New York Times Reporter David Fahrenthold Discusses the Challenges of Covering the Trump Administration
Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his reporting on President Trump’s philanthropic foundation, visited Yale SOM as part of the R. Peter Straus Lecture Series.
David Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, visited Yale SOM on April 24 to discuss his work covering nonprofits including the Trump Foundation and Open AI, as well as the challenges facing the media in President Donald Trump’s turbulent second administration.
Fahrenthold, a Pulitzer Prize winner who spent 21 years at the Washington Post before joining the Times in 2022, spoke as part of the R. Peter Straus Lecture Series, named for a 1944 graduate of Yale College who became a pioneer of public-service radio. In a conversation with Raphael Duguay, assistant professor of accounting, Fahrenthold provided an inside look at his reporting process and discussed the importance of maintaining public trust in the media at a moment of unprecedented political upheaval.
“There’s got to be things in every story, both in the tone and the proof you include, that will show a reader that this is more trustworthy than what you might find somewhere else, or in an anonymous tweet,” Fahrenthold said.
In recent weeks, Fahrenthold has devoted his time to covering the slashing of federal programs by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a newly minted agency run by billionaire Elon Musk. His stories have chronicled the impact of funding freezes on nonprofits and refuted some of DOGE’s claims about the cuts it has made.
“I got involved writing about DOGE before the administration took over, thinking it was going to be a nonprofit,” Fahrenthold said. “Then I got involved writing stories about something called a ‘wall of receipts,’ which is a website that publicly itemizes the cancellations they’ve made. It was important to us to ask the basic questions about the website: Is it accurate when it talks about its own work? Is it telling the truth? And we found pretty quickly that there were many errors.”
Fahrenthold also reflected on how storied outlets like the New York Times can maintain their relevance and reach new audiences in a journalistic landscape crowded with social media and misinformation.
“I’ve been amazed at the results of what we call ‘reporter videos,’” Fahrenthold said of the Times’ short-form content that condenses major stories, such as investigations into DOGE’s actions, into shareable videos. “Just a video of me talking, with a few graphics, got 5 million views on Instagram and TikTok, far more people than read the story. I don’t know if it brought them to the New York Times website and made them readers, but at least it got our content in front of those folks.”
