In a Divided Era, the New York Times’s Publisher Makes a Stand

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David Remnick: This is The Political Scene and I'm David Remnick.

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David Remnick: Five-odd years ago, I sat down in this studio with the man who had taken on the most powerful position in the most important news-gathering organization in the country, possibly the world. A. G. Sulzberger, not yet 40 at that time, had been named the publisher of The New York Times. He is the sixth of the Ochs Sulzberger family to run the paper. Under him, the Times has rebounded from a period of constant cuts and potential sale to a position of financial stability.

It remains though an extremely tense time in the news business. Donald Trump's rhetoric about fake news and enemies of the people has had real and lasting traction on much of the country. People like Bari Weiss who resigned from the Times a few years ago characterized the place as being in the thrall of the dread forces of workism. At the same time, left-leaning critics argue that The Times has been too cautious, too reluctant to call things as they are in an era of authoritarian demagogues.

1. G. Sulzberger: It's been really striking to me that the people making the strongest arguments, the people who are putting the intellectual muscle behind this conversation about what is the role of journalists, should the role of journalists be to push for a certain cause or party or group or ideology or even a specific outcome on a specific issue or should the role of journalists be to independently follow the truth and try to arm the public with the facts and the context and the understanding it needs for this giant diverse democracy to come together and self-govern.

David Remnick: Which is your view and the traditional view at the Times?

1. G. Sulzberger: That's my view and the traditional view at the Times. I've been struck that a lot of the intellectual firepower has been making the opposite case and that the traditionalists in the ranks, I think, have long believed that long-standing view speaks for itself. That the argument makes itself. I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn't make itself.

David Remnick: Sulzberger has just published a long essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, and it's called Journalism's Essential Value. What he's arguing there may sound like conventional wisdom to earlier generations of journalists, so I asked him where and how it gets difficult and why he's chosen to make this argument now.

1. G. Sulzberger: Let me just give a very specific example. Since the war in Ukraine started, we have had at least a dozen journalists on the ground every single day of the conflict so my guess is that every one of the journalists on the ground wake up every day thinking they are going to tell a story about Russian aggression, Russian atrocities, how Russia is hurting this country that they invaded in an unjust war, but one day, last year, one of the Times reporters woke up and found a different story and he found that the Ukrainian government was using cluster munitions. Cluster munitions are internationally banned and they're internationally banned for a reason because they disproportionately kill civilians and particularly children.

On that day, he told that story. He didn't do that so that we could balance a ledger and on one hand, Russia does bad things, on the other hand, so does Ukraine. He did it because it was true. I think all sorts of people may question, with everything that Ukraine's been through, why would you point to misconduct on the Ukrainian side? In fact, the Ukrainian government was angry enough about that reporting that they tried to eject that reporter from the country. Why? Because It's the truth. Because these are internationally banned for a reason, because if independent actors don't track their usage, that international ban is toothless, [chuckles] and ultimately if the press decides that the good guys can use it, it leads you to two questions. Are we always right about calling who the good guy is? Then two, doesn't that basically validate the bad guys using it too?

David Remnick: Joe Khan, your choice for executive editor, has said that, "You can't be committed to independent journalism and be agnostic about the state of democracy." What I'd ask is is the New York Times explicitly pro-democracy and how does that align with Walter Lippmann who you quote in your piece who argued that journalists ought not to be serving a cause no matter how good? Should the times be serving the cause of liberal democracy, which is now, I think we can all agree, under horrendous threat, and not just abroad in corners of place for foreign correspondents to cover, but right here at home?

1. G. Sulzberger: The Times serves the cause of the truth [chuckles] and an informed public. The challenge always, always comes not in the top line question, so do you support democracy? It comes in the questions that cascade underneath it. If you are a Democrat and you believe that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy, is it then anti-democracy for an organization like yours, David, to produce reporting that raises questions about the actions, conduct, or fitness of President Biden? You could argue with it. That is anti-democracy. Couldn't you?

David Remnick: I think there are people that argue sometimes, I don't want to paint caricatures of them, that if you're very critical or you're reporting as hypercritical of Biden, that somehow serves the cause of his defeat and therefore the rise with the re-rise of Donald Trump or the like.

