Here are some brief remarks I delivered about the current state of journalism and American democracy at the 2025 George Polk Awards ceremony.
The New York Times asked me to represent the staff in accepting the 2025 Polk Award for National Reporting. The committee described the winning package like this: “The National Reporting award goes to The New York Times for relentless and unflinching coverage of a White House that defied standards and norms in expanding executive power, issuing Presidential pardons, extracting lucrative profits from governmental action, withholding funds to punish localities and institutions deemed politically unfriendly, criminally prosecuting perceived enemies, abandoning environmental and public health safeguards, curtailing scientific research and regularly misleading courts and the public about initiatives like deportation of supposed felons and gang members or bombing of Venezuelan boats to curb drug trafficking.”
To be clear, while I had a byline or shared a cobyline on several articles in the 15-story package, there were many more that I didn’t have anything to do with; this was truly an award to the staff. But someone had to walk on stage to collect the plaque, and for each category, that person had to speak for about two minutes. These were my remarks as prepared:
It is an honor to stand here as a representative of a team — dozens of reporters, editors, and visual journalists who collectively produced a remarkable body of work last year, under intense pressures and at a time when independent, searching journalism has never been more important for American democracy and the rule of law.
At the highest level, this is coverage of a president who has pushed the boundaries of executive power in ways without precedent in American history, surrounded by lawyers who were openly selected for their willingness to provide a veneer of legal blessing to anything the White House wants to do. And it is coverage that sought to make sense of a firehose of events unlike anything any of us have experienced, even in Trump’s first term.
To cite just three examples, our investigative team traced how payments to the president’s crypto firm helped the United Arab Emirates win access to advanced computer chips despite national security concerns. Our immigration reporters obtained documents showing how officials defied court orders to deport migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Our national security team revealed a secret directive to use military force against drug cartels, getting out front of what became the legally contested boat strikes and a high-risk commando operation inside Venezuela.
It was a collective effort across beats, guided at every step in the Washington Bureau by Dick Stevenson and Matea Gold, whose editorial judgment and steadiness made all of it better. And it came as the administration waged an intense campaign against the independent press — personal attacks on reporters by name, lawsuits against news organizations, intimidating leak investigations, and restrictions that emptied the Pentagon of journalists at a time of expanding war. So I’d like to thank David McCraw, our newsroom lawyer, for leading our courtroom defense.
This is a lonely moment for legacy media. There are fewer newsrooms led by ownership willing to marshal the resources for this kind of work and with the moral courage to fight for independent journalism the face of government pressures, and so I also want to thank the Sulzberger family for remaining steadfast. That matters, because our democracy requires an informed electorate to function. Voters cannot hold their government accountable if they don’t know what it is doing. That is what this work is for. That is who it serves. That is the calling.
Thank you.