The publisher of The New York Times called out CBS News by name as he condemned news organizations’ willingness to bend to President Donald Trump during a speech on Thursday.
A.G. Sulzberger, who hails from the family that has long controlled the Times, delivered a scathing rebuke of Trump’s attack on the press and media leaders’ “capitulation” to the president while speaking before a press-rights group in New York.
The 45-year-old executive reserved some of his sharpest criticism for CBS’ new Trump-friendly owner, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, saying, “Under this new ownership, CBS has already altered programming, personnel, and policies in ways that align more closely with the administration’s preferences.”
Pointing to the intimate dinner Ellison, 43, hosted “honoring the Trump White House” last month, Sulzberger said CBS was “dispensing with even the pretense of journalistic norms.”
Since Ellison has installed anti-woke opinion columnist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, she has seemingly been on a mission to make the network more Trump-friendly.
The 42-year-old CBS boss personally recruited Tony Dokoupil to anchor CBS Evening News, a role in which he has at times been ridiculed for sounding more like a White House surrogate than an objective news anchor. She has also gotten hands-on with the direction of the legendary news show 60 Minutes, yanking one episode just hours before it was due to air, claiming it needed more input from the Trump administration.
CBS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher in 2018, also called out other peers atop media organizations for their deference to the Trump administration.
Pointing to the Times’ ongoing lawsuit against the Pentagon over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s restrictive press policy, he said, “Many of our peers argued that, given Trump’s frequent attacks on the press, this one was worth letting go. In fact, several told me directly that they feared sticking their necks out would invite retaliation.”
“But rights are just ink on paper unless they’re exercised,” he told the attendees at the event, which was hosted by Yale Law School’s Floyd Abrams Institute. “Standing up for press freedom in court and losing is still a much healthier outcome than standing down and letting the administration simply rewrite the rules. Our country has some of the strongest legal protections in the world for free expression and due process. They mean nothing if the press is too timid to defend them.”
Sulzberger noted that the “always litigious” Trump has secured several legal settlements from news organizations he sued “despite the law appearing to be on their side.”
CBS coughed up $16 million in a settlement with Trump last July after Trump alleged 60 Minutes had deceptively edited their 2024 interview with Kamala Harris, and ABC News, owned by Disney, also agreed to shell out $15 million in 2024 to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the president.
Sulzberger, a former journalist, said that “a number of news organizations have risen to the occasion by pushing back on the Trump administration’s efforts to attack and punish independent journalism,” naming the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
But he continued, “Then there are the media leaders who have settled winnable cases to appease the administration or advance their business interests. Those who have transformed their editorial pages to placate the president. Those who have let the president rewrite their style guides, telling themselves it’s harmless to swap out the Gulf of Mexico for the Gulf of America to avoid something worse. Those who have written unusually large checks for the benefit of the president. Such capitulation, even seemingly small instances of it, serves only to embolden the administration to keep attacking the press.”
Trump is currently suing the Times for $15 billion, accusing the newspaper and its reporters of defaming him. He is also pressing lawsuits against the BBC and the Des Moines Register.
When reached for comment, the Times referred the Daily Beast to a transcript of Sulzberger’s speech. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
