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The Worst Things I've Read Lately
The inaugural edition of an occasional series
Peter Shamshiri
May 20, 2025
A lot of newsletter authors occasionally provide their readers with a list of things they’ve enjoyed reading lately. But that’s a little off-brand for me. I read bad books for If Books Could Kill, and I read Supreme Court decisions for 5-4. To keep the newsletter on-theme, I’m introducing The Worst Things I’ve Read Lately, a loose collection of the most atrocious journalism and punditry I’ve come across recently. This should, ideally, spare you the indignity of having to read it yourself while still keeping you abreast of the latest developments in American stupidity. Enjoy!
A.G. Sulzberger, A Free People Need a Free Press
A.G. Sulzberger is the publisher of The New York Times, the latest nepo baby descendant of Adolph Ochs (who bought the paper in 1896) to take the reins. The Times, for all its prestige, is forever at the whims of a family of trust-fund wielding debutantes who oversee the world’s most renowned media product by virtue of their birth. Sulzberger was in his 30s when a trust and estates lawyer handed him control of the Times, and now he’s here to wax poetic about the value of a “free press.”
Much of this piece is fine, if unoriginal. He says that democracy is under attack across the globe, with newsrooms declining while tech giants increasingly control the flow of information. He appropriately spends most of the piece discussing Donald Trump’s assault on press freedom (even if he occasionally undersells it - he notes that Trump jokes about jailing reporters, ignoring that the administration actually detained Rumeysa Ozturk for writing an op-ed).
It’s when he turns to the press’s role that the piece starts to fall apart. He says:
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.
This might seem inoffensive at a glance, but I think these paragraphs point at a fundamental flaw with how Sulzberger views the media. The thing here is that the Times doesn’t simply report the news; it creates the news. It determines what is newsworthy and what isn’t. It shapes public discourse. The best example of this is something that is inexplicably a hot topic right now: Joe Biden’s age.
Before explaining the various dangers posed to a free press by Donald Trump, Sulzberger takes a moment to note that the Biden administration “frequently lashed out at journalists and news organizations who dared to ask questions about his age and fitness.”
Now, there are two primary critiques of the media coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline – one of them is a very bad critique, and the other is unassailably correct. The bad critique is that Biden’s mental state was not newsworthy. I think that’s ridiculous – we all saw him struggle through a nationally televised debate.
The good critique is that although Biden’s mental state was newsworthy, the media spent far too much time on it. This one’s less opinion than fact: the Penn Media Accountability Project, which tracks the volume of media coverage for different issues across large media outlets, found that The New York Times covered Joe Biden’s age over ten times more than Project 2025. Say what you want about the newsworthiness of Biden’s brain, but if you think it deserves ten times the coverage of Donald Trump’s actual policy agenda I’m more worried about your cognitive functions than his.
Sulzberger is merging the good critique of the Times’ coverage with the bad one, which allows him to dismiss them both. Beyond that, he’s revealing a very simplistic vision of how the media interacts with politics. He views the media’s role as passive: events happen, and The New York Times will cover them. The fact that the Times has finite space within its pages, and must therefore make decisions about which stories deserve coverage – and therefore raise the salience of those stories among the general public – is not acknowledged.
This basic approach has allowed Sulzberger to justify all sorts of journalistic malpractice, from the Times’ coverage of Biden’s age to their fixation on the excesses of pro-Palestinian campus protests and their ceaseless handwringing about trans youth. It’s not that he defends their editorial posture as much as he refuses to admit that they have one.
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