Pia Catton: Welcome to The New York Sun anniversary podcast. I’m Pia Catton, and I will be moderating a discussion between the founders of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, editor of the paper, and Ira Stoll, former managing editor. It’s great to be here with you two gentlemen. Thank you for joining me.

Seth Lipsky: Nice to be here with you, Pia.

Ira Stoll: Glad to be here, too.

Catton: The New York Sun is celebrating ten years since its move to a digital-only platform. The final print edition of The New York Sun was published on September 30, 2008, and today we’re just going to be taking a look at the past, present, and future of a great institution. I’m very happy to say that I was a part of it for a long time.

Seth, why don’t we start with politics. Let’s just jump in and think a little about your editorial page. Ira and Seth wrote many of our great editorials, and when we look back on that brand of conservatism, I would say that you two guys carved out a unique spot. You two were pro-immigration. You were pro-trade. The Sun today: Very supportive of President Trump. How do you square your support of Trump with your belief in pro-immigration and pro-trade policies?

Lipsky: The New York Sun is a pro-growth newspaper that believes in limited government and free markets. They are helped by the free movement of capital and the free movement of labor. These are themes that we were both were writing about before the Sun was launched in 2002, me at the Wall Street Journal and the Forward newspaper. Ira was managing editor of the Forward. Those still seem to be ideal elements of political economy and political liberty.

Catton: Ira, how do you see today’s political landscape when you take into consideration your Sun days? How do you think about what you would be writing today if the Sun were in print publication.

Stoll: You raise the trade and immigration issues, and I was writing and still am writing a weekly column that appears in the Sun and that appears some other places too. I was writing about it in the campaign and writing about the immigration and trade issues, and I find Trump on both of these a little bit hard to read, like he kind of straddles the issues.

He claims he’s for free trade, he just wants a better deal, he wants fairer trade. So when he’s threatening to impose these tariffs or tear up these trade agreements, he can’t come right out and say it’s all just a negotiating ploy to get concessions and then get a better deal, but there’s a lot of signaling that that is what is happening. I think that’s one reason why the markets have taken it with such relative calm.

On the immigration stuff, I mean during the campaign he was talking about building this wall, and a couple of times he was talking about the importance of this wall having a big beautiful door to welcome people in. I think that in one of his books he talked about making sure that people trained in American universities could have visas.

Trump himself is a son of an immigrant and is married to an immigrant. So, you know, I think what’s coming from some of the people around him on immigration issues is more restrictionist than Trump himself may be. Or it may just be a case of Trump trying to be political and speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

Lipsky: At the end of the day, we have favored jobs and growth, economic growth, and Trump has performed brilliantly on that. The employment picture in America has been soaring during his presidency. The Sun has argued from the beginning that the way to deal with immigration is to make more jobs and growth, and we will see how valuable these immigrants are. We’ll be begging for more immigrants when we get this economy growing the way it should be.

Catton: Now you two have taken some positions on government leaders that have been, I would say, contradictory but enjoyably so. Let’s read from an editorial about Michael Bloomberg, who was mayor during the run of the Sun. This is a really fun editorial. I’m just going to read a bit, because though the Sun was very supportive of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, there were moments like this — I’m reading from an editorial called “Bloomberg’s Disappointing Side,” from September 2005. I’ll just start in on some of these adjectives:

“…it epitomizes everything that many of us see as the disappointing side of the mayor, his spinelessness, his tendency to pander, his disregard for political loyalty, his self-righteousness when it comes to what he defines as matters of ‘public health,’ his special-interest-driven politicking, accompanied by blather about how he isn’t motivated by politics, his allegiance only to himself, his abuse of public resources, his arrogance, his hypocrisy, his combination of grandiosity and smallness.”

Now this is a guy that you guys liked!

Lipsky: Well, that editorial ran two days before we endorsed him, and it was triggered by his opposition to the nomination to be Chief Justice of the United States of John Roberts. It was an infuriating moment, so the Sun just let him have it with both barrels. We still thought he was better than his opponents when it came to running the city. Remember, Roberts was nominated by a Republican president to be chief justice. Mayor Bloomberg was still a Republican mayor, and it just seemed absurd.

