This essay was originally delivered as a talk at the Notre Dame Kellogg Institute for International Studies 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 strongmen 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 evenhanded 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 corrections 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 Rev. 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 that country’s mind-set 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’re not the resistance. We are nobody’s opposition. We’re 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 percent of the country’s news outlets, which effectively function as government mouthpieces. The pockets of independence 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.
When I shared these insights in an essay in The Washington Post last September, my goal was to encourage the journalistic profession to prepare for what may come. We knew how ruthlessly effective this campaign against journalists had been in other countries, and we knew those in President Trump’s orbit wanted to implement it here. Even so, it’s startling to see how quickly these warnings have come to pass.
In March, President Trump gave an address in the Justice Department that was both familiar and remarkable. He offered his usual, trail-worn attacks on the press, even implying that journalists should be jailed. At a campaign rally, that might be dismissed as overheated rhetoric to fire up his base. Inside the headquarters of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement operation, these words could be fairly regarded as something closer to marching orders.
Indeed, within a week, the administration opened multiple leak investigations into reporting by The Times. One focused on our revelation that Elon Musk was set to be briefed at the Pentagon on secret plans the U.S. maintained in the event of war with China. The revelation was of obvious public interest, given Musk’s substantial business interests in the country and apparent lack of appropriate security clearances. The president, who professed not to know about the meeting, denied the story. But he also publicly acknowledged the clear impropriety, and the briefing was canceled.
That should have been held up as evidence of the power of good reporting. But the government instead took the unusual step of announcing it was opening an investigation into the leak. That tactic — publicly acknowledging an internal investigation — may seem counterproductive. Unless the real goal was to send a warning: If you are a journalist writing about government misconduct or if you are a source trying to expose it, we are coming for you.
Let me paint a fuller picture of what the anti-press campaign in this country looks like and why it matters to all of us. The playbook can be distilled into five self-reinforcing parts. Each is already being wielded against journalists in this country. Together they represent the most frontal attack on the American press in a century.
The first part of the playbook is sowing distrust in and encouraging the harassment of independent journalists and news organizations. This is largely a campaign of words that aims to demoralize and exhaust. Today reporters who write about powerful people or controversial subjects often find themselves deluged with thousands of angry, bigoted and threatening messages. That online noise can quickly spill into the real world. In the last few years, my colleagues have been doxxed, stalked and SWATted. They’ve had their identities stolen and been falsely accused of crimes. They’ve faced death threats. Even when they steel themselves against these attacks, many reporters find themselves profoundly unnerved when the threats spread to their kids at school, their spouses at work and their parents at home.
President Trump, as I described, has been unusually aggressive in his use of anti-press rhetoric, and his supporters have been equally aggressive in going after his targets. Their goal is not just to spook journalists. It’s to train people to dislike and distrust the media. It’s to condition people to believe that journalists deserve whatever comes their way. In the short term, this has a chilling effect on independent journalism, forcing reporters to ask themselves whether pursuing a story will be worth the inevitable blowback. Long term, it breeds a climate hospitable to crackdowns on press freedom.
The second part of the playbook is exploiting the civil courts to punish independent reporters and news outlets. Even the most frivolous lawsuit can be expensive, invasive and time-consuming to defend against. These cases redirect time and money away from journalism. They can also deter news organizations from even pursuing accountability reporting that might invite new fronts of legal exposure. Smaller news organizations, in particular, fear that they could be financially drained even if they win a case and bankrupted if they lose.
President Trump has long used the civil courts to punish those who challenge him. The Times and other independent news organizations have been frequent targets over the years. These are often libel cases, which President Trump has long pledged to make easier to win.
But lately he’s also embraced novel legal claims about reporting he doesn’t like. In one recent lawsuit, he accused The Des Moines Register of consumer fraud for running a poll that did not match the final result on Election Day. A court doesn’t even need to rule in his favor for him to claim victory. Musing in 2016 about a failed libel lawsuit against a former Times journalist, he said: “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
Since his re-election, President Trump has extracted multimillion-dollar settlements from companies like ABC, Meta and X. Many legal experts regarded these cases as weak, but executives at each company had good reason to believe that the president could use his power to go after them in other ways if they did not pay or to reward them if they did.
The third part of the playbook is abusing legal and regulatory authority to punish the parts of the press that exercise independence. The most obvious abuse of state power is prosecuting and jailing journalists for doing their jobs. But courts are better protected against abuse, and spurious criminal charges risk a public outcry. Subtler, more technocratic forms of executive power are often more effective and less likely to provoke public outrage.
These tactics exploit weaknesses in the nation’s system of governance like regulatory oversight, immigration enforcement, tax investigations and government contracts. This also allows officials to go after the press without appearing to, because many owners of news organizations also have substantial nonmedia holdings that contract with or are regulated by the government.
