Opinion: A free people need a free press, May 13th, 2025 by A.G. Sulzberger. Mr. Sulzberger is the publisher of the New York Times. This essay was originally delivered as a talk at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs on Tuesday.
The role of a free and independent press in a healthy democracy is under direct attack with increasingly aggressive efforts to curtail and punish independent journalism. I don't believe it's an overstatement to say that this anti-press campaign threatens the special formula that has made the American model so successful for nearly 250 years. A free people need a free press.
Across the world, we've seen democracy in retreat. And for aspiring strong men seeking to undermine the laws and norms and institutions that underpin a healthy democracy, the free press is usually one of the first targets. It's no secret why. Once you've constrained the ability of journalists to provide independent information to the public about those in power, it becomes far easier to act with impunity.
From its beginning, our nation has recognized journalism as an essential ingredient for democratic self-governance. The founding fathers enshrined this insight in the first amendment, making the press the only profession explicitly protected in the constitution. The generations of presidents, lawmakers, and supreme court justices that followed largely championed and defended press freedoms.
Behind their support was a bipartisan recognition that the press plays a crucial role in our success as a nation. Three roles actually, each of which also maps precisely to current challenges undermining the nation's civic health.
As a historic surge of misinformation erodes our shared reality, the press ensures the flow of trustworthy news and information the public needs to make decisions, whether about elections, the economy, or their lives. As polarization and tribalism strain our societal bonds, the press fosters the mutual understanding that allows a diverse divided nation to come together with common purpose. As rising inequality and impunity undermine confidence in the American promise, the press asks the tough questions and exposes the hidden truths that enable the public to hold powerful interests accountable.
All over the world, we have seen escalating pressure on the ability of the press to play these roles. A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. Many more are subjected to campaigns of harassment, intimidation, surveillance, and censorship.
Those efforts have been perhaps most obvious and intense in authoritarian states like China and Russia. But a more insidious playbook for undermining the press has emerged in places like Hungary and India, places where democracy persists, but in a more conditional way under leaders who were elected legitimately and then set about undermining checks on their power.
The experience in those eroding democracies offers sobering lessons in how attacks on journalists are often precursors to attacks on a broader suite of democratic institutions, rights, and norms such as free expression, fair competition, and the even-handed administration of justice.
This anti-press playbook is now being used here in this country, and it could not come at a more difficult time for the American press. The business model that funded original reporting is failing. About a third of all newsroom jobs have disappeared in the past 15 years. Hundreds of newspapers have gone out of business and they continue to close at a rate of more than two a week.
That economic pressure has been increased by the difficulty of operating in an information ecosystem dominated by a handful of tech giants. They control the flow of attention online, but most have shown something between apathy and open hostility to independent journalism and little concern about the quality of information they pass along to the public.
In short, a vastly smaller, financially weakened, and technologically disintermediated profession now finds itself facing the most direct challenge to its rights and legitimacy as well. Some cheer this state of affairs. I'm all too aware that mine isn't the most popular profession.
Too much of modern media is devoted to entertaining rather than informing, to stirring up anger and fear rather than advancing understanding, to amplifying whatever is trending rather than focusing on what really matters. In a country with too many pundits and too few reporters, it's not a coincidence that trust in the media has plummeted.
Even the best news organizations, the ones with the highest standards, the most rigorous processes, the best track record of putting the public interest first, don't always get it right. At the Times, we run a daily correction section for good reason. And in our long history, you'll find we've made our share of bigger mistakes as well.
But independent journalism is designed to be self-correcting. We constantly ask the same questions of ourselves that we hear from our critics. Were we open-minded enough to unexpected facts? Were we skeptical enough of prevailing narratives? Have we taken enough time to really understand the issues and the communities we're writing about? Were we too soft, too tough? Did we double check, triple check, then check again?
When we make mistakes, we try to own them, learn from them, and do better. And yet, even with its imperfections, the press remains essential.
I want to share a story about the relationship between two illustrious Notre Dame alumni. It offers a model for navigating the natural tensions between power and the press. On one side was the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, who served as president of Notre Dame for 35 years. On the other side, an ambitious student journalist named Bob Anson, who helped found The Observer, a campus newspaper still going strong.
Amid the political and cultural tumult of the mid 1960s, Father Ted, perhaps generously, perhaps hoping to cultivate a friendly voice in the student press, offered the young journalist a standing invitation to drop by the president's office. One might think that given that access and the imbalance of power between president and student, Anson would be eager to protect their relationship.
But Anson understood the importance of journalistic independence, and he proved unafraid of wading into the most contentious campus issues. For Father Ted, the Observer became a persistent headache, one that went so far as to call for his resignation. For Anson, the university's frustration with his journalism was so great that he faced calls for his expulsion.
The story could have ended with his graduation, but a few years later, Anson was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers while on assignment for Time magazine. Father Ted helped lead the push to secure his release, even appealing to the Pope for help. Anson would later call Father Ted, my guardian angel, who moved heaven and earth trying to save my life.
Father Ted reached for a different spiritual metaphor. Freeing Anson, he quipped, was like getting the devil out of hell. And sure enough, it wasn't long before Anson was back at Notre Dame reporting a story that would cast an unflattering light on the university, its beloved football team, and once again, Father Ted.
But Father Ted never lost sight of the value of journalism, even though it challenged public figures such as himself. You were a student editor, he later told Anson, with whom he maintained a lifelong relationship. All student editors are trouble. Goes with the territory.
