On Press

In the 1960s and 1970s, facing new competition, pressure over their treatment of women and minorities, and charges of bias from left and right, America’s leading newspapers changed how they worked. Matthew Pressman shows how papers like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times moved from reporting the news to analyzing it, took a more adversarial stance toward power and, in many ways, became more liberal. He explains why those values held for three decades and why they came under review again in the Trump era.