Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts

232 Pages·2019·2.1 MB·English

by  David E. McCraw

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

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Dedicated to the men and women of the New York Times newsroom. Miracle
workers, every day.
PREFACE
This book tracks a particularly unsettling period in American press freedom. It
begins with the turbulent presidential campaign of 2016 and then follows the
escalating hostilities between the press and the president through the first year
and a half of the Trump administration. The administration’s war with the press
comes with no clock. By the time you read this, much more will have happened:
new skirmishes with reporters, a scattershot barrage of “fake news” tweets,
another round of calls for the scaling back of press freedom. But the events that
unfolded in the last months of the campaign and the first months of the new
administration were critical. It was in those days that each side, and America,
came to understand what the terms of engagement were going to be—what shape
the attack on the American press would take and how the press would respond.
I have spent a decade and a half as the newsroom lawyer for The New York
Times. I set out with a modest objective for this book: to let readers look behind
the scenes at some of the most consequential reporting done by The New York
Times and to understand how, sometimes quietly and sometimes not, the law
protected journalism, shaped it, and, in a more fundamental way, made it
possible. I did not want this to be either an abstract treatise on the First
Amendment (although the law is front and center throughout the book) or a blind
rant about Trump (even though the president fares poorly in virtually every
chapter, at least until Harvey Weinstein shows up). The reason for that is simple:
America’s tradition of press freedom will not survive if the First Amendment
strikes people as abstract and disconnected from the real life of the country or
nothing more than a vehicle for advancing some political agenda. In journalism,
the First Amendment happens at ground level, empowering and illuminating
choices that journalists make every day in their pursuit of the truth. That is the
story told in these pages.
Not everything can be told here. I am a lawyer, and that means there are
confidences that cannot be shared. I work with journalists doing cutting-edge
reporting, and that means they have sources who have to be protected. I have
played a pivotal role in the rescue of journalists when they have been kidnapped
or detained overseas, and some of the details of what happened remain secret.
But within those bounds, I have tried to honestly capture the real interplay
between lawyers and journalists in the nation’s most important newsroom. This
is not a lawyer-as-hero book, as much as I wish it were. I was wrong about
Trump for much too long. I held back at times when the press should have been
making its case more forcefully, either in the court of public opinion or in a court
of law. I misjudged how polarized America had become on the issue of press
freedom.
For most of my time at the paper, to be a lawyer for The Times was to occupy
a fairly tidy corner of the First Amendment world. People complained about
stories, detected what they were sure was bias, challenged (sometimes correctly)
our facts, and railed against our editorial positions. A few of them were even
motivated to sue. But, even among our harshest critics, few people seemed to
question that press freedom mattered, that we were all better off with a press that
was free to report inconvenient truths, take on the government, and speak up
about the excesses and missteps of powerful companies. Now we live in a time
when the president demands that laws be changed to rein in First Amendment
freedoms and denounces the press as the enemy of the people, a stain on society,
traffickers in “fake news.” The problem is not so much that he says all of that;
the problem is how well it plays, delighting crowds that, in a frenzy, turn to jeer
the assembled press corps covering the event.
In the days when I was completing this book, a gunman opened fire in the
newsroom of a newspaper in Maryland, killing five people. The White House
press secretary declined to say that the press was not the enemy of the people.
One of the president’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, went on national TV to declare
“truth isn’t truth.” And the president himself asked the Department of Justice to
open a criminal investigation to find out the identity of “Anonymous,” a senior
government official who had committed the “crime” of writing a Times op-ed
capturing the president’s erratic behavior, impetuous policy choices, and
disregard for the rule of law.
Much of what follows here is not rendered in the dark colors of troubled
times. The book is often irreverent, even funny (yes, even by a lawyer). Here’s
the thing: It’s a joy to be a newspaper lawyer. Zany things happen, crazy people
emerge from nowhere, and little is as intoxicating as being present at the
moments that world-rattling journalism is taking form. Lawyering for a
newspaper may not be a labor of love, but it’s pretty close, and I have tried here
to capture the spirit that animates the work.
None of which should distract anyone from the real point: bad things are
happening to democracy, and we need to do something.
1
Election Day
The failing @NYTimes has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Said I would lose the
primaries, then the general election. FAKE NEWS!
—Donald Trump, Jan. 28, 2017
NOVEMBER 8, 2016: At 10:00 p.m. I made one last circuit of the newsroom. Our
CEO, Mark Thompson, stood near the political desk, looking on with his wife
and a small group of others connected somehow to The Times. Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, and Michigan remained in doubt, but the reality was sinking in:
Donald Trump was on the verge of winning the American presidency. I have
been in newsrooms on election night before. I know how it is supposed to be.
The only thing that ever mattered was the horse race (think Gore-Bush) or the
historic moment (think Obama-McCain). There was no investment in which
candidate was winning—he (or she) was destined to disappoint in the long run—
and the dominant emotion was a certain not-quite-cynical detachment amid the
electric buzz of the vote count and projections and the anticipation of relief that
the endless push of the campaign was finally over. Sure, you couldn’t ignore the
victories or the big-picture moments, and the day-after stories would be
celebratory in their way—duly restrained but with a nod to victory itself, not
unlike the next-day account of a Super Bowl or Game Seven of the World
Series.
Capture the triumph for a night or relish the race too close to call. Leave the
dancing and the crying for others, for believers. But this night was like no other
election night. There had been an investment, not just journalistic but spiritual.
Donald Trump had campaigned not just against Hillary Clinton but also against
The New York Times and the mainstream American press. And his astonishing
rise to the top of the Republican Party had been built on a near-daily attack on