Cynicism About News Helps Our Dictator
DCReport Readers, I want to strongly encourage you to look at the front page of The New York Times for Sunday, March 8, 2026. There are six stories, any one of which I would have been proud to author, and all of which upend any claim that The Times is no longer worth your time.
The great Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage leads the page with a news analysis headlined “Trump Tramples a Line, Worn Faint, on War. He describes how, since the Cold War began, the Constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war has been progressively eroded.
As commander-in-chief, the President only has inherent authority to defend against a current or imminent attack. Trump’s war on Iran finishes wiping out that bedrock Constitutional standard, while the leadership on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers, does nothing.
Immediately below that piece, but still above the fold, is a Kenneth P. Vogel piece headlined “Pardon Industry Offers the Rich A Path to Trump.”
Selling Pardons
Vogel, a dogged investigative reporter, devotes an entire inside page to showing how Donald Trump is selling clemency and pardons to the rich. If that sounds like an impeachable offense, it is. Among those pardoned are some of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, child sexual abusers, and white-collar criminals who will now get to keep their ill-gotten billions with no restitution to their victims.
This was an exceptionally difficult story to ferret out because public records are scant, and conspirators in these pardons-and-clemency-for-sale schemes aren’t eager to implicate themselves or Trump.
It’s also criminal in my view, as someone who both knows Trump and has taught law for the last 17 years, although I’m not a lawyer.
Taking money to let people out of prison or wipe their slates clean, even when it’s done through intermediaries or ancillary characters, is a crime, not an “official act.” That distinction matters because of a cockamamie 2023 Supreme Court decision that former presidents may not be prosecuted for any “official act” performed while in office.
Issuing clemency and pardons is an official act. Taking money isn’t, even if the money goes to confederates.
Also above the fold: “Colleges Respond to Upswing in Disability Diagnoses,” in which reporters Mark Arsenault and Steven Rich dive into the reasons for the last decade’s 50% jump in the number of students receiving special treatment for diagnosed disabilities. They found that some of these reflect refined techniques to identify disabilities and related physical and intellectual limitations. However, some of it reflects students gaming the system for a range of accommodations, such as extra time to complete quizzes, midterms, and finals.
Billionaire Boom
Right at the fold, a four-column headline suggests a threatening scenario: “Torrent of Money Transforms A Slice of Wyoming” This story documents America’s billionaire boom and how wealth is increasingly concentrated at the very top, a story I started making a kitchen-table topic in 1995 when I became a reporter for The Times, and I continued to pursue it for the next 13 years.
Back then, a small army of critics blamed me for, in their view, abusing income statistics to fabricate an issue. Those critics were never able to point to any conceptual or factual error, but that didn’t stop their attacks until the Obama era, when widening income inequality became so obvious that denial no longer resonated with anyone except cranks and the willfully blind.
Times reporters Katie Benner, Steven Rich, Mike Baker, and John Branch did a fabulous job of updating the economic data to show that the top 1 in 1,000 families is experiencing skyrocketing wealth, while the bottom half of Americans have merely doubled their minuscule wealth in the last 35 years.
The sixth story is about retirees who chose to stay in Gotham rather than go to Florida. As Kiplinger’s, the personal finance magazine, pointed out years ago, if you have your housing costs solved (own, rent-controlled, or rent-stabilized), then the big city is one of the cheapest and most culturally enriching places in America for those with a modest income. No surprise, but a sound reminder.
Unique Workplace Principles
It’s easy to fault The New York Times. Indeed, few people are more critical of the paper than those who work in its newsrooms.
That’s because newsrooms operate on principles different from any other commercial enterprise. There’s an old journalistic saying that “a healthy newsroom is a newsroom with lots of bitching” about what is and is not in the daily report, as the mix of news stories is known among reporters and editors.
Newspapers make mistakes just like every other institution. But they are virtually unique in owning up to those mistakes and ensuring the public is aware of them.
There’s another old saying in newsrooms: “Doctors bury their mistakes, lawyers see theirs off to jail, only reporters sign theirs on the front page for everyone to read.”
Standing Up
I once spent money on researchers to find out who originated that phrase. The oldest verifiable use was under my byline. But I did not originate it. If you know who did, please write to us via the DCReport Tipline.
Few institutions in America have the resources, the talent, and the institutional imperatives to stand fast against Trump. For a long time, The Washington Post stood for our Constitution and the liberties of the people. But then its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, decided his fortune mattered more than America’s future as a democracy of free peoples.
Now and then, Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal breaks a big story that infuriates Trump. But Donald can rely on the WSJ opinion pages to, for the most part, give cover for his anti-democratic moves. The American edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is solid, as are many independent news websites.
If you want to live free. If you want your progeny and the progeny of others to enjoy our liberties, then one key thing you can do is start every morning by reading The New York Times.
That doesn’t mean you should concur with or believe everything you read. Read the first rough draft of history with a grain of salt, as I do. Recognize that some reporters are great and many are merely good, and that, overall, the news is a highly accurate recounting of the official version of events and the official criticisms of those events.
Or be cynical. Close your eyes. Donald Trump will exploit your ignorance, but he’ll never thank you.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