1. G. Sulzberger: Exactly. That's the exact argument that the Ukrainian government made. I could point to 10 other example. I could actually point to 100 other examples. We hear that our coverage maybe independently each piece on Silicon Valley is worthy and defensible, but from inside Silicon Valley, we hear that together it's disproportionate.

David Remnick: 18 years ago, 2004, this is long before you took the reins, the first public editor of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent, published a column headlined, and you quote it in your essay, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" The first sentence of that column was, "Of course, it is." Now, the column caused a bit of a storm. Every time I've ever talked certainly publicly to a New York Times editor, Dean Baquet, and others, and asked them, is The New York Times Liberal newspaper when they're still in office, they always say no. When they're not in office, they say of course it is. What do you say?

1. G. Sulzberger: I really will push back on that.

David Remnick: Why don't come out of the closet and admit to being a liberal newspaper in the broadest sense, that's also fact-based, that's also relentless about accuracy, and is intellectually honest and independent? Is it impossible to be those two things at the same time?

1. G. Sulzberger: Again, coming out of the closet suggests that we're hiding something here. I think the premise is simply not true. All of the critiques of the independent model, I think there's some truth in there. I hope in the essay you see me grappling with it. For example, almost everyone who works at the New York Times lives in the big city and graduated college. That alone makes our staff unrepresentative in many ways. That alone means that we're going to under-index in gun ownership, under-index in church attendance.

The posture of independence, the posture of independence, it's not about being a blank slate. It's not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. I think that that is a parody of the long debate over objectivity. Objectivity as was originally formulated wasn't about the the person's innate characteristics. It was about the process that helped address the inherent bias that all of us carry in our life. The key isn't being a blank slate. It's not that you don't have a theory going into any story. It's a willingness to put the facts above any individual agenda. You think about this moment and how polarized this country is. How many institutions in American life do you believe are truly putting the facts above any agenda, putting a independent posture, the desire to arm the public with the information the public needs, to reckon with all the giant existential challenges we face. The challenges are--

David Remnick: Yet the public distrusts, I'll say us, the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, at record levels. Our ratings are a misery.

1. G. Sulzberger: I'll say a couple of things on that. I think we've seen a few things drive that. One, let's be absolutely clear. The former President of the United States, the current leader of one of America's two political parties, has now spent the better part of seven years telling the public not just to not trust us, but that we were the enemies of the American people, that our work was actually fake, that it's manufactured.

If that's the way that the political atmosphere has worsened trust in media, I think that we can agree that the social platforms have done the same. In an era when it is easier than ever for like-minded people to gather to build their own narratives in which the loudest and most extreme voices in those communities tends to rise and when it's easier for those groups to mobilize and be heard, those are the fundamental dynamics of social media.

We now see the zero-sum dynamics around tolerance for journalists challenging in-group narratives that we used to only really see with abortion, with Israel-Palestine, and with presidential politics. It was like those were really the only giant stories in American life that had all those dynamics and where the rhetoric and intensity always felt dialed up to 10.

David Remnick: Now it's everything.

1. G. Sulzberger: It's everything. It is everything. That's the dynamic we're talking about when we talk about echo chambers and social media. The third dynamic inside our industry is that journalism to some extent has become an echo chamber. What do I mean by that? It's been a while since I looked at your bio, so I can't say this for a fact, but if you are like many journalists of your generation, and if you're like many journalists of my generation, you probably started at a local paper. Did you?

David Remnick: Unless you consider the Washington Post a local paper.

1. G. Sulzberger: I don't.

David Remnick: You could get in a lot of trouble right there.

1. G. Sulzberger: I don't. I don't.

David Remnick: I got lucky. It was a different era.

1. G. Sulzberger: You might just be more talented than me.

David Remnick: Yes.

1. G. Sulzberger: Like many journalists in my era, and many journals of your era started at a local paper.

David Remnick: Sure. That was the path.

1. G. Sulzberger: That was the traditional path.

David Remnick: That's the traditional path.

1. G. Sulzberger: What was the day like in a journalist at that point? Every day you were out in the communities you were covering, and you were being confronted with the full diversity of this country and of the human experience. On the same day, you would talk to rich and poor, you'd talk to a mother who just had lost a son to murder and a mother whose son was just arrested for murder. You would just see everything.

David Remnick: People just sitting in rooms in front of a screen, I don't think that's the case.

