USA · Bias: Liberal
Sulzberger family (NYT Co.)
America's self-styled "paper of record" has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news organization in history — well over 130 of them — including for publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, when the Nixon administration tried and failed to block it at the Supreme Court, in one of the most important First Amendment rulings ever handed down. That legacy took a serious hit in 2003, when star reporter Jayson Blair was exposed for fabricating and plagiarizing dozens of stories; an internal review found real problems in 36 of his last 73 articles, and the paper's top two editors resigned over the institutional failure that let it happen.
In 2019, the Times launched the 1619 Project, an ambitious effort led by Nikole Hannah-Jones to reframe American history around the date the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia rather than 1776. The goal was to center slavery's legacy in the national story in a way mainstream history rarely had. Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for the project's lead essay in 2020 — but a group of prominent historians, including Pulitzer winners Gordon Wood and James McPherson, publicly objected that a central claim, that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for the American Revolution, wasn't supported by the evidence. The Times quietly edited the online text to soften that claim without adding a correction note, which critics said was worse than the original error — a stealth revision instead of an honest one.
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