Receive Your Copy Truth In Our Times: Inside The Fight For Press Freedom In The Age Of Alternative Facts Composed By David E. McCraw Accessible As Volume

The publisher sent me an ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review, I am also a subscriber to the Times,

On the day I finished reading this ARC, the President of the United States called the New York Times an “enemy of the people,” and the Times itself carried an article about a reporter being detained and kicked out of Egypt.
Additionally, the President tweeted support of a lawsuit against the Washington Post, And a supreme court judges wants the court to reevaluates the Times vs Sullivan case,

Talk about timing,

David E. McCraw is a lawyer at the New York Times he is the Deputy General Counsel for the paper, As such, he is familiar with Free Speech as it applies to the news as well as the work and danger of being a journalistic.
His book is part defense of the news in general, of the Times in particular, and a call arms not for journalists, but for the public.


Because of his job, McCraws primary example is of the Times, and he details how the Times responded to not only news such as the allegations of Trumps harassment of women among others but also how the public responded to their reporting such as the profile of a man who supports racist ideas.
It also chronicles the papers response to issues such as Spicers banning of them from the press gaggle to debates about how reporters should tweet.


While the bulk of the book deals with dealing with Trumps seemingly relentless attacks on the press, the book is even handed.
McCraw deals with the Obamas administrations treatment of leaks and sources, as well as how Clinton dodged a reporters phone calls, It might be antiTrump, but other politicians are not let off the hook, And it might upset some people, but I found the discussion of the Clinton emails to be very interesting,

It is though his look at both the coverage of events and criticism of the Times coverage that he is at his most engrossing.
In part, this is because of some of the stories he tells, His examples of strange redacted documents are worth the cost of the book alone, The chapter on leaks, in particular, strikes right at the heart of the issue Freedom of the Press vs the need to keep some information back.
While McCraw is understandably on the side of the press, he does address the question with nuance, He does the same when discussing the political leanings of journalists as well,

The book includes how the Times handled abductions some journalists and the reaction of the media to becoming “news”, This is in part to show that the idea of press as the enemy as been building for some time, and illustrate similarities between how some regimes treat the media and how Trump does.


You might criticize the Times coverage, but this book does show the purpose and need for a free press as well as why we shouldnt give up on it.


"They are not unrelated, the runaway internet and the antipress president with autocratic impulses, The genius, stable or otherwise, of Donald Trump is some intuitive knowledge of that relationship, The First Amendment is at base a belief in the idea of a marketplace of ideas where truth and falsity compete and an engaged citizenry can discern the difference without coaching from the government.
The internet should be democracy's engine, breaking down all the barriers that have in the past prevented those who want to speak and those who want to hear from participating meaningfully in that mythical marketplace.
Instead, a technology to make us smarter, better informed, less isolated, more empathetic regularly achieves precisely the opposite, There has never been a more important moment in history to demand that Americans discern, question, and doubt, but in the cacophony of our breached politics, many people will do the easy opposite: believe and ignore.
" This book is written in spirit of an oldtime newspaper man regaling cackling, amused, rednosed patrons in a smokefilled, dimlylit bar with personal and singular stories of powerful forces arrayed against a humble man who plays it as though his power is negligible.
David E. McCraw may be a downhome guyas Trump says, he has a soothing, bedroom mannerbut his reach is hardly negligible, Dont be fooled.

Reading this book is every bit as fun as finding oneself under the influenceof a worldclass raconteur, We get the inside story on the early days of Trump, when inTim OBrien, then an editor at The New York Times, published sitelinkTrumpNation and got sued for it.
That book is funny and as good a read as this, so get both, In hiring practice, The New York Times must adhere to the NoAsshole Rule its a real thinglook it up,

McCraw goes through the thought and research processes of releasing the couple pages of Trumps tax returns from, and finding the NYT and Fox News agreeing for what seemed to be the first time in history.
He discusses the bizarre beginning to the Trump presidency during which Spicer sought to limit the access of newspapers, certain reporters, and insisted on telling lies about the size of crowds at the inauguration.


When Trump declared the NYT to be “failing,” the senior management couldnt resist bragging that Trump was doing more for their bottom line than a war.
And McCraw doesnt make any bones about the fact that he stood for press freedom no matter which party The Times was talking to.
Hillary Clinton “had a hostility to openness that doesnt befit a public officeholder” Truer words were never spoken,

What I admired most about the tone in this book is the bigbrain reasonableness of the whole thing, I mean, here we have one of the premier newspapers in the world, with all kinds of talented reporters doing important work, but McCraw recognizes each as individuals and sees the need to tamp down their rage, at times, with the lies and shenanigans happening in the White House and the reporters impotence, in the end, to do anything but report on it.


