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**AUGUST 17, 2022**

New York Times Faces Backlash Over Dan Goldman Endorsement Debacle

BY DAVID DAYEN, ALEX SAMMON AND RYAN GRIM

There are ties between the families of Goldman and Times publisher A.G.
Sulzberger, who took an interest in the endorsement.

Over the weekend, the New York Times editorial board for the state's
upcoming congressional primary elections, backing a slate of Sean
Patrick Maloney in NY-17, Jerry Nadler in NY-12, and Dan Goldman in
NY-10.

The spectacle of the Times endorsing three white guys was itself enough
to draw attention, but capping it off by backing Goldman, a self-funding
heir to the Levi Strauss fortune
,
has brought an unusual amount of attention to the paper's endorsement
process.

The extremely crowded race in a deep-blue district features a current
member of Congress, a former member of Congress, two members of the
state Assembly, and one city councilmember. Goldman, a former counsel in
the first Trump impeachment, has not held public office and has thus
far  of his exorbitant personal wealth to his campaign. That type of
self-funding has previously been a disqualification for a Times
endorsement, but the paper of record made an exception for Goldman.

The paper also skipped the open primary for New York's Third District,
and missed an easy chance to endorse a nonwhite man in New York's
16th, which pits incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman against Westchester County
legislator Vedat Gashi and county legislator Catherine Parker.

As important in the context of the Times endorsement, Goldman's family
enjoys ties to members of the Sulzberger family, which has owned and run
the New York Times Company for six generations. The current publisher
and chair of its parent company is Arthur Gregg "A.G." Sulzberger.
One of the rival candidates, Rep. Mondaire Jones, alluded to that
relationship in a joint press conference attacking Goldman on Monday
alongside another candidate, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou. "Look, I
have no idea whether the generations of close family relationship
between the Sulzbergers and the Goldmans had any role at all to play in
the endorsement," Jones said
.

The Times editorial board insisted that the decision was based on merit,
but also disclosed that the board answers to the publisher. A.G.
Sulzberger did not recuse himself despite the ties between the Goldman
and Sulzberger families, and has in the past overruled editorial board
preferences. Sulzberger, who lives in the Tenth District, expressed an
interest in the race internally, according to a political operative not
working on behalf of any of the candidates who spoke directly with
multiple members of the editorial board, and another person close to
Sulzberger.

"[O]ur election endorsements are independent decisions that emerge
through reporting and discussion by a board of experienced journalists,
through individual interviews with candidates. This board reports
directly to the opinion editor and, through her, to the publisher,"
according to a statement from the Times, which added that Sulzberger and
Goldman do not personally know each other. Asked if there were any
contacts between Goldman and Sulzberger family members during the
endorsement process, Goldman campaign spokesperson Simone Kanter said,
"The answer to your question is 'no.'" He also cited the
Times' statement.

Jones was featured so much in the text of the endorsement

that without the headline it could have been seen as backing both men.
The two experienced women of color in the race who are at or near the
top of the polls, Niou and city councilmember Carlina Rivera, were not
mentioned in the endorsement at all. New York's Ross Barkan noted

that the endorsement was part of a pattern of "the Times' growing
disdain for the progressive left."

According to conversations with multiple members of the Jones camp, the
campaign was under the strong impression that a majority of the
editorial board members were in support of his campaign, though no final
decision had been made. But the Jones camp also understood the influence
of the Sulzberger family on the process, and in particular A.G.
Sulzberger's ability to tip the scales, as Jones alluded to in his
comments. There was a broad awareness in Jonesworld that majority
support from the board did not always translate to an endorsement, and
when the endorsement went to Goldman, a belief that the family's
personal preference factored in.

PERHAPS NO OTHER NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENT in the country matters as much as
the Times', particularly in the wealthier enclaves of New York City.
It has the demonstrated capacity to move voters who are in its core
audience. (The Times' nod to Jones in 2020 helped him win his open
primary in the district now pursued by Maloney.) Normally, the paper
doesn't get this opportunity, because seats come open so rarely. But a
late change to redistricting in New York upended districts serving the
affluent communities in Manhattan, giving the Times real power to shape
certain races with its endorsement.

The ties between the Goldman and Sulzberger families include their
mutual membership in elite D.C. circles. Shortly after announcing an
abortive run for New York attorney general, Goldman banked a $1,000
check

from Joseph Perpich, Cathy Sulzberger's husband. It was the 81-year
old Perpich's one and only contribution to a New York state political
race.

Goldman's mother, Susan Sachs Goldman, and Cathy Perpich (née
Sulzberger), the sister of the previous New York Times publisher and
aunt of its current one, both sat on the Board of Trustees of the elite
Beltway private school Sidwell Friends, where all three Goldman children
and all three Perpich (Sulzberger) children attended school. At Sidwell,
Goldman was one year ahead of David Perpich
, who sits on the board of
directors of the New York Times Company and is the publisher of Times
products The Athletic and Wirecutter. Duke Magazine, the university's
alumni publication, profiled

Perpich as "The NYT's Quiet Strategist" in 2020.