Stoll: In a way the Sun was vindicated on Roberts, at least from the perspective of Bloomberg. I mean, if Bloomberg had gotten what he wanted and Roberts hadn’t made it on the court, then Obamacare might have been struck down.

I mean, the conservatives were furious at Roberts for upholding elements of Obamacare, and I think on some other decisions the conservatives have felt disappointed by Roberts, who turned out to be a totally mainstream, center-right unifier of a pick, not another Thomas or Scalia or even Alito.

So I think that editorial looks even more spot on now, having seen Roberts on the court, and I wonder if we went back to Bloomberg about it whether even he would acknowledge that maybe he was wrong to oppose Roberts.

Catton: Let’s go back for a moment to the very first editorial, and I should note that what I just said is a pet peeve of Seth’s, and I’m sorry I said it — “the very first.” Seth one time had a list of phrases that we are not allowed to use, and “very first” was one. Because how could there be another “first”? Of course it was “very.” Another Seth prohibition was against using the Oxford English Dictionary.

Lipsky: On first reference. The only permissible dictionary on first reference is Webster’s Second International. The reason is that it’s the responsibility of a paper, in the Sun’s view, to retard the development of language, or not to willy nilly accept new meanings for words, until they’re time-proven. So we default to a single dictionary.

Catton: Just to give you a little flavor of what it was like to work at the Sun. I was once sent a copy of the OED. It was a giant door-stop of a book, and it was sitting on my desk, just volume one. Seth came by my desk and said “This is a fireable offense,” and he took this giant book and threw it in the trash. [laughs].

Anyway, moving on. So I would like to go back to the first editorial at The New York Sun. It was called “What We’re Smoking.” It was written off an interview that, Ira, you had with Mayor Bloomberg. In it he basically asks you what are you guys smoking that you would start a new daily newspaper.

Could you take us back to that editorial and that moment for a little bit, and I’ll preface it for listeners by saying that this editorial really concerned the idea of the privatization of the second avenue subway line. So what were you smoking, Ira?

Stoll: Well, it was me and Ben Smith, who was the city hall reporter of the Sun at the time. Bloomberg wasn’t asking us what we were smoking in terms of starting a print newspaper, although that might have been a good question. He was responding to my question about whether it might be possible to build the new subway lines with private funds, the way most of the subway was originally built with private capital.

The question was born out of a view on my part that the subways as they were run by the government weren’t working too well. It had taken decades to build this new Second Avenue subway, and as we wrote in other editorials, the Subways didn’t run too well in the rain, and they were dirty and they were overcrowded.

Since then I think that recognition has spread, as the conditions on the subway have gotten worse. The New York Times did a huge investigative series on it, pointing out the exorbitant salaries of some of the union subway workers and various ways that people have made a lot of money as the subway has gotten more crowded and broken down more and more often.

It’s interesting to consider whether if at that point, rather than dismissing it as crazy, Bloomberg had worked with the governor to try to pursue an alternative approach to public transportation, whether we might be in a different place now. That editorial ran in 2002. It’s now 2018. Certainly there have been subway lines that have been built in fewer than sixteen years.

Lipsky: Mayor Bloomberg’s incredulity at Ira’s wonderful question about why not just sell the Second Avenue subway in a way underlined the logic of the Sun to begin with. No one had ever gone into the mayor and said ‘why don’t you just sell it and let private enterprise just build it?’

It also illuminated one of my favorite facts about the Sun and why we picked up the flag of the Sun. It had a long streak of favoring private initiative in solving the city’s problems. The first subway in New York City was built in secret — it ran for one block — it was built by the New York Sun. I think Beach was the guy that did it.

Catton: Let’s just give listeners a moment. Who was Beach?

Lipsky: He was an early editor of the Sun, an owner of the Sun, I believe, and he secretly built a subway.

Catton: You can’t secretly build a subway, Seth.

Lipsky: He did secretly build a subway.

Catton: How do you secretly build a subway?

Lipsky: They dug out the ground under the Sun headquarters, and they built a one-block long, pneumatic tube subway in secret.

Catton: Where was this?

Lipsky: In Lower Manhattan.

