The Trump-Sulzberger Feud

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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A.G. Sulzberger (New York Times photo)

News that the new publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Gregg “A.G.” Sulzberger, went to the White House to implore President Trump to lay off the press brings to mind the story about a visit to President Reagan paid by an earlier publisher of the Times, Punch Sulzberger. Supposedly A.G.’s grandfather was in Washington on routine business, when Reagan, newly installed in the White House, heard that he was in town and invited him to lunch.

So Sulzberger suddenly found himself in the presidential dining room with not only Reagan but also the vice president and the secretary of state. Even for a seasoned publisher, it was a heady lunch. Afterward Punch telephoned his mother, Iphigene Sulzberger, the family matriarch. “Guess whom I had lunch with,” he exclaimed. His mother said she hadn’t a clue. So he told her: The president, the vice president, and the secretary of state.

“What did they want?” she replied.

The story may be apocryphal, but how the glory days have flown. Now it’s the publisher of the Times who wants something from the president. It wouldn’t have been an unreasonable request, either — save for the source. It is the Times that has sought to seize the van in a campaign by the press to topple this freely elected president. Where in the world does it get the standing to go into the White House with a special pleading that the president cut the press some slack?

We don’t gainsay for a moment that relations between the press and the president are at a nadir. Whose fault, though, is that? Not solely the press’s or the Times’s, of course. What makes the Times special is that in August 2016, in the homestretch of the presidential campaign, it publicly questioned, in a column on its own front page, whether the traditional principles of objectivity were appropriate with Mr. Trump. Its own chief editor then endorsed the abandonment of objectivity.

What a spot that put the Times in when Mr. Trump emerged as the president-elect. About Secretary Clinton’s chances of victory, after all, the Times had “lied” — we put the word in quotes because we mean it only in the sense that the Times itself has taken to using the word “lied” — right up into election day. It clearly hoped to fulfill its own prophecy. When the Blue Wall crumbled and, on the morning of the Trump era, the dust had cleared, the Times issued a wan apology.

Fair enough, people might have said had the Times’ apology been sincere. Instead, the Times fell into a total abandon, unleashing a campaign of disdain and distortion the likes of which journalism has rarely seen. It has been egging on a special prosecutor in hopes of driving Mr. Trump from office. It has raised the ratio of rhetoric to reporting to historic highs. And who’s to stop it? Under our constitutional system, the press is, and should be, sovereign.

What is shocking is for an officer of the Times to interrupt the paper’s campaign to go into the White House and to have “implored” — that’s the word Mr. Sulzberger used — the president for special dispensation. It’s like some industrial polluter going into the Oval Office to beg the president to restrain the EPA. A.G. Sulzberger later stresssed that he was not asking for Mr. Trump to soften his attacks on The Times but to “reconsider his broader attacks on journalism.”

That’s like the industrial polluter who insists he’s concerned about the broader economy. It’s still special pleading. Mr. Sulzberger went so far as to suggest that Mr. Trump’s attacks on journalists have put journalists in physical danger, particularly overseas. The demarche did little to chasten Mr. Trump; he promptly unleashed a new tirade of tweets, including one suggesting that the press’s own disclosures have put Americans in danger.

Let us say that we’ve rarely met a person who loved as much as we have what the Times once was. We want no part of Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the press has responsibilities. If the press were responsible, no one would need the First Amendment. It is needed precisely because the press has always been irresponsible. This is why the Times can run headlines like the one about how Mr. Trump is a “treasonous traitor.” If one is going to do that, though, it takes some brass to complain about presidential guff.


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