MODERN TIMES
ON A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE SUMMER OF 2018, ARTHUR Gregg Sulzberger, a member of the fifth generation of the family that controls the New York Times, was changing the diaper of a member of the sixth, when the phone rang. Another mess: A few days earlier President Trump had invited Sulzberger, in his capacity as Times publisher, to a private meeting at the White House. Now a Trump tweet had not only made the meeting public but also asserted it had produced an unlikely meeting of minds: “Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”
Stock in ‘the failing New York Times’ runs three times its price a decade ago
What happened next amounts to the news as we’ve known it for decades. The Times put out a version of events contradicting the President’s. The White House doubled down. And the public took sides. But six months later, after accepting another White House invitation (this time on the record), Sulzberger sat down at a microphone and talked to someone else: the people who download The Daily, which is among the most popular podcasts in America and is produced by the New York Times. Listening is as different from reading as the Times of 10 years ago is from the news organization today, and it’s all there in “The President and the Publisher,” the Feb. 1 episode devoted to the meeting. From Sulzberger, you hear not only about the diaper, but also about waiting in the cold on Pennsylvania Avenue because the Secret Service didn’t know the publisher was coming. From Trump, there’s an evident boredom with questions of policy, then a plea delivered in honeyed tones: “But I came from Jamaica, Queens, Jamaica Estates, and I became President of the United States. I’m sort of entitled to a great story from my—just one—from my newspaper. I mean, you know.”
TRUMP TRIUMPHS is a pretty great story. It covered two-thirds of the front page the morning after an election result that three years later still draws attention from other vital matters, including the signal accomplishment of the slender, bald young man seated on the other side of the Resolute desk. The American landscape is littered with the husks of news outlets desiccated by the migration of life-giving attention from a page that folds to a page that glows. Worse, people tell pollsters they don’t even believe most of what they read on
