate themselves to improving the world. Materialism is real. A desire for status is real. So how do you incentivize someone who might be tempted to go into a line of work that you see as morally vacuous to instead pick a career that is morally ambitious? If people desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing and have that cottage on the beach, fine. People have the right to be boring. But I think there are quite a few people who work at Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who are looking for a way out. Your book has this implicit idea that there is a deficit of moral ambition in the United States. I want to press on that. One could say that the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was morally motivated. Or one could argue that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was morally driven. So what would account for the possibility that moral ambition on the right seems to be more ascendant than on the left? That's a good question. Ralph Nader in the late '60s and the '70s built this incredible movement of young people who were like: We're not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We're going to Washington to lobby for a good cause. At some point a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader because it was the coolest thing you could do. Right wingers looked at that model very carefully. They built this huge network of think tanks. They built a network of 5,000 clerks and lawyers and did so many strategic lawsuits, and that all culminated in the Dobbs decision. That's what it takes. Read more of the interview here.
Rediscover the mango. Match these famous quotes to their novels. Hang string lights outdoors.
The end of spring can bring a flurry of activity for both children and parents. In this week's Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Margaux Laskey offers recipes that can be prepped fast and ahead of time, including sheet-pan chicken and tomatoes with balsamic tahini, spinach yogurt dip, and slow-cooker butter chicken.
Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were initialize and tantalize. Can you put eight historical events — including the first air traffic controller, the development of calculus, and the coining of "hello" and "goodbye" — in chronological order? Take this week's Flashback quiz. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
|
