The chief executive of The New York Times has said the company will “not be cowed” by Donald Trump’s $15bn lawsuit against the newspaper and accused the US president of enacting an “anti-press playbook”.
Meredith Kopit Levien described the lawsuit not only as legally baseless, but as part of a campaign to intimidate independent journalism, drawing parallels with authoritarian tactics in countries such as Turkey and Hungary.
“There is an anti-press playbook at this point . . . If you look at countries like Turkey and Hungary and India, those countries have elections but they also really work to quash opposition to the regime,” Levien said at a Financial Times conference.