Civics: “more than a few stories of discovering the fruits of their labor in the Times, as though it had fallen like manna”
Given its national status as “the paper of record,” the company sometimes behaves as though nothing has been officially recorded until it is recorded there. As Sam put it, “The world is their tip sheet.”
And while that posture often lives in service of a civic mission, sometimes you just have to follow simple kindergarten rules and give credit where it’s due. Securing retroactive credit for one’s work can be a blood sport, however, and many reporters resign themselves to little more than a resentful X post—perhaps aware, begrudgingly, that the only ones who care about the provenance of a revelation are the journalists themselves. (This, too, is often true!)
Yet the Times’s chemical plant story seemed like a particularly egregious expression of the genre. Shortly after seeing it, Sam reached out to Lipton by phone. “He hung up on me immediately and didn’t engage,” Sam told me. “At the very least you’d think he’d say something like, ‘Hey, that’s a good story you guys wrote. I think we built on it.’ But I think the approach from the Times is that they’re untouchable and don’t owe anyone anything for their work.”
———
