When I was a law student in San Francisco in the late 1970s, I never imagined that over what became a 40-year journalism career, I would write eleven opinion pieces for The New York Times, plus four more for its Sunday Magazine — ranging from Nazi war criminals to political assassinations to secret Vatican files to, most recently, the government’s failures after the Trump assassination attempt. It was during those law school years that I started a habit: when I needed a single reference point, the reporting in The New York Times was what I treated as determinative. The San Francisco Chronicle was the local competition, but the Times carried a different kind of authority. “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—its famous slogan, still tucked into the upper-left corner of the front page—did not seem like an empty boast.
When I moved to New York to practice law, and later as a journalist, that was how I worked for decades. The Times was one of my first stops for general news and analysis. It …