Catton: Ok. Any fact-checkers out there want to challenge that, let me know.

Lipsky: That was for a subway in New York, and I think Ira’s question just really nailed the point that the Sun has always believed in. I still think they ought to sell the subway.

Stoll: It’s a point about the direction of the arrow of history that goes also to the current moment and what President Trump is trying to do. I mean, there’s an assumption that the percentage of stuff that is going to be run by the government is going to be constantly ever going up, and we came in with the idea that maybe that wouldn’t be so. Maybe the dial would be turned back. So far, if you look at the performance of the economy and the markets in the Trump administration, so far, so good. The story’s not over yet, and there’s a lot more to do. But I think there are some encouraging signs.

Catton: There was also a series that the Sun ran — and this is related to Trump — and I would say it’s a good point on Donald Trump’s side. This was back in 2005, when Donald Trump, just a plain old real estate developer, was objecting to the U.N. renovation. This was supposed to be a $1.2 billion renovation, actually, more than that, it would probably cost about $3 billion. At the time Donald Trump suggested that rather than renovating, the U.N. should move down to the World Trade Center. You guys ran a series of articles about this. I think it’s actually a pretty good point, when you look back at it. Why renovate when you could build?

Lipsky: First of all the reporter on that was done by a brilliant reporter named Meghan Clyne. She wrote extensively about this problem, and those stories came to the attention of a senator called Jeff Sessions. He then teamed up with Trump to press this issue about funding of the U.N. Trump felt it could be done for half the price. It’s conceivable that’s when the partnership, so to speak, between Trump and Jeff Sessions began, courtesy between Meghan Clyne of the New York Sun’s reporting, and the rest is history. The Sun came to the view that the United Nations should not be in New York at all.

Catton: Where was your suggestion for it?

Lipsky: Some place other than America. And that the U.N. had become tragically invested in isolating and even destroying Israel, and we just thought it wasn’t a logical U.S. project any more. Some of the agencies might be broken off, but people were shocked at those editorials.

Catton: Let’s just talk about the U.N. reporting that the Sun did, because as I recall Benny Avni was a great addition to the Sun.

Lipsky: Benny Avni is one of the greatest full-time U.N. reporters in the whole history of the institution. I think Ira hired him early on to be the Sun’s correspondent. He did most of our U.N. reporting. One of the biggest stories we broke, though, concerned the discovery that the son of the secretary general, Kofi Annan, had been employed for longer than previously disclosed by one of the contractors for the “Oil for Food” program.

And that scoop was by another brilliant reporter who covered the U.N. for the Sun, albeit as a freelancer, Claudia Rosett, formerly of the Wall Street Journal. So we had a wonderful record on the U.N. between Meghan Clyne and Benny Avni and Claudia Rosett.

Catton: Let’s take a moment to look back at the management of the Sun. Ira, how many reporters did we have, and how did you kind of allocate resources. I remember it as being a great time in my life as a reporter, dance critic, fashion editor, and then I wrapped up as cultural editor, which I deeply loved; it was a great experience for me all the throughout the time that I was there writing and editing. But Ira, what was that time like for you.

Stoll: I think that at the peak we had about 55 news or editorial employes. Some of those were editors, some of them were reporters. We had a bureau in Washington, we had a bureau in Albany. For a while we had a reporter who was based in Cairo. We sent reporters to Iraq and to Darfur. For a small newspaper, there was a team. It wasn’t just the number of them, they were really talented, hard-working, smart, highly-motivated individuals who are now, most of them, off doing good journalism in other places, and it was a lot of fun for me, too.

Catton: One of the distinctive features of the Sun was its arts section. Seth at some point you determined that this newspaper should have visual arts on its front page, in addition to its own free-standing arts section. Tell us about the philosophical underpinnings to having such a commitment to the arts.

Lipsky: The discovery of just how important a cultural section could be to a paper happened to me when I was editor of the Forward and a young copy-editor candidate walked in named Jonathan Rosen, who was an obvious hire and I just snapped him, and 30 minutes later he came over and said, “Maybe I could start a literary section for you,” and I said, “Oh, that would be a great Idea.” And that was the last instruction I ever gave him. He just built this wonderful cultural section in the Forward.