As a 16-year-old student at Sidwell in 1993, "Danny" Goldman was
quoted in the Times

reacting to Chelsea Clinton's entry into the private school. Days
later, The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz criticized the Times

for running the story without disclosing Cathy Sulzberger's presence
on the Sidwell board.

Both the Times' official statement
and a tweet
thread from
the company's PR feed are carefully worded. In the tweet thread, the
paper stated that "there are no members of the Sulzberger family who
have anything to do with candidate endorsements other than our
publisher," who is, of course, a Sulzberger. The thread stresses that
the endorsements are "independent decisions" but adds that the board
reports to the publisher, Sulzberger, through the opinion editor.

Daniel Okrent, the former public editor of the Times, had no knowledge
of the specific endorsement in question, but explained that similar
situations have happened before. "The publisher of the paper is the
authority over the editorial page," Okrent said. "It's not
infrequent that the board might want somebody, and the publisher wants
someone else."

Okrent didn't find this instance particularly worthy of condemnation;
after all, the publisher is ultimately responsible for what goes out
under the paper's name. In this case, he wasn't sure whether it
merited disclosure within the endorsement. "I can see how [the
editorial board] would think, if we say he's a family friend that
would weaken our determination that he's the best person for the
job," he noted.

THE ENDORSEMENT ITSELF

IS UNUSUALLY WEAK. It leads by saying that Goldman and Jones stand out
from the mostly unnamed rest of the field. (Former Watergate-era
Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, along
with Niou and Rivera, round out the top six candidates.) It highlights
Goldman's work on the Trump impeachment and says that "those who
have worked with Mr. Goldman behind the scenes describe him as diligent
and prepared and a person of integrity." Longtime local reporter Errol
Louis  to mean: "Queries within the alumni networks of Sidwell
Friends, Yale, and Stanford Law, from which Goldman graduated, turned up
good reports and no scandals."

The endorsement celebrates Goldman "bring[ing] serious policy ideas to
the race," but only mentions his support for a "ban on stock trading
by members of Congress," which has already been widely embraced by a
majority of Democrats. The endorsement lauds Goldman for assisting with
some research while in law school on the book The New Jim Crow, but does
not linger on Goldman's immediate decision to become a prosecutor in
the same criminal justice system the book had just lacerated.

Jones, by contrast, is described as a "prolific legislator" and a
"bridge builder between the progressive wing of his party and its more
moderate leadership." The only mark against him is that he lacked
experience working in the community he seeks to represent; Jones was
elbowed out of his home district when Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the
chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, moved to a
more favorable seat. But of course Goldman similarly lacks that
experience; the endorsement points out that "Goldman would need to use
his first term to convince the large numbers of lower-income and
middle-class Americans he would represent that he understands the issues
facing those constituents."

The Times editorial board is also known to harbor ill will in general
toward candidates who self-fund their campaigns, a vestige of the
anti-corruption piety that harks to their mugwump roots. Goldman held
off self-funding for much of the campaign, presumably fearful of losing
the coveted endorsement. But on July 13, facing a cash shortfall, he
dropped $1.24 million

of his own money into his campaign coffers, and another $750,000 a week
later. Goldman later donated an additional $2 million of his own money.

His opponents assumed the move had cost him the endorsement. In the
past, when the Times has endorsed a wealthy candidate funding his own
campaign, they've lashed themselves for it in the process. "This
page cares deeply about making elections fair and open, and if Mr.
[Michael] Bloomberg's administration had been anything less than
distinguished, his insistence on undermining the campaign finance system
would disqualify him from our support," the Times wrote in the past.
"As it is, with that one caveat in mind, we enthusiastically endorse
Michael Bloomberg for mayor."

"Mr. Bloomberg's current campaign approach reveals more about
America's broken system than his likelihood of fixing it," the Times
observed in declining to endorse Bloomberg for president. "Rather than
build support through his ideas and experience, Mr. Bloomberg has spent

at least $217 million to date to circumvent the hard, uncomfortable work
of actual campaigning."

But Goldman won the prize without so much as a mention that he had
broken their cardinal rule.

Goldman had already leapt to the top

of an Emerson College poll even before the Times endorsement was
released. Though he takes only 22 percent of the vote in the poll, the
unsettled field of candidates with similar ideologies could allow that
small share to take the seat.

A similar progressive split vote led former Republican Jake Auchincloss
to win a seat in the Boston area in 2020. There were also rumors

in that race that a close relationship between the Auchincloss family
and the owners of the Boston Globe, John and Linda Henry, led to
Auchincloss winning that paper's endorsement.

The Times editorial board's endorsement process has embarrassed the
paper in the past. The 2020 Democratic presidential co-endorsement of
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren was roundly derided two and a
half years ago.

On Wednesday night, the NY-10 candidates debate at Medgar Evers College
in Brooklyn. Goldman, Jones, Niou, Rivera, and Simon will be on the
stage.

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