Dear Mr. Sulzberger:
I am writing you as publisher of the New York Times, in response to your public comments after your recent meeting with President Donald Trump.
Years ago, at the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University, along with other high school newspaper editors, I learned journalism is a noble profession and, indeed, a calling. Its canons and high standards include truth, fairness, objectivity and completeness – in a word, virtue, like that on which our republic was founded.
The duty to inform a free nation remains a sacred one. As you well know, the press constitutes the Fourth Estate, after the government, the church and We the People. For America to work, each of the four must function independently and with integrity. Editorials belong on the editorial page, not baked into the “news.” Partisan journalism is for the Reich Propaganda Ministry and Pravda.
Sadly, most of today’s establishment media organizations have abandoned journalistic virtue, to wit:
- New Gallup polls released June 20, 2018, reveal that 62 percent of U.S. adults believe that media news is biased, 44 percent believe it is inaccurate and 39 percent believe it is misinformation.
- The Media Research Center found media coverage during the first 18 months of the Trump presidency was 92 percent negative.
- In the July 11, 2018, piece headlined “The 55 Major Media Mistakes of the Trump Era” on Sharyl Attkisson’s blog, the New York Times appeared 13 times.
The establishment media have shed impartiality in order to sell a hard-left agenda. They have has aligned themselves with global elites, to whose power they should be speaking truth. They prevaricate the easy way – by omission, that is, by ignoring news that fails to serve their agenda.
Rejection of journalistic virtue carries a high price. President Trump recently tweeted about the “dying newspaper industry.” On July 30, 2018, Pew Research confirmed that media newsroom employment declined 23 percent between 2008 and 2017, with newspaper newsroom employment plunging 45 percent during this period.
When President Trump decries “Fake News” and calls the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” he is stating the truth. The media’s disingenuous umbrage is reminiscent of those who called President Harry Truman “Give-’em-Hell Harry” for his plain-spokenness. Truman famously replied, “I don’t give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they say it’s Hell.”
President Trump is not being “divisive” in his comments. It is you, Mr. Sulzberger, and your fellow travelers in the mainstream media, who – to apply your own words – are “undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and … eroding … our country’s … free speech and a free press.” Trump is just calling you out.
You speculate that President Trump’s comments are “contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.” Where is your outrage, Mr. Sulzberger, about the blood spilled in the 538 actual attacks on Trump supporters (including the near-fatal shooting of a U.S. congressmen) since the election?
You are on a trajectory to suffer the judgment of history, like your predecessors – William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer – in Yellow Journalism.
In 1901, two Hearst writers published separate columns (which Hearst reportedly was not aware of) that appeared to suggest the assassination of Republican President William McKinley. When McKinley was fatally shot on Sept. 6, 1901, public outrage exploded against Hearst, a Democrat. Pulitzer, another Democrat, pursued Yellow Journalism through the New York World, a tabloid that later tried to become respectable. That paper – in its time, the largest in the United States – died in 1931, twenty years after its publisher.
As President Trump says, you are the “last chance” to fulfill your founder’s vision of an enduring news publication. As America heads toward a great awakening, will the New York Times embrace journalistic virtue and integrity?
A former international banker, Joseph A. Wemhoff closely follows current events.