The free press may be trouble, but it goes with the territory of a healthy democracy. Even the most cursory read of the news shows that our democracy is undergoing a significant test. Foundational laws and norms are being undermined or swept aside. Rule of law, separation of powers, due process, intellectual freedom.
And the press is far from the only American institution that finds itself under pressure. We're seeing direct efforts to go after government agencies, universities, cultural institutions, research organizations, advocacy groups, and law firms. We're even seeing challenges to the authority of Congress and the courts to serve as a check on executive power.
Like all of those institutions, the free press is imperfect. And like all of those institutions, the free press is a load-bearing pillar in a free society. In the words of President Ronald Reagan, there is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the founding fathers called our noble experiment in self-government.
A subservient press, meanwhile, makes it easier for leaders to keep secrets, to rewrite reality, to undermine political rivals, to put self-interest above public interest, and ultimately to consolidate and cement their power. In the words of the political director for Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister often cited as a model for President Trump, whoever controls a country's media controls the country's mindset and through that the country itself.
Let me pause to say plainly that as a champion of independent journalism, I believe our job is to cover political debates, not to join them. We are not the resistance. We are nobody's opposition. We are also nobody's cheerleader. Our loyalty is to the truth and to a public that deserves to know it.
That is the distinct role that independent news organizations like the Times play in our democracy. That means we will cover the Trump administration fully and fairly regardless of what attacks it sends our way. We will continue to provide unmatched coverage of its abuses and failures. We will also cover its successes and achievements and explore its support across a large and diverse swath of the country.
Holding fast to our independence in the face of intimidation is not appeasement or acquiescence as some would suggest. It's certainly not a form of complicity. It's a refusal to allow ourselves to be pressured by anyone into distorting our mission to follow the facts and bring the public the full story.
However, as the steward of a leading news organization, I also have a responsibility to speak out about any efforts by the government to undermine the public's right to know. Over the decades, my predecessors and I have done so under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Those administrations have certainly had their complaints as well.
President Joe Biden and his aides, for example, frequently lashed out at journalists and news organizations who dared to ask questions about his age and fitness, even as they went to historic lengths to avoid unscripted exchanges with reporters. I know this firsthand because Times journalists reported deeply on these questions and called attention to his evasion of the press. President Biden's White House and his supporters attacked them for it constantly.
President Trump, in contrast, continues to make himself more available to reporters than previous presidents. Yet, in every other respect, he has taken the naturally tense relationship between the White House and the press to an increasingly combative place. You can see this most clearly in the language he uses.
He started with schoolyard insults such as the failing New York Times that escalated to more direct attacks on integrity, the fake news New York Times. Before long, the president was attacking the Times with the very label Stalin used to justify crackdowns, the enemy of the people. If that was too subtle, soon the rhetoric was ratcheted up to include words that more plainly sit in the criminal code, like treason.
Today, he's openly musing about jailing reporters and joking about the prospect of prison rape. The publisher, too, he likes to add.
Shortly after I stepped into my role as publisher in 2018, I received an invitation to meet with President Trump. Despite his bombastic rhetoric, he is a longtime reader of the Times who loved chatting with our reporters and sending them signed clippings of articles that caught his eye. Removed from the rally stage, he admits to being an admirer of what he's called my newspaper and a great, great American jewel, a world jewel.
In a civil meeting in the Oval Office and another there that followed, I challenged President Trump directly on his anti-press rhetoric. I told him he should feel free to continue to attack the Times or me personally if he liked. The Times wanted no favors. But I did want to make clear his rhetoric was playing a dangerous role in countries where democratic norms were more tenuous.
All over the world, power-hungry leaders were greedily interpreting the American president's attacks on the press as a sign that going after journalists was now fair game. You may be unsurprised to hear that my argument did not win the day. Indeed, President Trump professed some pride at having popularized the term fake news.
In the years since, more than 70 countries passed laws supposedly aimed at curtailing fake news. In reality, many of them took aim not at misinformation, but at independent journalists who dare to provide the public with truthful reporting about the actions of those in power.
Since 2016, the number of countries deemed to have a good record of protecting press freedom by Reporters Without Borders dropped by more than half. Effectively, in his first term, President Trump exported his anti-press rhetoric to illiberal leaders abroad. Those leaders took that rhetoric as permission to develop and implement an aggressive new playbook for cracking down on journalists.
Now, in President Trump's second term, this vicious cycle has been completed as the anti-press playbook he helped inspire has been imported back to the United States. That makes this a perilous moment. The shift from words to action.
My colleagues and I spent much of the last year studying the tools and tactics of this new anti-press playbook, which range from sowing distrust and normalizing harassment to misusing the civil courts and abusing state power. The overarching aim is straightforward. To undermine the social and financial standing of independent news organizations, to sideline journalists willing to ask tough questions and inform the public honestly, and to elevate media figures willing to echo the party line.
If the free press is designed to be a watchdog, the playbook's goal is to tame it so it becomes a lap dog. Consider the fate of Hungary. Prime Minister Orban's allies now control more than 80% of the country's news outlets, which effectively function as government mouthpieces.
The pockets of independents that endure face intense political, legal, and economic pressure. Messaging from pro-government media is so pervasive and so relentless that it's the only thing most people read or hear. Corruption has gone largely unchecked. Businesses operate in an environment where political connections matter most.
The rights of disfavored groups are steadily cut back. Yet, a badly weakened opposition has struggled to even make these arguments to the public, let alone use them to win elections because of its limited ability to reach voters through the media.