In President Trump’s first term, for example, his displeasure with the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post led him to try to upend Amazon’s shipping deal with the U.S. Postal Service and undercut the company’s defense contracting. This term we’ve seen ICE’s targeting of foreign students, including for an opinion essay published in a college newspaper, lead some student journalists to stop writing pieces that challenge the Trump administration and others to ask for their bylines to be removed from such work.
We’ve seen threats to use the I.R.S. to go after nonprofits the president dislikes, a point of obvious vulnerability for the growing nonprofit news landscape. We’ve seen efforts to defund or dismantle public media, such as local radio stations, PBS and Voice of America. The F.C.C., which regulates broadcast channels, has been most direct in going after the news organizations that President Trump has complained about. It opened investigations into PBS and NPR, as well as the parent companies of ABC and NBC News.
In one striking example, it opened an investigation into CBS over a routine editing decision that mirrors allegations made in a lawsuit President Trump personally filed last year. That investigation further increased the pressure on executives of its parent company to settle a case they reportedly believe has kept the government from approving a proposed merger. They, in turn, increased pressure on the famously independent “60 Minutes” newsroom, prompting the top producer to resign in protest.
The fourth part of the playbook is amplifying the government’s attacks on the press by encouraging wealthy or powerful allies to join in. In other countries, this has become a way for businesspeople to ingratiate themselves with the ruling regime. They attack disfavored journalists, including through the civil courts and the power of their companies. Ambitious allies in state and local politics use the levers of their governments to the same ends.
Many of President Trump’s closest supporters have pursued this route. Musk, the richest man in the world and a powerful member of President Trump’s inner circle, offers a particularly useful example of this dynamic. He regularly calls The Times everything from “propaganda” to a “threat to our democracy” — attacks that often come just before or just after we publish a major investigation into him or his companies. Meanwhile, his social media platform, X, has taken a variety of steps aimed at reducing the visibility of The Times to the broader public.
Finally, the fifth part of the playbook is about replacing. It is not enough just to dismantle the independent press. It’s better still to replace it with government-friendly media controlled by supporters. Such outlets appear to play a journalistic role while lobbing softball questions at press conferences, attacking the leader’s critics and faithfully repeating ruling-party talking points. The administration has repeatedly blocked The Associated Press, for example, for continuing to use the longstanding and internationally accepted term “Gulf of Mexico” while also acknowledging that President Trump has decided to call it the Gulf of America.
At the same time, the administration is expanding access for partisan news organizations, influencers and activists with a track record of repeating the president’s language and promoting his interests. Meanwhile, the administration announced that Voice of America, already gutted by cuts, will now be asked to air reports from the pro-Trump One America News Network.
These efforts are portrayed as an expansion of perspectives. That would be a worthy goal. But in reality they are attempts to replace skeptical questions with supportive ones, independent accounts with recitations of the party line. Such a strategy, as the Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said recently, “does not give the power back to the people; it gives power to the White House.” The administration seemingly confirmed this sentiment in a social media post, writing: “Since REAL journalism is dead. We will do it for you!” Last month it began its own faux news site, The White House Wire.
The initial reaction from media leaders has concerned those who recognize the importance of journalism in our democracy. Understandably so. Some, as I have noted, offered large sums to settle winnable cases out of court, which critics liken to paying a protection racket. Others adopted the president’s preferred language (like “Gulf of America”) or retreated from policies he opposes (like diversity initiatives), perhaps to win favor, perhaps just to avoid retaliation. Some have gone so far as to rein in the journalism itself — most notably how their opinion departments operate — in ways their employees see as designed to placate the president.
But there are also reasons for confidence, none more heartening than the actual journalism being produced. A number of outlets have shown continued willingness to follow the facts and publish pieces that may spark retaliation from the administration and its backers. The A.P., for example, deserves great credit not only for going to court to resist the administration’s efforts at intimidation. It also broke major stories on the Department of Government Efficiency’s questionable claims. The Wall Street Journal investigated the administration’s tumultuous approach to economic policy. The Washington Post exposed the haphazard handling of sensitive government data. Politico revealed dysfunction roiling the Pentagon. ProPublica probed the record of a top prosecutor, undaunted by his habit of threatening those who challenge the administration.
At The Times we continue to examine every element of the Trump presidency. Our beat reporters spend each day not just keeping up with the fire hose of news — an essential service itself. They also circle back to important stories and connect the dots between them to make sure readers understand their significance.
Meanwhile, our investigative reporters continue to build on what is already the single largest body of accountability reporting ever produced by a single news organization on a single subject. They exposed how President Trump and his family leveraged his office to benefit their cryptocurrency firm and other business ventures. They revealed the reckless communication habits of national security leaders. They painstakingly documented that dozens of supposed Venezuelan gang members sent to a Salvadoran prison had no established gang ties — or any criminal record at all.
The pressure we’ve faced from the Trump administration in response to our reporting so far has been fairly predictable. Names called. Access restricted. Government subscriptions canceled. Lawsuits threatened. Leak investigations opened.
