Monday, Nov. 10, the College of William and Mary hosted New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David E. Sanger for a public conversation in Tucker Hall, moderated by George and Mary Hylton Professor of International Relations and Director of the College’s Global Research Institute, Mike Tierney ’87.
Sanger is the White House and National Security Correspondent for the Times and has worked there for over 40 years. He has served on three different Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams, which uncovered the causes of the Challenger disaster, the Clinton administration’s approval of American technology sales to China and Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
Sanger’s visit to campus followed the College’s selection of him as its 2025 Hunter B. Andrews Distinguished Fellow in American Politics. The College uses the Andrews Fellowship each year to host journalists, scholars and politicians on campus, allowing them to interact with and teach students.
College President Katherine A. Rowe began the event with remarks. She mentioned the role that the College will play in celebrating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States.
“We are at the eve of the U.S. Semiquincentennial,” she said. “What that means is that we are the place, the cradle of civic leadership, where over the next year we’re going to be thinking most intensely in this country about the ideas in which our nation was founded.”
President Rowe described the Hunter B. Andrews fellowship as a way of celebrating these founding ideas.
“We celebrate them this evening on the eve of the moment when this country was imagining a republic, with our Hunter B. Andrews fellowship,” she said. “[With the fellowship], we invite distinguished leaders and scholars in politics and journalism to come to reflect on the moment that we’re in.”
President Rowe then introduced Sanger as the College’s 2025 Andrews fellow.
“David Sanger has reported for The New York Times for more than 40 years,” she said. “He’s covered five U.S. presidencies [and] currently reports on the White House and National Security.”
President Rowe passed the floor to Tierney, who began the conversation by asking Sanger about the role of journalism with democracy.
“Let’s start with your day job,” Tierney said. “Talk to us about the role of and relevance of the media and a free press in a liberal democracy, in general, and then grounded in our democracy in the United States.”
Sanger explained how he believes the role of a free press and liberal democracy to be closely linked with each other.
“You can’t have a free society without a free press,” he said. “And by a free press, I mean an independent press.”
Sanger elaborated on what he meant by a free press.
“A press that hears out the government and whoever’s in power, and is under no obligation to publish things that aren’t true,” he said. “A press that starts each day knowing that the founders intended for the media and the government to be in this constant form of tension.”
Sanger illustrated how he saw the Trump administration hurting America’s free press.
He referenced the Trump administration’s ban on the Associated Press from the White House press pool for not using editorial language the president preferred.
“Until we got to the second Trump term, we did not have significant moments [similar to] this period, where the government actively went out to try to ban news organizations on the basis of the content they were reporting,” Sanger said. “Yet, in the first months of the [Trump] administration, the AP was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to use the phrase Gulf of America.”
Sanger also explained his worry about some of the lawsuits President Trump has levied against news organizations, particularly with how some of these companies have chosen to settle rather than fight the government in court.
“I am worried about my journalistic colleagues who work for news organizations that are owned by larger firms that have business in front of the government,” he said. “[They’ve] settled these suits that I think never had any merit, and I think it sets a bad precedent for the parent companies to be doing that.”
The conversation transitioned to talking about national security and Sanger’s newest book, “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.”
Referencing his book, Sanger discussed at length how the previous bipartisan consensus around dealing with China and Russia through liberal and economic integration, in his mind, did not work.
Tierney asked Sanger if he believed that this liberal integration strategy with China and Russia could have worked. Sanger responded that it would have required China and Russia to give up geopolitical influence to the West, which they ultimately were not going to do.
“I am of the belief that [the Western integration] strategy was doomed to fail because none of these countries was willing to give up its superpower status,” he said.
Lastly, Tierney asked Sanger about the relationship between U.S. national security and universities.
Sanger sees the Trump administration cutting off federal funding to universities and their research as damaging to our national security, as it allows our adversaries, like China, to challenge our global research prominence.
“You’re in a situation where the Chinese are funding basic research at a remarkable rate,” he said. “The idea of cutting [federal research funding] off without explaining to the country or to universities or to private industry what the alternative is, and just expecting it to blossom by itself strikes me as the best news that the Chinese could possibly hear.”
Sanger took brief questions from the audience and concluded on a final note regarding the importance of a free press.
“I think we need to drive home to Americans again that independent journalism is part of what made America, America,” he said. “We ought to have governments that are strong enough to take the criticism, reject some, take others and face the voters when you’re all done with it.”