Then, when we were staring the Sun, Ira Stoll hired Robert Messenger, and he built the cultural section. When he left for another publication, we hired Robert Asahina and you to build the cultural section. I think culture is a great story in and of itself, but culture also is a kind of balm that is a great counterpart to the rough and tumble of commerce and politics and scandal, and I just love it.

We began running paintings and other cultural pieces in the center of the front page. We had a business manager, publisher at the time called Ron Weintraub who pressed to make the cultural section a daily second section, and I think that was a good idea, and that further boosted the importance of the cultural section in our scheme. We had great critics and analytical sports coverage, and it all came together nicely.

Catton: One of my favorite memories of reporting for the Sun was an evening where I attended an art gallery dinner. This was a situation where you walked in and saw this table set for something like 250 people. I mean it was just enormous, it was beautiful — silver candelabra, very elegant, and as it was going along we noticed that there was a kind of bridge being built in this gallery space and these kind of interesting men building it.

They were working like busy little bees. It was also sponsored by a fashion house, everyone was looking very glamorous, and these gentlemen continued to build their bridge over the top of this extremely long dinner table, and we’re instructed to go and sit at our dinner seats and we eat dinner. Meanwhile these men are continuing to construct a giant bridge over the table and across the walls of the gallery.

At some point we are directed to pay our attention to the men on the bridge. They had formed a kind of trail and they were each standing about 20 feet away from each other, and they proceeded to urinate into buckets on the bridge, one after another, and the crowd went wild. When I went back to the office the next day and tried to describe this whole situation to Seth, he said there is no way that you are permitted to write about this in a positive way.

But I think I did. I think I wrote a story that captured the moment, but I was asked to include the phrase that said, “The evening’s activities were ridiculous.” These kinds of moments were definitional, they were defining in my experience of reporting and writing. Because, look, the Sun was a friend of contemporary work and modern work, but it was also a friend of standards and classicism and landscape painting.

Lipsky: I have a slightly different memory of that. I actually thought the existence of such a stunt at a dinner party in the art world of New York was kind of a scoop. I think, as I recall, you were the only one who got that scoop, and it was a cultural marker of the time, this crazy fountain.

Catton: Fountain, yes. That’s a great way of putting it.

Lipsky: One of my favorite cultural stories was when we heard that Mayor Bloomberg had okayed the creation under the Brooklyn Bridge of fake waterfalls. I don’t know if you remember that.

Catton: Yes, absolutely.

Lipsky: We asked the conceptual artist doing this if we could have an illustration, and they said they’d promised in to the New York Times. So we commissioned our own art department to imagine what it might look like, and got it on the front page a day before the Times.

Catton: I believe that was Olafur Eliasson. And that also brings up another point about public art. The Sun was first against the “Gates” and then we were for it. What happened there?

Lipsky: That brings up another of my favorite editorials, and it was headlined “Correction.” That was when on the 150th anniversary of Central Park we rescinded our opposition to the creation of the Park in the first place. Then, not long after that, “Gates” was unveiled. That was a Christo creation, an art work erecting hundreds, maybe thousands of gates along the walkways of Central park. And wrapping each gate in a kind of saffron cloth.

It had struck us as a ridiculous concept at the beginning, but what changed our opinion, which we wrote about in an editorial, was just how beautiful it was. It was a strikingly beautiful scene, with a kind of greenish toned, greenish brown tone to the park, contrasted with the color-wheel-opposite of saffron, and it was really gorgeous, and we wrote about that.

Catton: Ira, what’s your recollection of the “Gates”-gate basically?

Stoll: I went to see it with my family, and was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was, not just the view of the gates, but being there with all the other people who were also viewing the gates. I remember after they came down, the artist and the city were quite closed-mouth about what was going to happen to the gates afterwards. They didn’t want any people grabbing souvenirs or whatever.

I think it was Konrad Fiedler, our photographer, and I can’t remember the reporter, it might have been Bradley Hope, who followed the truck with the remnants of the gates to some plastic resin melting down factory in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or something, and came back with the littles pebbles that were the remnants with what used to be the gates, and shared them with some of the people in the newsroom.