1. G. Sulzberger: Of course, it's the case. That type of work putting people out in the world is so expensive. As traditional media faded, and particularly local media faded right, and as digital media filled that vacuum, we actually saw a full inversion of how days were spent. The new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. If you have to write three to five stories a day, there is no time to get out into the world, and-

David Remnick: You're typing.

1. G. Sulzberger: -see it in all its complexity. You're spending your time writing.

David Remnick: You're typing.

1. G. Sulzberger: Which means that you are drawing on your own experience and the experience of the people immediately around you. Literally, many journalists in this country have gone from spending their days out in the field, surrounded by everything else in the world-

David Remnick: In life.

1. G. Sulzberger: -in life, to spending their days in an office with people who are in the same profession, working for the same institution, living in the same city, graduating from the same type of university.

David Remnick: You allude to something that's just incredibly painful in American life, and that is the contraction of local journalism all over the country, all the many, many newspapers that have either collapsed or their newsrooms have shrunk to the vanishing point.

1. G. Sulzberger: Yes.

David Remnick: When Ben Smith started as the media columnist for The New York Times, having come from BuzzFeed. His first column was about the potential dangers of The New York Times' immense success, ironically enough. I think it wasn't too many years ago that I wrote in The New Yorker that there was a moment not too long ago where the biggest question about The New York Times was about when the Sulzburger family was going to be forced to sell The Times and would Carlos Slim or Mike Bloomberg be a better or worse proprietor?

That was a very dangerous moment because neither one of them, to be perfectly honest, was anywhere near well enough equipped to head this, I'll say it, essential American institution. Now your success is gigantic, and the distance between you and your competitors and putative competitors has widened, and I don't see that it's going to get any narrower in the near future. That's an enormous responsibility for you. What are the perils of The Times' success and it's singularity, if that's what it is?

1. G. Sulzberger: First of all, thank you for the kind words. I also read The New Yorker and admire very much.

David Remnick: I appreciate that.

1. G. Sulzberger: Eight years ago, when I started getting deeply involved in shaping the modern strategy of The New York Times, one of our biggest challenges and our highest aspirations was, let's make a market. Let's make a market for great journalism in this country. You'll remember that the skeptics thought it was ridiculous to try to make a paid market for journalism. We were widely ridiculed for launching a paywall for asking people to subscribe to our digital news report.

David Remnick: Same here.

1. G. Sulzberger: Yes. Not only did we grow ourselves and we've grown from-- At the time when we launched the paywall, the consultants who helped us launch it told us that if we did everything exactly right, we might be able to get 650,000 subscribers. That was going to be our ceiling. Today we're almost at 10 million. One of the things I'm proudest of is we didn't just make a market for ourselves. What's happened? The Washington Post has more subscribers than it's ever had in its history. They don't publicly report their numbers, but I've heard anything from two and a half to 3 million.

David Remnick: Although slipping lately.

1. G. Sulzberger: Two and a half to 3 million is nothing to sneeze at. I think The New Yorker has more subscribers than at any time in your history. You probably can't say it because you also don't publicly report your numbers, but I think The Atlantic has more subscribers than at any time in their history. The Journal, more subscribers than at any time in their history.

What do all those have in common? Those are the institutions that are still investing in the really resource-intensive [unintelligible 00:18:01] [crosstalk]

David Remnick: Of course, I couldn't agree more. There is a problem, though, that comes with that. You've just named The New Yorker-

1. G. Sulzberger: All national media.

David Remnick: -something called The Atlantic, I've never heard of it, but The Atlantic, The Times, The Journal. They're not cheap to get. They are considered by the general public, you'll forgive me, elite media, and probably--

1. G. Sulzberger: Can I push you on that?

David Remnick: Hang on. You can. Of course, you can, yes, but hang on. The concern is, and I think Ben Smith reflected it and others have, that while those media not only have their readers, they also influence other media and there's a trickle-down effect of the facts that they uncover in the stories they write or publish or broadcast. There's a widening gulf. Just as there's an income inequality problem in this country that gets worse and worse, there's an information problem, that the map of that information problem has gotten different. I'm not saying that A.G. Sulzberger can be responsible for it and can control it and make it all better with a stroke, but there is that problem.

