Team Of Rivals

The root of today’s electric, scoop-filled coverage of the trump administration is a decades-old competition between two newspapers and the wealthy people who own them.

- Alex S. Jones

It was another day in the tit-for-tat competition between the Washington Post and the New York Times. On June 15, 2017, the Times reported, above the fold, that newly appointed special counsel Robert Mueller was, in fact, investigating whether President Donald Trump had obstructed justice. The piece was smartly written and well reported, but in the fifth paragraph appeared the words newspapers include when they have been bested: “The Washington Post first reported…”

Reading that phrase reminded me of my own stint as a reporter, covering the press for the Times, from 1983 to 1992, and how those moments of being bested were an occasion for grinding teeth and frantic effort. Each paper (and in those days it was only on paper) had someone stationed at the other’s headquarters to secure the first edition and rush it to waiting editors. I, like many of my colleagues, was sometimes awakened from a sound sleep and told I had an hour to match something that had appeared in that morning’s Post.

Not since the days of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate has the journalistic competition between these two institutions been so fierce, a gift of the Trump presidency. Since his election, both papers have published weekly, sometimes daily, bombshells about the new administration. These articles have dominated the news and shaped public discourse. They have also brought in new readers and reinvigorated each company’s bottom line.