The administration may have more serious action planned. But so far, the signs that have troubled me most have come from other public- and private-sector leaders too worried about the administration to stand up for their own rights and principles. Large companies, nonprofits and foundations long supportive of journalism now tell us they fear retaliation if they openly support news organizations. Leaders and academics who have long fiercely defended the rule of law now pull opinion pieces, lest their arguments attract the administration’s attention. The reaction has been dispiriting enough that we felt compelled to call our outside law firms to make sure they remained committed to defending our constitutional rights.
On the one hand, I understand all this caution. The Trump administration is abusing its vast powers to go after those it perceives as critics. People and institutions feel vulnerable.
On the other hand, your rights can hold only if you use them. The systems that protect against injustices can support you only if you turn to them.
Democracy, at its core, is based on the notion that power is best distributed. Each person’s willingness to wield his or her modest share of that power matters. Each retreat matters, too. Fear is contagious. But courage is also contagious. Standing up to power. Putting long-term principles above short-term self-interest. These are muscles that benefit from use.
In this moment of pressure, I count myself fortunate that The Times has 174 years of practice upsetting powerful interests of every type. We revealed details of the U.S.-Soviet arms race that so enraged President John F. Kennedy that the F.B.I. wiretapped our reporter’s home phone. We published the Pentagon Papers in defiance of legal threats from President Richard Nixon. We disclosed the warrantless surveillance of American citizens after President George W. Bush warned us we’d have blood on our hands. We exposed the hidden civilian death toll of reckless drone strikes authorized by a succession of presidents, suing the Biden administration when it unlawfully tried to hide records that documented these failures.
That isn’t an anomaly; no news organization takes the government to court more often to fight for the public’s right to know about its actions. Yes, we’ve learned over the years that following one’s principles sometimes comes at a cost. If fair and accurate coverage results in lost access or less advertising or canceled subscriptions, so be it. But we’ve also learned that when we stick to our values and do our job with rigor and fairness, we benefit from deeper trust and growing readership in the long run.
The Times will meet whatever comes by continuing to seek the truth and help people understand the world. We will do that work, as we have through every presidential administration since Abraham Lincoln, without fear or favor. If the press climate continues to deteriorate, The Times will draw on the lessons we’ve gained reporting from places without the safety net of established press freedoms. Places where our colleagues face constant surveillance or ever-present risks to their physical safety.
We know how to operate in tough conditions. And we’ve been drawing on those experiences to prepare our journalists for a more difficult environment at home, as well. Things like taking enhanced precautions to protect our sources in the face of surveillance and leak investigations. Maintaining pristine business practices to reduce exposure to abusive tax and regulatory enforcement. Increasing the budget for safety, security and litigation nearly tenfold.
Another critical step is supporting other news organizations when they face pressure. Our industry has a long history of competing on stories but uniting on the cause of press freedom. That will be necessary to avoid the divide-and-conquer strategy we’ve seen employed against law firms and universities. But in this moment of low trust for the press we also need to do more to explain why the broader public should care as well, regardless of their politics.
As we take all those steps, we must hold fast to our independence. This is a point that Andras Petho, a courageous Hungarian investigative journalist, has emphasized in describing his experience reporting in the face of relentless government pressure. He warns that nothing makes autocrats happier than reporters who portray themselves as crusaders against the regime — or victims of it. It provides ammunition for those in power who wish to portray journalists not as disinterested truth tellers but as members of the political opposition animated by partisan aims.
“If you act like an advocate, you should not be surprised if you become viewed as such,” Petho has said. “I’m not saying that nobody should speak up. On the contrary, I hope that lots of people — human rights defenders, advocacy groups or simply just average social media users — will do it. But if you are in the news business, your greatest possible contribution to saving democracies is doing your job and doing it well.”
Put another way: Democracy assigns different roles to all of us. The role of the press is to arm everyone else with the information and context they need to understand and meet the moment.
Without a free press, how will people know if their government is acting legally and in their interest? How will people know if their leaders are telling the truth? How will people know if their institutions are acting to the benefit of society? How will people know if their freedoms are being sustained, defended and championed — or eroded by forces that seek to replace truth and reality with propaganda and misinformation?
A strong and independent press is essential to self-rule, to personal liberty, to national greatness. That once radical insight, made law in the First Amendment, anchored a centuries-long, bipartisan tradition of supporting the rights of journalists. If broken, a free and independent press won’t be easy to rebuild.
As the free press and democracy more broadly face this period of pressure, I’d urge you to support both by seeking out news sources worthy of your trust. News sources that produce original, independent reporting in the public interest and that have a record of challenging power, no matter who wields it. Make room for this kind of journalism in your lives and routines. Read. Listen. Watch. Engaging with the news is one of the simplest, most essential acts of citizenship. This is not the time to tune out.
A.G. Sulzberger is the publisher of The New York Times.
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