How the New York Times Political Coverage is Like Eliza Dushku’s Sexual Harassment Legal Case

"This is how it's always been."

This past Thursday, A.G. Suzlberger wrote a 4,100-word opinion piece for the Washington Post.

I did a double take when I saw the byline, because I was certain I had opened the WaPo app, not the app for the New York Times, which Sulzberger publishes.* 

But the headline was, in fact, in small cap sentence form (as opposed to the first letter in every word capped in Times headlines). And the WaPo logo was on the top of my screen.

Even more jolting was what the 44-year-old Sulzberger was writing about: the threat of authoritarianism to a free press.

His piece starts with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But you don’t know at first if he’s talking about Orbán. He writes about a “former leader” who is “returned to office on a populist platform” and then begins squeezing the press using various levers of government.

Before he identifies Orbán in the fourth paragraph, Sulzberger quotes the dictator’s political director: “Whoever controls a country’s media controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.”

“Over the past year, I’ve been asked with increasing frequency whether The New York Times, where I serve as publisher, is prepared for the possibility that a similar campaign against the free press could be embraced here in the United States,” Sulzberger wrote.

He answered himself: “It’s not a crazy question.”

Sulzberger then goes on to list the vocal support Trump has expressed for Orbán and other strongmen. He even notes that Trump invited Orbán to Mar-a-Lago for dinner.

In his piece, Sulzberger takes aim at the various ways state action has impeded the media in recent years. He cites the problem of meritless lawsuits - which is a tactic perfected by Trump.

He cites the raiding of the Marion County Register by the local sheriff.

He laments the “arrest and censorship for reporting on a separatist conflict in Cameroon.”

What he does not do is look at how his own politics team is continuously giving a pass to the American dictator he warns about.

Trump Loves Authoritarians… But You Don’t Read That In The Times

Journalist Jamison Foser notes that Sulzberger probably spent more words writing about Trump’s fascination with Orbán than the New York Times has written about Trump and the Hungarian leader in the last year.

According to Foser, after Trump devoted a good portion of his Republican National Convention speech to praising Orbán and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, the Times did not mention it in “a single news report, and it has drawn only brief passing mention in a single opinion column.”

The Times has still not mentioned it beyond that column.

Here’s what Foser says the Times did write about after the convention.

• That Trump claimed the convention was “the most organized, best-run, most enthusiastic convention they’ve ever covered”

• Numerous articles on how the convention was a “fashion spectacle”

• That Hulk Hogan’s wife was sitting in Trump’s box at the convention

• A few pieces on Trump’s stated goal of making a “somber appeal to unity”

A few days after the convention, Trump again praised Orbán and Kim at a Michigan rally, where he also praised Chinese president Xi Jinping as “‘brilliant’ because he ‘controls’ 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” 

The Times didn’t report any of that. Instead, notes Foser, they quoted Trump saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats are “the enemies of democracy.”

Sulzberger defends his newspaper’s decision not to cover the authoritarian elements of Trump. He characterizes the increasingly loud criticism of the Times as an attempt to make his employees “give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away.”

But choosing which quotes to highlight and which to ignore is part of journalism. The New York Times politics team makes those choices every day. And they make them to favor Trump by playing down his authoritarian statements.

The Times does not report on the similarity of Orbán’s actions to Trump’s plans, or the plans written out clearly in Project 2025.

When the Times mentions Orbán and Trump, it’s usually in passing. “Oh, and he praised Orbán again.”

This is from the paper that published numerous news stories and polls about Biden’s age being a burden, but has published few news stories on whether Trump’s increasing incoherence is a burden.

The irony for me is that even as Sulzberger is warning against authoritarianism, he seems also to be admitting that the authoritarian candidate and his minions already own the media. He is defining “independent” as “not calling out Trump.” But the same “independent coverage” is not extended to Democrats.

The way Sulzberger looks at “journalistic independence” reminds me of a man who spent all his life in, say, Lapland or Finland, then moves to Las Vegas and insists on wearing a coat even in July.

Where he comes from you need coats all year.

He cannot understand that the weather in the place he lives in now is different. And that wearing a coat in July might actually kill him.