1. G. Sulzberger: I disagree with that hypothesis.

David Remnick: Go ahead.

1. G. Sulzberger: I think there is an information problem, but I think it's about the collapse of local news. I think that that is an American tragedy and I think a very dangerous and insidious force in American life.

David Remnick: Do you have any responsibility as an ascendant and increasingly responsible--

1. G. Sulzberger: Let me get to that. Let me push back on the other part. At the peak of COVID half of Americans were using The New York Times to get essential information about how to navigate the pandemic. On Election Day, we typically have more than a third of the country using The New York Times. Again, we have fewer than 10 million subscribers. Those are not all subscribers. The Daily which now reaches far more people than our front page and is free. The morning newsletter, which lands in 6 million inboxes every morning, is free or homepage free. Why am I saying that? Because I think there's often an imaginary person who wants to read quality news but are being boxed out because of the cost. I really don't believe that that is a real population in any significant number. Based on my own--

David Remnick: I assume the hope though is that people who do avail themselves of those freer service will subscribe because they make you make an appeal at the end of every broadcast of the daily hoping you do.

1. G. Sulzberger: You anticipated the next spot I'm going to go to, which is I think it is so interesting that our industry has an obsession with making the news free, even though the news is so expensive to make. The New York Times was the only newspaper that had a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan every day of the conflict and still has a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Just literally just think about the implication of that. Had The New York Times not born the cost of covering this war on behalf of the American public, we would've had a conflict where American troops were on the ground but no American journalists to hold them to account, to bring the reality of the conflict back to the American people. I think there's been this hangover from the honestly terrible conventional wisdom of the early internet information wants to be free.

David Remnick: That was a canard.

1. G. Sulzberger: It almost sunk our industry. Instead, do you know what an average cup of coffee costs in New York? Sorry, not in New York, in America.

David Remnick: I use the same analogy every time I'm talking about a subscription price, believe me, I know.

3. G. Sulzberger: It's 3.99.

David Remnick: I get it.

1. G. Sulzberger: That's the national price. For less than a cup of coffee a week-

David Remnick: I think you stole this from me. [chuckles]

1. G. Sulzberger: -I don't think the journalists should apologize for that. We don't expect medical care in this country, or food or electricity, water. Water is not free in this country but yet we think that this essential service should be free. We know what happens when it is. We've seen what happens, which is people can no longer afford to support reporting.

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David Remnick: I'm speaking with A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, more from our conversation in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. He's published an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review called Journalism's Essential Value. It's a defense of the traditional independent stance held by generations of reporters at a moment of intense controversies over news coverage.

One particularly damaging controversy that erupted under A.G.'s watch was the publication of a guest opinion column by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. In June 2020 during the protests that followed George Floyd's murder by police, The Times op-ed page published Cotton's essay with the headline, Send In the Troops. Cotton argued in that piece that the federal government should order the military to put down what he called an orgy of violence that he said was being led by left-wing nihilists and Antifa.

Now, the purpose of an opinion page is to air differing viewpoints but this column coming at the moment it did, caused real outrage including in The Times Newsroom. James Bennett, who oversaw the editorial pages, was forced to resign. He later said that The Times had "signed up so many new subscribers in the past few years, and the expectation of those subscribers is that The Times will be Mother Jones on steroids". When you look back at that and you're a person of thoughtful self-criticism, how do you evaluate it? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? How do you look at that episode?

1. G. Sulzberger: The thing I took away from it. A lot of people wanted that episode to basically be a proxy for our view on this principle of independence and the very particular way the principle of independence manifests on the op-ed page or in our opinion pages as we now call them. The thing the episode underscored more than anything else was, of course, the principle matters. It is the first and most important thing but process matters, and execution matters. If you get process wrong and you get execution wrong, and then you wrap a flawed thing that you produced in that principle, the thing that you produce is flawed, people can see you as flawed.

David Remnick: How is it flawed?

1. G. Sulzberger: I don't want to go into too much detail because I have so much respect for all the folks who are involved, and I don't want to reopen what I'm sure for many is a really difficult episode but if you go back and read about it, just the process, if you had seen that piece, you would've said, "This is going to be one of the most controversial things I'm going to produce all year." If you had decided that it was an important piece and that it met your standards, you would've put it through the wringer to make sure that you got everything just nailed down. You would've thought about the headline, the presentation, you would've made sure that every bit of it was perfectly fact-checked. The same way that when the newsroom counterparts have a giant investigation, say when we got Trump's taxes which he had been hiding from the public for years. Dean is involved at every single step.

