The cumulative reporter

by David Benjamin

“ … Like many policy declarations by Mr. Trump, it is hard to divine his true beliefs, and impossible to assure he will not change position again. He is nothing if not mercurial. His foreign policy views, former aides say, are more often driven by pique and a sense that he has been disrespected than by strategic analysis …” — David E. Sanger, NY Times, 24 Sept.

PARIS—One of my must-reads in the New York Times is foreign affairs reporter David E. Sanger, who recently filed a story about Donald Trump’s apparent—but unreliable—policy pivot on the war in Ukraine. I read Sanger, trustingly, for his thoroughness, his clarity and his capacity for critical analysis—the power to see through the veil of publicity and to intimate the actual truth.

In the Ukraine story, for example, Sanger provided factual details eighteen times on the issues emerging from United Nations discussions about Ukraine. In eight references, he cited precedent that lent background to the emerging news. He enriched his coverage by citing or quoting directly nine experts, officials and authorities (none of them Donald Trump). His direct quotes ranged from former John McCain aide Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for New American Security, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Sanger’s access to these sources is a product of his longstanding presence on the foreign policy beat. He knows the right people to whom to talk on a vast array of global matters. These people are usually willing to talk to him because he’s talked to them before and—never once—misquoted them.

Finally, in the sort of flourish I admire in a pro, Sanger delivered a rim-shot punchline, quoting Zelensky: “Stopping Russia now is cheaper than wondering who will be the first to create a simple drone carrying a nuclear weapon.”

My attentiveness to Sanger’s work is partly a matter of personal affection. We met in Tokyo some 35 years ago, at a reception marking my appointment as editor of Tokyo Journal, the English-language city magazine. By then, Sanger and I were both veterans in our trade but with vastly variant status. I’d been a weekly newspaper editor in a small town. Sanger was a rising reporter for the world’s foremost newspaper, undertaking a plum assignment as Tokyo correspondent. I was flattered by his attendance at my party, but I also understood that he had to show up. Tokyo was his beat. I was taking over a periodical read by the majority of English-speaking expatriates in the capital of Japan. His job—as was mine—was to accumulate as much information as we could absorb, as fast as we could, about the community of our coverage. Both of us needed to be able to pose, credibly, as experts on what was happening around town and around Japan.

Regular people could coast through much of life, not having to bone up or sweat the details. A reporter is a lifelong freshman with a pop quiz every day.

By the time Sanger finished his Tokyo gig, he was entitled to be called a “Japan hand.” Likewise, before I left, I’d piled up enough “background” on things Japanese that I was quotable—even on local TV—about a few local topics, especially sumo. In a sense, and almost accidentally, sumo became my beat. I accumulated enough sumo lore to write an entire book about it.

However, I could not have even pondered my sumo book had I not spent a lot of years writing about sports and about the practices and politics of sporting outfits like the Japan Sumo Association.

A reporter is a cumulative creature.

Sanger, for example, wrote his latest piece on Ukraine steeped in memories he had accumulated in three years of covering the war. He could also reference Ukraine stories that his Times colleagues had written. Moreover, Sanger has spent a lifetime explaining foreign affairs. This includes “memories” of moments in Ukraine’s history—or in Japan’s past—that happened before Sanger was born. Every journalist learns that, to cover what’s happening now, you have to learn what happened then and to know how past events apply—or are not relevant at all—to the present.

For example, when I started out covering local news in New England, I was unfamiliar with the regional tradition of an annual Town Meeting—a gathering during which citizens directly decide on local legislation, voting each “article” up or down. As I was writing my first Town Meeting preview article, I noticed, tucked toward end of the annual Warrant, a proposal to grant a woman named Doris the right to buy an adjacent property owned by the town and listed on the map as “Garden Street.” The hitch was that there was, as yet, no such street, nor might there ever be. Once a year, Doris came to Town Meeting, demanding the chance to own and develop this idle stretch of swampy forest next door to her house.

Every year, however, the Town Meeting refused Doris. Every year, Doris got a little more pissed off.

Since I was new (and hadn’t yet met Doris in the flesh), I thought her Garden Street grievance somewhat justified. Why not just sell her that strip of land and be done with her? My attitude changed—and become more detached—when I learned that the Conservation Commission had Garden Street concerns, as did the Health Board. Before authorizing any sale of town turf, the Finance Committee and Board of Assessors might have to evaluate the property in both its pristine and potentially developed incarnations. Garden Street’s future also fell within the sway of the Planning Board, the Board of Selectmen and the Town Manager.

Finally—and perhaps decisively—the unspoken and unprintable thread that sewed together all these complications was that Doris was a pain in the ass.

It took me a while to figure out all this mishigoss. But once I’d learned, and re-written every detail (pretty much from memory) year after year, I was—willing or not—the local authority on Garden Street.

Although careful not to disparage Doris personally, I was able—as the years went by—to explain the Garden Street uproar in what are known as “layman’s terms,” with historical sidelights, explaining why Doris had failed in past efforts despite strutting and fretting her frustrations before a dwindling electorate on the last evening of Town Meeting. I was able to indirectly forecast Doris’ upcoming defeat and even to predict that it would occur without a vote, but simply with the failure of a quorum count and the Selectmen deciding to adjourn—tabling all unfinished articles—’til next year.

Likewise, on a grander stage, David Sanger has infused his coverage of the Ukraine war with the nation’s history. He has schooled Times’ readers, often entertainingly (part of the reporter’s job), on the political interplay among Zelensky and Putin, Trump and NATO, the EU, EC and UN. If asked, he can—off the cuff—recount turmoil that dates back to Leonid Kravchuk, the first post-Soviet president, Kravchuk’s successors, the Orange Revolution, and the eventual overthrow of Zelensky’s corrupt pro-Putin predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych.

Not to mention Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelensky in 2019.

Sanger knows all this stuff. He finds it out, remembers it and, when the next story needs it, he can summon it from his memory. He knows this stuff because he’s been doing it all his life, because it’s his job to get it down, get it down right, back it up, remember it and, if he can’t remember it exactly, to keep notes that are legible to him at least and, ideally, to somebody trying to read them after he’s dead.

Because journalism really is the first draft of history.