At the recent New York Times annual meeting, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was not only put on the defensive regarding the paper’s coverage of gays, but of China. He concluded the exchange saying he wasn’t aware of any business interests which could potentially affect the Times coverage of that communist regime.

      The Times forced veteran Times journalist A.M. Rosenthal into retirement, but he continues writing excellent columns. They appear in the Times’ competitor, the New York Daily News. Recent columns by Rosenthal have emphasized the problem of human rights violations in China. By contrast, the Times now runs columns by Tom Friedman, who, on the very day we were in New York at the Times annual meeting, had a column about progress in China.

      Friedman described China as an authoritarian state. He didn’t use the term dictatorship. He went on to talk about the rise in personal freedoms in China, including the use of the Internet. So my question at the meeting was directed on this subject to Arthur Sulzberger and Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital who is responsible for the New York Times on the web. Based on people we had talked to who have come back from China, ordinary Chinese citizens do not have access to the Internet and foreign sources such as the New York Times. I wondered if this was acknowledged by the Times.

      Nisenholtz confirmed that, saying that the Times on the web was not available in China unless you were able to hack into it. He said this was because the regime was blocking it. So the authoritarian government described by Friedman that is supposedly allowing people more personal and Internet freedom actually blocks access to the columns of Tom Friedman! But readers of Friedman’s column had no way of knowing that. Nisenholtz said the Times had “discussed this with the Chinese and made the point that we would very much appreciate the New York Times being distributed in China but obviously we can’t do any more than that.” Another Times official said they had run editorials and stories on this subject, although Friedman himself seemed to be unaware of them.

      I then asked Sulzberger about his paper’s preference for the term, “spy plane,” in describing the American EP-3 plane seized by the Chinese regime. The Pentagon referred to it as a surveillance or reconnaissance aircraft. It’s a lumbering plane that was on automatic pilot over international waters. The use of the term spy plane implied something suspicious and illegal. The Times preferred the Chinese term and, in an editorial, even defended the Chinese in going aboard this plane and checking out the equipment, which was reportedly thoroughly destroyed. So my question to Sulzberger was whether his paper was pandering to the regime or if it was just a coincidence that the Times used the same terminology employed by the official Chinese television agency.

      He replied, “I’m delighted to tell you that unequivocally the New York Times is not pandering to the Chinese regime.” He also denied that the Times had any business interests or investments in China, saying, “Not that I’m aware of. Not on purpose.”

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