David Remnick: Dean Beckett [crosstalk] at that time.

1. G. Sulzberger: His closest deputies were involved. There are a lot of cooks in that kitchen. You know that when you do a big difficult piece, you put it through a lot of steps. As was I think widely reported at the time this piece was rushed in and it showed. My main takeaway and it's one of the reasons I talk about process so much in this piece because I think the disciplines of the journalistic process are really essential to supporting the underlying principle of independence. It's not enough just to have the principle and wave it around. You also have to execute on it well especially in an era in which that principle is so frontally under attack.

David Remnick: One of the arguments was that that piece somehow endangered the lives of Times reporters, particularly Times reporters of color. Do you believe that was true?

1. G. Sulzberger: You have to remember when that argument was being made and the context in which it was being made. That was-- I don't know. Was it six months into the pandemic, five months into the pandemic? Then we saw the eruption of the single largest social justice protest movement in this country in half-century.

David Remnick: Sparked by a hideous murder that was on the phone.

1. G. Sulzberger: That's right. Exactly. In that context, I'm sympathetic to how folks felt. What I will say, going back to the principle is-- Some folks wondered is this Mark a retreat from The Times, from Independence, or a commitment to having a wide range of controversial views on our op-ed page. I'd point out to the thing we did not just months later but that very week which is we ran a series of pieces attacking The New York Times for our handling of that piece, attacking me in times for our handling of that piece in our own pages from the left, right, and center.

David Remnick: True.

1. G. Sulzberger: Some folks pushed back saying, "We should never have run the piece at all." Some folks pushed back that we should have stood behind it and defended it every turn. The broader thought with opinion, I would just say, "Look, three years after that episode, do you feel that The Times opinion pages, are you regularly seeing pieces from every side of the political spectrum on the abortion debate, on economic, political questions, social-political questions?"

David Remnick: I think you do.

1. G. Sulzberger: I think you do. I had to argue actually under Katie, you're seeing more of them than ever.

David Remnick: Katie Kingsbury who replaced James Bennet.

1. G. Sulzberger: That's right. I think you see that she's just hired another conservative columnist, our first Evangelical columnist, also a military veteran.

David Remnick: It's David French.

1. G. Sulzberger: David French who's done extraordinary work for us so far. She's worked really hard to broaden the number of voices coming to the op-ed page. I think that that principle--

David Remnick: Would you hire a Trumpist to the op-ed page?

1. G. Sulzberger: This is a question I've been getting now for six years. It's a really tricky one. It is harder than you'd think to find the Trumpist who hasn't at some point said that 2020 election was rigged, Donald Trump won the election, Barack Obama was--" it's open question or [crosstalk].

David Remnick: I get it. Tens of millions of people either tolerate that point of view or believe it.

1. G. Sulzberger: Independence is not about both sides. It is not about-

David Remnick: You would not have a Trumpist who had said that at some point on your op-ed page.

1. G. Sulzberger: We would not have anyone who-

David Remnick: But you'd have guest columnists say, Tom Cotton, it certainly doesn't-

1. G. Sulzberger: We certainly would not have a columnist who has a track record of saying things that are demonstrably untrue.

David Remnick: Another controversy earlier this year had to do with coverage of trans rights. In particular, it focused on Times reporting on medical care for trans miners coverage that was cited in support of some Republican anti-trans legislation. Trans advocacy organizations were involved and there was a public letter by some of the Times' own contributors. Now, regardless of your objections to the way that the petition was handled or the way specific reporters were singled out, put that all to the side if you would, did you find any of the criticism valid?

1. G. Sulzberger: Look, we've listened really deeply. I know the standards desk, Joe Khan, and his senior editing team have met with a bunch of groups, inside groups, outside groups, who have raised concerns about the coverage. I want to say unequivocally that I think the accusation that The Times coverage has been anti-trans is just demonstrably untrue. I'd encourage anyone who has the slightest bit of skepticism of that just to type in the phrase transgender issues New York Times, and go to the landing page that's automatically populated with everything we've written. You will find hundreds of stories there doing the very thing that we've been accused of not doing, which is these are stories that are exploring the groundbreakers in the trans community who are blazing new trails across a huge range of industries all over the world and gaining new acceptance and recognition for trans people. We're chronicling the dismaying rise of prejudice and bigotry and attacks that the trans community is facing. All the efforts at the state level to undermine trans rights. We have been writing all those stories.

