Last month, the economist Jeffrey Sachs appeared on the Substack podcast Nonzero, hosted by the writer Robert Wright, to discuss American foreign policy failures in the post-Cold War world. Wright asked Sachs if he felt American journalism is in decline. Sachs—who, as the head of multiple UN nonprofits and director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development, is one of the most institutionally recognized figures in public intellectual life—said that it absolutely had, and then shared an anecdote. “I had a chat with a longtime friend of mine…a senior reporter at one of the most important newspapers,” he said, “and I said to him, ‘When I was young, I turned to your paper because of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and I loved it.’” According to Sachs, this nameless friend, who in a later appearance Sachs would identify as a senior New York Times reporter, replied, “That paper is so dead and gone, Jeff. You have to understand that.
Sachs spoke with the reporter last September. The issue that provoked the reporter’s comments was the recent bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and its subsequent coverage in the media. In the days and weeks after the attack, a flurry of conjecture about who was responsible dominated mainstream outlets, with CNN and the New York Times echoing U.S. and European government allegations that Russia had sabotaged its own piece of critical infrastructure in a dramatic bid to turn European favor against Ukraine. Sachs, who worked closely with Mikhail Gorbachev and knows his way around U.S.-Russia relations, read these reports and called his friend: “The U.S did it!” he said. “Why is your paper saying today that Russia did it?” The reporter responded, “Of course the U.S did it. Who else? But come on, Jeff. The editor isn’t interested in that.”
In relating these stories, Sachs expressed a view shared by a coalescing group of anti-establishment thinkers, journalists, pundits, and academics: that the mainstream media in the United States has been corrupted beyond repair and is so deeply beholden to U.S. intelligence and security interests as to be of little journalistic value. Sachs has been increasingly vocal about this over the last year, as the war in Ukraine—the fault for which he places squarely at the feet of the United States and its decades of NATO bellicosity, even blaming specific State Department operatives for the 2014 ouster of Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych—escalates shockingly, with little mainstream media attention given to potential American culpability in provoking and prolonging the bloodshed.
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