We spent much of our holiday break reading Adam Nagourney’s 2023 history of the last 40 years or so at the New York Times. It’s called The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism. Unlike Gay Talese’s 1969 history of one of the world’s great newspapers, The Kingdom and the Power, this recent effort spends at least as many pages chronicling what The Times got wrong as what it got right. In the 1970s it was slow to promote women; in the 1990s it was slow to hire people of color. In the 2010s it was slow to embrace the web and digital journalism. Though the Times continued to break news and win its share of Pulitzers, the Washington Post often beat it, as with Watergate. Even when the Times got the story first it sometimes got it wrong, as with reporter Judith Miller’s lending credence in 2003 to reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. All these flaws are comforting for the editor of a small newspaper to read about. If the best is often slow, sometimes late and occasionally wrong, then there’s hope for the rest of us.– Fletcher Farrar, editor
This article appears in Best films and scenes of 2023.