Part of our job is also to write the stories that society is working through. The stories are less cut and dry. We've never written a story that questioned whether trans people exist or should exist, which is an accusation I've heard from many corners. That is just literally factually untrue. It is our journalistic responsibility as an independent news organization to reflect, for example, the very real debates happening in the medical community and even among trans people and parents of trans people about what type of medical intervention should happen for minors and when and when the risk of not acting outweighs the risk of acting.

These are questions that the medical community is actively working through. There's an active debate there. Our critics have effectively asked us to pretend that debate is not happening for fear-- Again, this is going back to the same theme, for fear that the information could be misused. That fear is legitimate. There are all bad faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country. On the other side of the ledger, if that's what we're hearing publicly, what we're hearing privately is we've gotten so many notes from trans people, from doctors who care for trans people, and parents who are making decisions on behalf of trans miners.

David Remnick: You're saying that there's nothing in the critique that you thought, "Okay, they have a point here or there."

1. G. Sulzberger: For example, on the story I'm citing right now, I know we did make a correction, right?

David Remnick: But overall.

1. G. Sulzberger: Look, if I was to have finished that sentence, what I was building towards is those folks, people within the trans community, people who've dedicated their lives to caring for people within the trans community have written us notes at times begging us not to stop this reporting. What they've said is that their greatest fear is that we get to a world in which the only information they have is in talking points of various groups.

David Remnick: I see.

1. G. Sulzberger: The talking points that people want to crack down on trans people and the talking points of trans advocates who are trying to make the strongest case for trans rights in this country. What they've said is these are life and death decisions, these are decisions involve personal health. We need information we can trust. If there's a debate happening in the medical community, we don't want that hidden from us.

David Remnick: A.G. are you willing to say what your politics are, just broadly speaking? I worked for Len Downie as he was the executive editor of The Washington Post. Before that was Ben Bradlee. Len not only wouldn't reveal his politics, although it was pretty plain what they were. He didn't vote. Again, you live in New York City, you went to Brown. Everything tells me that you're pulling the Democratic party lever, if not every single time, then 90-odd percent of the time. That probably people think they can guess what your politics are. Why not say it and then still be committed to this quite in-depth well thought out and coherent presentation of what independent journalism is?

1. G. Sulzberger: The thing I feel most passionately about in the world is that society needs independent actors and independent journalists. I just believe it. There's is nothing I feel more strongly than that. I do not believe that the truth ever resides in just-- that any one person will ever have the full truth, right?

David Remnick: I get that. That requires you to not say anything about this?

1. G. Sulzberger: I was really struck as I've learned about the Red Cross. Everyone and particularly, Western nations want the Red Cross to declare an allegiance in this conflict. They want the Red Cross to say, "Ukraine is right." The Red Cross is stubbornly asserting that the world needs an independent actor to enforce the laws of war. That if they say that it's going to be harder for them to get access to the prisoners on the Russian side, it's going to be harder for them to push the Russian government.

Their belief is that society benefits when you actually have independent actors. I believe that that's the case. I believe that's the case with the judiciary, I believe that's the case with medicine. I believe that there are these parts of the world where we want independent actors.

David Remnick: It must irritate you that some of your reporters go on television or social media and very blatantly declare their politics. Without naming anybody, it's very clear that must fly in the face of this kind of Red Cross model of at least the appearance of what would you call it?

1. G. Sulzberger: Independence. Again, I'm aware of how old-fashioned this sounds. I guess what I would ask you is in this hyper-politicized hyperpolarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper and louder and louder about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences? Or do you think there's space for some actors who are really committed just to serving the public with the full story facts fall where they may?

David Remnick: Thank you, A. G. Sulzberger. Thank you so much.

1. G. Sulzberger: Oh, it's a real pleasure. Thank you.

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David Remnick: A.G. Sulzberger became publisher of The New York Times in 2017. You can read more from my conversation with him @newyorker.com.

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