McCraw tells the story of Stanley Dearman, a newspaper editor in Philadelphia, Mississippi when three civil rights workers went missing in.
Foryears after, Dearborn kept reminding citizens in print of the unsolved case of the mens disappearance, ignoring those who told him to “drop it.
” McCraw tells us Dearborns work was an example of showing the difference between serving the people and catering to them,

When a reporter wrote a story trying to explain the phenomenon of an ordinaryseeming midwest young man expressing adherence to the philosophies of Hitler, the outrage visited upon the paper led to threats against the reporters person and livelihood.

“Dealing with threats against journalists had become a sadly routine part of my work life, but each time a new one surfaced a feeling of discouragement about what the country had become would come over me again.
”

I hear that. But perhaps the country has always been this way, that even NYT readers are quick to show their lack of understanding about enormously important subjects that reach to our makeup as humans.


McCraw also discusses the case of David Sanger writing a book about cyber warfare based on, it was argued in court, leaks of classified documents from highlevel government insiders.
This is intensely interesting stuff for those who ever wondered how reporters manage to report on closelyheld highlevel secrets, Probably most of us would agree with McCraw that “the real problem for America was not the unauthorized revelation but an excess of secrecy.
” Later he argues "Secrecy breeds absurdity, "

The whole book is a feast of huge stories reaching right into the psyche of Americas collective past, nearly twenty years now of stomachchurning days for someone in McCraws position.
High stakes, for everyone. I will end before McCraws account of the Weinstein story, finishing with the decision to publish theWikileaks cache and Greenwald amp Poitras decision to bypass the NYT to have Snowdens secrets published by The Washington Post and The Guardian instead.


McCraw sounds disappointed that The Times was bypassed on the Snowden story, and I remember well the criticism of them at the time.

“Maybe we should be better at inculcating all citizensnow all potential publisherswith a sense of social responsibilityI continued to believe the risks that came with freedom were worth the priceI also believe The Times had been right, in its North Korea reporting and other sensitive national security stories, to give the government a chance to responds before publication.
Many readers saw that process as a surrender

“It was important to debate whether The Times had been timid then or at other times, but context was important: our newsroom regularly decided that the governments objections were too abstract, not believable, insufficiently weighty, or given by officials too far down the food chain to know, and then resolved to move ahead with publishing.
But its not a science, Editors sometimes get it wrong, National security is intrinsically the hardest of the calls they have to makeIf we are ever forced to defend against a criminal charge, I wanted our legal narrative to be one of responsibility, serious deliberation, and a demonstrable concern about the publics best interests.
”

McCraw s book raises some thorny ethical questions and answers one newspapers take on many more, If there were room for a half star, Id border it up between three and four, because theres no question that David McCraw has been an allstar lawyer for the New York Times, no question that hes faced down some of the most difficult truths in our times, per the title, no

doubt that his office and his business has been under enormous strain over the last five or six years, an unnecessary strain of ignorance and accusation from the White House and all those who embrace the thoughtless presumption of a misguided and misplaced term known as fake news.
I can even say, in favor of Mr, McCraw, that I appreciated his address of the Obama Administration and its ethicallychallenged attack on government leaks in the press, more so than any other administration prior, certainly setting a tone that Mr.
Trump would try to emulate for a very different and far more narcissistic agenda, But in the end, Truth in Our Times felt like a void, like it was missing something, like for all the talk about Trumps “enemy of the people” attacks on the press and its impact on the world stage, for example, McCraw never once mentions the murder of Jamal Khashoggi over at the Washington Post inand never once deals with the impact of the sudden, careless, and lawless travel ban that put everyone on edge, including the press, within two weeks of Trumps inauguration.
In some ways, this book felt like it meandered through time, through various stories that certainly made sense on their own merits, as their own kind of anecdotal chapters, thanks to McCraw avoiding the temptation for legalese, but it just felt strangely incohesive.
Knowing that the Khashoggi murder happened six months before this book was released, its certainly possible that there was a calculated, lastsecond omission, seeing as the information continued to be under investigation for several months after the fact, but I just couldnt help feeling like this book was full of gaps that would be uncomfortably familiar to any reader paying attention to the world in which McCraw was an attorney for the biggest newspaper on the planet.
Maybe the book should have been longer, Maybe that would have fixed the problem, Truth in Our Times is a truly fascinating look at the behind the scenes workings of The New York Times, particularly the legal department.
It is a mix of past events and current event commentary what it is like to be in peripherally attached to the news room in the era of Trump.


The most compelling chapters were regarding Harvey Weinstein and the kidnappings in Afghanistan, They both were full of information that I did not know, and the constant challenges and evolving job descriptions of being the lawyer for the Times.
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