Editor’s note: David E. McCraw, a 1976 U. of I. journalism graduate from Monticello, Illinois, got some unexpected online attention last week in his role as a vice president and assistant general counsel for The New York Times. The focus of that attention: McCraw’s response to an open letter from Donald Trump’s attorney, demanding the paper retract and apologize for a story about two women claiming unwanted past sexual advances from Trump. McCraw’s brief letter to the attorney, published on the Times site on Oct. 13, went viral on social media and shot to the top of the paper’s lists of most viewed and emailed items. On the Times site alone, it has been viewed by more than 1.6 million people. He spoke with U. of I. News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain about the job, the letter and what he learned at the U. of I. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.
How did you find your way to a legal career and then to the Times?
I worked at the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, right after graduation. After earning a master’s degree from Cornell, I later taught journalism at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. During that period, I was also a part-time columnist for a local newspaper and a freelance writer. While teaching at Marist, I attended Albany Law School and graduated in 1992. I went to law school intending to continue on as an academic, but I really fell in love with law as a pursuit and a profession. I worked for several years at a New York law firm and then was the newsroom lawyer at the New York Daily News from 2000 to 2002. I have been at The Times since 2002. I am also an adjunct professor at NYU Law School.
Your letter was one attorney responding to another. How unusual is it for the paper to publish that correspondence?
It’s extremely unusual. I'm the newsroom attorney, so all this comes through me. In the normal course, we would just have a private back and forth with a lawyer. Somebody writes, I write back, that’s it. We make an exception when the person writing has essentially initiated a public debate over this by going public with the initial letter. It’s obvious that now it’s not just the legal threat, but it’s our reputation and our standing to do our journalism that’s being called into question, and I'm happy to speak up in defense of that.
You have received more than 800 emails in response to the letter. How would you characterize those responses and your reaction?
Many people wrote to me to express anti-Trump sentiments and I understood why they would do that, but this isn’t political to me. I have sued the Obama administration more than any other media attorney in the country for its record on Freedom of Information Act requests. I have had a very contentious relationship with our Democrat governor’s office, and I'm not a huge admirer of people who have private email systems, because I think they’re doing that to thwart people’s right to know. So this wasn’t political to me, this was stating very basic propositions about how the law of freedom of the press works in this country.
The emails fell into three broad categories, one of which is those people who completely got the free press part of that – that I had somehow given them in words what it means in this country to cover an election and the freedom that the law provides. The second group are people who wrote in to thank me for standing up for women who spoke up. I had not really focused on that in writing the letter, but I received very, very touching emails from women – men as well, but mainly women – saying thank you for standing up for the right to speak out because people have been scared to do so.
The third group was appreciative of the writing style, and as someone who had a decidedly undistinguished journalism career, I still love to get praise for being a writer. There were lawyers who had done an analysis of how many sentences were in the active voice, the variation in the length of sentences, all that, and that was very, very encouraging to me.
(More about McCraw’s take on the reaction to his letter can be found in his Oct. 17 piece for the Times Insider section: “I Hardly Expected My Letter to Donald Trump to Go Viral.”)
What motivated your interest in journalism and the law?
I went to college just after the Supreme Court decided the Pentagon Papers. Watergate unfolded while I was at Illinois. In the journalism school, we all seemed to be reading “Four Theories of the Press,” that still-great classic book about freedom of the press written by professors at Illinois. As a senior, I did an independent-study paper on blacklisting in the film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, with professor Thomas Guback. I also took the media ethics class with professor Cliff Christians, which focused intently on how moral reasoning is done. From all of that, and many other things, I became fascinated by the stories of those people who pressed America to live up to its commitment to freedom of expression.
What are the other aspects of your job?
My job has a variety of components, including overseeing commercial litigation involving the company. But in my role as a newsroom lawyer, I spend a lot of time bringing Freedom of Information Act suits against the federal government and fighting to get court records unsealed. I advise our journalists on the whole range of legal issues: potential libel problems, issues in news gathering, the law of privacy. I also play a major role in our security efforts for our overseas journalists. I run our crisis response when our journalists get kidnapped or detained or have a medical emergency abroad: so far, two kidnappings in Afghanistan, the detention of four journalists in Libya, and a variety of other incidents in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere.
How is it you got involved in security issues?
It is one of those things that just sort of happened. The first time we had a reporter kidnapped, which was in 2008, I had been the person who wrote our crisis management plan. On the basis of that, people decided I must know something about this and so I was thrust into the forefront and became the point person. (After a second kidnapping), I decided to get more involved in how our operations prevented people from getting into jams. I’ve been to “kidnap response school” and spent a lot of time with consultants and experts.
Would you say this is the most challenging thing you do?
Yes. We have gotten so much better at it that there are very few times that it comes up where we actually have to kick into gear and do a response. When you have an incident, when you have somebody taken by a foreign government or you have somebody kidnapped, nothing is more challenging than that. It’s challenging as an intellectual exercise, it’s challenging emotionally, and it’s challenging just in all those skills you bring to the table of how to talk to people, how to reassure people, how to work closely with families and make sure they have the information they need and that they’re working with us to get the thing resolved.
What have you found to be the benefits of a journalism background for practicing law, setting aside the fact that you work as a newsroom attorney?
Obviously, in law school there's a whole lot of writing. In this job there’s a whole lot of writing. The kind of things I learned as a writer at Illinois stay with me. Some lawyer pointed out in an email to me that all but two of the sentences in the letter (to Trump’s attorney) were in active voice, and I work at that. I work at being clear, being direct.
One of the things I’ve done in the course of my legal career is a lot of pro bono work abroad, where I’ve worked on freedom of information projects in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe and Central Europe and in Russia, China. I’m always very aware that someone in those situations is translating me. And if you talk like a well-written news story when you’re making a legal presentation, you can’t go wrong and your interpreter will love you. Simply being able to say who did what is not only a really good way to approach a story, but it’s a really good way to explain the principles of the law.
(More about McCraw’s work can be found in this Times Insider piece from Aug. 10: “FOIA, Subpoenas and Singapore’s Libel Laws: All in a Day’s Work.”)