Eliza Dushku and the Blindness of CBS

OK, let’s look at this another way. Let’s look at it through the story of actress Eliza Dushku.

Eliza Dushku 2014

Dushku gave Congressional testimony in 2021 on a bill looking to ban binding arbitration clauses in most contracts.

The story she told is harrowing.

In 2017, she was “aggressively pursued” to play opposite Michael Weatherly on the show, “Bull,” on CBS.

The role, she said, of a tough and serious lawyer was meant to act as a counterbalance to Bull, who is a free-wheeling legal consultant loosely based on Dr. Phil.

She was looking at a 6-year contract.

“In my first week on my new job I felt myself the brunt of crude, sexualized and lewd verbal assaults,” Dushko told Congress. “I suffered near constant sexual harassment from my co-star.”

Weatherly, she said “would frequently refer to me as legs.’ He would smell me and leeringly look me up and down.”

Smell her? Ew.

“Off script,” Dushku said, “in front of about 100 crew members and cast members, he once said that he would take me to his rape van and use lewd, long phallic things on me and that he would take me over his knee and spank me like a little girl.

“These were not lines in the script,” she adds.

“One day,” Dushku says, “after I had delivered a courtroom monologue that I had spent significant time rehearsing, my co-star shouted out that he and his buddy wanted to have a threesome with me, and began mock penis-jousting while the camera was still rolling.”

Again. Ew.

“Then, as I walked off to my coffee break between scenes, a random male crew member sidled up to me at the food service table and whispered, ‘I’m with Bull. I wanna have a threesome with you, too, Eliza.’”

You can see the entire video testimony here.

Dushku told Congress that after she talked to Weatherly, telling him how he was making her feel, “he responded in feigned shock” and said “‘No one is more respectful of women than me. I grew up with sisters.’”

The next day she was fired, after Weatherly shot off a text to a CBS higher up saying that Dushku had a “sense of humor problem.”

Dushku tried to sue, but realized she had signed a contract with a binding arbitration clause. In other words, a standard Hollywood contract. That’s what Congress was investigating - whether people are being coerced to sign their rights away with the implicit threat that they won’t get hired if they don’t.

The best part of this story is not that Dushku was awarded $9.5 million from the arbitrator. It was how the arbitrator was convinced she was telling the truth.

It was on video.

As Rachel Abrams and John Koblin of the New York Times reported back in 2018, the argument CBS Chief Compliance Officer Mark Engstrom made is that far from being a victim, Dushku routinely cursed out the people she was working with.

Abrams and Koblin wrote that Engstrom “handed over outtakes from ‘Bull’ in the belief that they would help the company’s cause, because they showed Ms. Dushku cursing on the set.”

What those outtakes also showed, before the cursing, is the very sexual harassment Dushku was describing.

In a separate investigation into the culture of CBS - whose CEO, Les Moonves, was ousted for sexual harassment of at least 12 women - investigators detailed how Dushku’s attorneys realized they had just been handed a “gold mine” for their client.

What struck me is that Engstrom actually watched these tapes, and never saw the sexual harassment. He just saw a petite, beautiful woman breaking gender norms by swearing and raising her voice.

The harassment in front of him by the men was just wallpaper to him. It was how people acted. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Sulzberger, and his politics team, have the same kind of blindness. What they do - and Sulzberger actually argues this in his WaPo piece - is report what was said in terms of horserace and, sometimes, policy.

The Times’ role has never been to call out authoritarian tendencies in candidates because we have never had a candidate with such blatant authoritarian tendencies. 

“At The Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it,” Sulzberger wrote. “Our democratic model asks different institutions to play different roles; this is ours.”

It doesn’t matter that the evidence is on so many tapes. It doesn’t matter that the political weather has changed drastically. The Times will play its role, as if nothing has changed, without any self-examination.

They are holding on tightly to the way things “usually are.” And ignoring anything that suggests anything different.

Even when it’s blatantly obvious to everyone else.

*Fun fact, Sulzberger’s family has published or controlled the Times since his great-great-grandfather, Adolph Ochs, bought the paper in 1896.

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