Q&A: NYT Publisher Tells Me He’s Worried About Trump Press Crackdown

A.G. Sulzberger saw it coming.

Last September, the New York Times publisher warned that if Donald Trump was elected again, he and his administration might emulate crackdowns on the press we’ve seen in other countries — particularly Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

In those campaigns, he argued, populist leaders don’t necessarily shutter newsrooms or jail reporters they don’t like. But they do make it harder for independent journalists to do their jobs, and they “reward news outlets that toe the party line.”

And in just the few months since Trump’s election, we are seeing evidence of that playing out in the US: Trump has been able to extract settlements from publishers and platforms in First Amendment lawsuits they would normally have a very good chance of winning. His administration has blocked the Associated Press from the White House, while offering more access to Trump-friendly outlets. Meanwhile it is starting investigations of big media companies that own news organizations.

But it’s one thing to see it coming, and another to figure out what to do about it. Sulzberger is hopeful that some combination of American idealism, good journalism, and the court system will keep press freedom intact in the US. But the day-to-day questions Sulzberger faces — like how to respond to the AP ban — don’t necessarily have good answers.

Sulzberger and I talked about other issues he’s dealing with, including the Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, and the economic uncertainty generated by Trump’s tariff wars, and you can hear the whole thing in my Channels podcast. Below, you can read an edited excerpt of our conversation.

Last fall, you published an op-ed in The Washington Post, warning that government attacks on the press around the world might be replicated in the US. What was the point of publishing it, and what did you think would happen after it ran?

A.G. Sulzberger: At the end of Donald Trump’s first term, his anti-press rhetoric started to shift into anti-press action. More notably, over the course of his [reelection] campaign, he and his supporters became more explicit about their desire to crack down on the free press in the United States. And it was clear to me that there was a playbook that they’d be drawing from if they followed through on those promises.

I thought it was really important to study that playbook. To get my own organization ready for what might come, but also to encourage other leaders in media and other journalists to get to know that playbook, too. Because of the high likelihood that it would be employed here. I think it’s essential when our industry is under pressure for us to be preparing as much as possible and steeling ourselves for what may come.

I have to say, I’ve never written something that I wished to look, in retrospect, so off-base and hyperbolic. It has been dispiriting to see how quickly the central concerns have been validated.

There’s a line in there I wanted to highlight: “These leaders have realized that crackdowns on the press are most effective when they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers but a movie so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it.”

I’ve been writing about some of this stuff over the last few months. And there is not a huge audience demand to learn about what’s happening at the FCC and how they’re interfering with a “60 Minutes” interview or how Trump is suing The Des Moines Register over an inaccurate poll.

But I’m also not surprised that there’s not a lot of audience for that. It seems like the 2024 election was, in a lot of ways, a referendum on whether people consume news. Broadly, it seems like people who consume what we would consider news, traditional news, voted for Kamala Harris, those who didn’t voted for Donald Trump.

I think there’s a little more nuance in that, but certainly…

And I’m just wondering if making these kinds of arguments is almost kind of beside the point because there’s no one in authority who’s gonna pay attention to them.

Look, I’m a big believer in the American system. A free press in this country has not been a partisan ideal. It’s not a Democratic ideal. It’s an American ideal. The Founding Fathers were a politically and ideologically diverse group of people. And this was one of the few points of true unanimity — the centrality of having a press that would arm this country, this democracy, with the information it needed to lead itself. And also provide a central check against abuse of power; against incompetence; against corruption, self-dealing.

And that model has continued to be a bipartisan ideal over the last century. At the Supreme Court, one of the most regular points of consensus are around the free press and free expression and First Amendment rights in this country. So I remain extremely hopeful about this.

I also think that we need to explain ourselves to the public. Why should they care? The press shouldn’t just matter to folks like you and me who are employed by news organizations. The press is asking questions on behalf of the American public.

There’s talk about whether the press should engage in some sort of collective action on behalf of the Associated Press (which the White House has banned from press conferences and events in a dispute about the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America.) Do you want to see a concerted effort? Would you condone having your staff not attend press conferences?

(Editor’s note: On Tuesday, a judge said the AP couldn’t be excluded from press conferences because of its viewpoints. It’s unclear if the organization will be returned to the press room.)

It’s a great question. Me and many of my peers have reached out to the AP and asked how we can be supportive. There’s not a serious news organization that doesn’t have major concerns about this — including some news organizations on the right. There was a powerful quote from a Fox News White House reporter talking about the dangers of allowing a president to take an action like this.

In the past, when Fox had been kicked out of some briefings by the Obama White House, my organization was among the many news organizations that said “We’re not going to attend them, either.”

What’s trickier in this moment is that the White House is very plainly trying to remove organizations that are willing to ask the tough questions, the questions that the president doesn’t want to answer, and to replace them with organizations that are less independent, that maybe are more openly supportive of the president and his agenda, so that they won’t be challenged.

Is the concern this time that “Well, if we walk out of the briefing room, we’ll never get back in?”

Look, I don’t know about that. You know, “never” is a big word that copy editors in The New York Times …

I mean, if you were willing to walk out of briefings during the Obama administration, why not this time around?

Without getting into too many private conversations, I think it’s important to not accidentally stumble into the very reaction that the White House is hoping for. Which is to have a bunch of serious journalists willing to ask tough questions on behalf of the American people, independent journalists — remove themselves from a position to do that.