The New York Times and Our Freedom

A lesson from one week, and two attacks

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Everyone who reads this newsletter understands, I hope, that these are difficult times for press freedom in this country. Tonight will be the last time the oligarch who owns CBS will permit one of the President’s smartest critics to ridicule him. The FCC has been thoroughly corrupted, turned into a partisan weapon against free speech in a manner appalling even to Ted Cruz.

Back at CBS, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Trump’s key foreign ally, was recently offered his choice of interviewers by the TV neophyte currently leading the news division to ever-lower ratings. That executive remains in the job in which the oligarch placed her, presumably for political rather than business or journalistic reasons— although possibly not for long.

The Washington Post has had its editorial voice rendered at once only semi-coherent and totally ineffective, while most of its best journalists have been driven away by draconian cuts ostensibly necessitated by business concerns, even as its owner found the money to pay what amounts to a large bribe to the President’s wife.

There is, to be sure, still great reporting being done about the incompetence and rampant corruption of the regime. The same Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic are among the publications whose editors are still regularly willing to reveal hard truths, and Trump’s sagging popularity is, in part I believe, a consequence.

At the heart of it

All of this said, the center of independent journalism at the national level remains the New York Times, and two events last week reminded me of how much we all owe the Times for keeping the journalistic faith, and for having the institutional courage to resist the threats of the would-be autocrat and his cronies at home and abroad.

I will get to last week’s events in a minute, but before that I want to repeat what regular readers of this newsletter already know: I am not unaware of the limitations and imperfections of the Times. I hear often from friends, inside our industry and out, who are frustrated with this Times headline or that point of emphasis, and who despair that it is not doing enough to singlehandedly stem the onslaught. It is principally to well-meaning people like that that this week’s column is addressed.

Here is the context those critics and worriers are missing:

On May 11, Nick Kristof, a Times opinion columnist who has worked for the paper for 40 years and won two Pulitzer Prizes (one each as reporter and opinionator), wrote a horrifying piece on rapes of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, security service interrogators, prison guards and West Bank settlers. If you have not read the article yourself, you need to do so, even at 3700 words, and as unpleasant as that will be.

Kristof’s column cited a number of human rights reports, but he also spoke personally to 14 people who told him of their own sexual assaults. At least two of these were themselves journalists. Two Israeli agencies issued blanket denials to Kristof; the country’s national security minister declined to comment. None would answer detailed questions. The security service reportedly visited at least one of his sources after receiving queries for the piece, following which the source withdrew his permission for Kristof to use his name.

A former Israeli prime minister told Kristof that he “definitely” believes such sexual assaults occur. Importantly, Kristof’s piece did not by any means suggest that Israel was unique in having a problem of sexual assault by those in positions of power. He repeatedly referenced such brutalities by Hamas on and after October 7, and also noted episodes in Ethiopia, Sudan and the New York City Police Department. Let me hasten to add that I know Kristof, like all of our fellow human beings, is not perfect. Nor am I certain that every one of his sources is reliable. But the weight of his piece overall is overwhelming.

In response to this devastating account, Netanyahu accused Kristof and the Times of a “blood libel” and threatened to sue for defamation. (These allegations, by the way, are not what constitutes “blood libel,” and the Israeli government devalues that historically significant phrase when they deploy it so recklessly.) Netanyahu made a similar threat last year, over reporting about Gaza, and did not follow through.

Where would a foreign head of government get the idea to sue the New York Times for defamation? From the head of our own government.

Clogging the courts

Trump has one libel suit pending against the Times over reporting on his businees and finances; his second attempt at a complaint in the case is pending possible dismissal. Earlier suits, relating to an op-ed on Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and about coverage of his personal finances, were eventually dropped after being dismissed by trial courts. He has another suit against the Journal, about reporting on Jeffrey Epstein.

After CBS paid a thinly-disguised bribe in settlement of a bogus case about video editing to help ease the path for its sale by its prior owner to its current one, Trump has filed a similar case against the BBC. And in a game of Can You Top This?, the amounts sought grow ever higher: $10 billion! $15 billion!

Other Trump libel cases clogging the courts, now and in the past, have included as defendants the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Chicago Tribune, Bill Maher and the author of a critical Trump biography. Notably, while a couple of Trump cases have settled since he was re-elected, Trump has never prevailed in court in a defamation case against a news organization.

Netanyahu has not said where Israel plans to sue, but it presumably won’t be in this country, where seditious libel cases brought by government have been disfavored throughout American history, and essentially forbidden for more than a century.

Facts are not treasonous

Anyway, the Kristof column was last Monday. On Friday, winging his way back from a disappointing summit in China, Trump took a question from the Times’s White House and national security reporter, David Sanger, about whether and why he might renew the bombing of Iran. Sanger has also spent more than 40 years at the paper, and been a member of three Pulitzer-winning reporting teams. Trump responded by telling Sanger his writing was “sort of treasonous.”

Treason is the one crime defined in the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” It is punishable by death. Trump suggested Sanger should be executed for observing that 38 days of bombing “did not get the political changes in Iran” Trump seeks. That is, of course, simply a fact. We have all gotten too used to this sort of madness.

My point here is that it is most often the New York Times these days which is being accused of blood libel and treason by the authoritarians. The rest of us need to continue our occasional efforts to hold the Times to highest standards, and to call it out when it falls short. But week in and week out, we need also to rally around the Times, to justly celebrate it as the jewel of our industry, and to recognize that its adversaries are our own.

Correction: This piece has been revised to reflect the allegations of Trump’s latest case against the Times and to note that his earlier cases were dropped only after being dismissed.