The New York Times was founded in 1851 as a four-page paper called the New-York Daily Times. It tried to provide objective, serious coverage of the daily news. In 1896, the Times was bought by Adolph S. Ochs (1858–1935) and began to establish itself as New York's premier newspaper and the nation's "newspaper of record." Since 1897, it has carried a front-page motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print." In 1905, the paper even gave its name to one of the most famous squares in New York—Times Square.

Apart from being a news source for politicians around the world, the Times has also fought for freedom of the press and set the standard for investigative journalism. Always best at reporting on federal government and international news, it won a Pulitzer prize for reporting on World War I (1914–18) in 1918. In the 1960s, critics claimed that the paper had...