The New York Times functions as a power nearly equal to the state

Evidence

It is not only that it is America’s leading newspaper, but that taken together with its catholicity, level of expert reporting, responsibility, and, most important, its ability to write credibly from the viewpoint of national security give it a force of unique gravity. In others words, the Times can speak authoritatively about a subject and also make that subject pertinent to the nation; it does so deliberately and, it seems, successfully. Thus Harrison Salisbury recalls that in the spring of 1961 President Kennedy told Turner Catledge of the Times that had the paper printed more details of the impending Bay of Pigs invasion (which the Times had gathered on its own), “you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.” After the Bay of Pigs, Salisbury says, neither the Times nor the world yet understood that Tad Szulc’s reporting was not exceptional, and for that matter, that what the newspaper accomplished was not exceptional either. It was simply a matter of routine. The Times had become an extraordinarily strong institution functioning as a power almost coeval with the nation itself. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Agnew-era critiques of the press and later scholarly work on media as the fourth branch of government.
• QUESTION: Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs rebuke to the Times is verifiable and worth pulling the primary source.