In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
Early in the first Trump administration, the White House sought to punish news organizations it didn’t like, including The New York Times, by barring their reporters from daily press briefings. “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth,” President Trump wrote on Twitter (now X) on Feb. 24, 2017. “A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!”
Journalists were not alone in protesting such official antagonism. Two days later, an ad hoc group of New Yorkers staged a demonstration in favor of press freedom. Their march through Midtown Manhattan began and ended at The Times’s headquarters, 620 Eighth Avenue.
Barbara Malmet, an artist and political activist, stenciled the cardboard placard she carried at the demonstration: “The Gray Lady Abides.”
She used a nickname for The Times going back many decades to an era when the newspaper’s front page was a gray mass of type, unbroken by images. The Times was also a “gray lady” in its circumspection, when contrasted with the sensational “yellow” journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ms. Malmet’s message — along with signs like “The Free Press Protects Us” and “There Is No Freedom Without a Free Press” — heartened those who worked inside The Times’s headquarters. Dean Baquet, the executive editor at the time, told Sarah Maslin Nir, the Times reporter who covered the event: “I don’t look at us as the enemy of the White House. I look at us as people who are aggressively covering the White House.”
After the demonstration, Ms. Malmet gave her placard to Ms. Nir. In turn, Ms. Nir lent it indefinitely to the Museum at The Times. The placard is exhibited next to a photo by a freelancer, Jeff Bachner, of the small crowd huddled outside The Times on a wintry day.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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