With the editorial, it’s a good example of being fact- and evidence-driven and being open minded and letting reality rather than a pre-existing fixed point of view drive our opinions. I think that’s the way people should be.

Catton: That leads me to look back again to “What We’re Smoking.” And I’ll quote: “The notion seems to have taken hold that the structures that have dominated New York are ossified and unchangeable, whether they may be subways or, say, the stadium setup or the welfare laws or the public school system or the marginal tax rate or, we don’t mind pointing out, the number of daily newspapers that can be supported in the biggest, newsworthy city in the country.”

Ira, that was from your first editorial in 2002. Let’s talk about your last editorial, which I believe was called “The Arc of the Sun.”

Stoll: So I guess the first editorial had the optimism and the dynamism of New York City, which we really tried to capture while we were publishing, the sense that the city was always changing. I think that last editorial, I think it mentioned the last issue of The New York Sun that had come out on January 4, 1950. I’m looking at it here in my office in Boston. It’s up on my wall. Some of the headlines are “Dewey Pledges No Tax Rise, Hits Truman Health Plan”; “Dewey Asks City Rent Law”; “Mercury at 59.8 Sets New Mark.” So you’re looking at taxes, health care, rent control, record high temperature —

Catton: Climate change!

Stoll: That was 1950. That could give you the impression that things are not changing, and it’s just the same fight that we’re having over and over again and I guess there’s some truth to that. But it’s also true that we looked at that front page from 1950 again in 2001 and 2002 and we started a new newspaper around some of those issues, and were inspired by some of those ideas in the editorial talking about free enterprise and good citizenship and equality before the law and fighting against socialism and communism and governmental extravagance, the encroachments of bureaucracy in the form of governmental paternalism that eats into the marrow of private initiative and industry. And so from 1950 to 2002 was 62 years. Who knows? It’s been 10 years since the print Sun ceased publication. Seth is plugging along admirably online. Another 52 years from now, someone else may come along and be inspired to try again. Stranger things have happened.

Catton: Seth, what do you see as the future of journalism?

Lipsky: I tend to be an optimist about journalism, but I do think the current political scene has brought journalism to a new low. The Sun endorsed Donald Trump. We endorsed Ted Cruz in the New York primary. When he lost, we endorsed Trump in the general election. We did it on Republican principles. We favored the pro-growth economic platform, we opposed the Iran deal, we favored a military buildup, and we favored moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. So we supported Trump.

When at three in the morning it became clear that he had won, we had an editorial up by breakfast saying, among other things, that the press was the big loser in the campaign. You remember, the New York Times had declared it was time to end objectivity. That was in a column by its press critic on the front page. It was endorsed by its editor. Nearly every paper in the country had miscalled the election, and the other news outlets, too.

Not all of them by the way. Bob Tyrrell of the American Spectator predicted this thing some 15 months out; it was just absolutely incredible. Much of the press has joined with the campaign of resistance to the decision the American states made in electing Trump, and it’s kind of a dark moment for the press.

Our approach to it has been to try to maintain this editorial voice that focuses on principles over politics and the deep Constitution, not just the deep state, but the deep Constitution, as I like to call it, and the principles that we believe in, which are equality under the law, free markets, free people. We’ve been working that. And I think people are responding.

Catton: You’ve also created a new kind of model for yourself. You are now reader supported.

Lipsky: That’s a good point. Readers are stepping up, increasingly so, becoming sustaining members of the Sun. One can still read it for free, but sustaining members keep it alive. We run Ira’s column, which holds the number one and number two places in the hit list of the traffic generators for the paper. He’s got the two top record spots. It’s a great column. No other column quite like it in America. Conrad Black, his column runs in the Sun; it has a huge fan base. So we’re optimistic.

Catton: Ira, how about you, how do you see the future of journalism shaping out. Where are we right now?

Stoll: Well, you’ve got the president of the United States calling the fake news the enemy of the people. I’m a historian. So I know there’s a long history of acrimony between administrations and newspapers. Not just Nixon, but all of the administrations have had their innings with the press.

