David McCraw serves as the lead newsroom lawyer for The New York Times. He has spent 21 years at The Times and currently holds the position of Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. He is the author of the book “Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts” (St. Martin’s 2019), a first-person account of the legal battles that helped shape The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, national security, and the rise of political partisanship in America.
In addition to advising the newsroom on libel and other legal issues, Mr. McCraw is one of the nation’s most prolific litigators of Freedom of Information cases. He also oversees international security for Times journalists working in high-risk areas and has served as the crisis response manager when journalists have been kidnapped or detained abroad.
Mr. McCraw regularly teaches a course in press law at Harvard Law School and has been an adjunct faculty member at the NYU School of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School.