Catton: I think it’s fair to say, though, that this is at different level.

Stoll: I think you could debate how different it is. I see it as more similar than different. I think the press clearly feels under siege. You have the Boston Globe and all these other newspapers running editorials defending themselves, many of which were quite self-congratulatory.

Catton: Which really only played into the existing, I mean, it just created more fuel for the fire.

Lipsky: The low point so far was probably during the “Quasi War” around 1800, when President Adams turned around and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts and started putting editors in jail. Benjamin Bache of the Aurora —

Stoll: Don’t forget Judith Miller.

Lipsky: — [Benjamin Bache] died awaiting trial. Those were serious times. That was a serious —

Catton: This is nothing!

Lipsky: — seminal battle. Trump hasn’t put a single journalist in jail that I’m aware of.

Catton: Not one single journalist in jail!

Lipsky: The point is that I do think it’s an old story. You know, in the years when I wrote a humor column I wrote a column called “Pointers for Presidents.” This was during the Reagan era. The last of the ten points for a successful president is to always stay on the bad side of the press. You know, Reagan was on the bad side of the press and he won 49 of the 50 states.

Catton: Ira, is there any other part of the Sun that you would like to look back on or reflect about.

Stoll: The period that The New York Sun published, New York was coming back after the attacks of September 11, and it was doing that in a really strong way. The United States was expanding its power to the Middle East in a very ambitious way. And I think the period we’re now in is marked by more humility in certain ways, more modest goals. Never mind all the talk about making America great again. There’s a diminished ambition globally, and maybe even in New York. Part of the excitement of the Sun in that era had to do with that resurgent, post-9/11 patriotism and feeling of possibility in both the city and the world — and unity, the post 9/11 American flag-flying. I think we’re still kind of groping to recapture that as a country, and it’s sad in a way that some of that is lost.

Catton: I would add to your point about patriotism and just say that you two are probably some of the most patriotic people that I know. The march that we’ve been listening to in the “intros” and “outros” of this podcast are important, right? These are national symbols. We don’t hear national marches so much anymore. The music that is included here is the “National Emblem,”* which is a favorite march of Seth’s.

And if you take a look at the logo of The New York Sun, there’s liberty and justice, two figures framing the actual Sun, and that design is more than just a newspaper symbol. It’s really a symbol of the country, and I think that Seth and Ira you two express that, and it really reflects that in your writing and work over time. Any closing thoughts, Seth?

Lipsky: I agree with what Ira said. There was a really special moment between 2001, when American began to rebuild itself after these attacks, and the years of the Sun. The reassessment that is going on today under president Trump — his re-thinking Europe, his re-thinking NATO, his re-thinking NAFTA — I agree with some of these, and I disagree with some of them. But he’s not the only leader in the world who’s doing this.

Brexit, I began covering the European Union, I went to Brussels and lived there for six years to cover the European Union, and I began to re-think the European Union then, and came to realize that it was a fundamentally anti-American structure. It was completely illogical for Great Britain to belong to the EU. You could say that I was for Brexit before Brexit.

Catton: When was this?

Lipsky: I was there between 1984 and 1990 as a newspaper correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Boris Johnson was later there as a newspaper correspondent for the London Telegraph, I think it was — it might have been the Times; I think it was for the Telegraph — and he reached the same conclusion. It was illogical for Britain to belong to that.

I think these are healthy things, personally, and I’m quite optimistic that out of this reassessment that we’ll find a new and better footing for the future, as America has always done (like we did on the Central Park “Gates”). So I tend to be optimistic, and I tend to like the ability that the Sun has given to its writers to take fresh looks at things.

Catton: And you continue to do that at www.nysun.com. So congratulations, Seth, on keeping The New York Sun alive, shining. And Ira, congratulations on continuing to contribute to it. I think we’ll wrap it up, and please send any comments or questions that you might have for Ira (editor@futureofcapitalism.com) and Seth (editor@nysun.com) to the New York Sun.

Stoll: Thanks a lot. It was fun.

Lipsky: Thank you, Pia.

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* Strains of the “National Emblem” at the beginning and end of this podcast are from a recording by the United States Air Force Heritage of America Band.