Nature & Animals Quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger

A sly little power map hides inside that cat metaphor. Sulzberger, the long-serving New York Times publisher, frames journalism as directional intelligence rather than direct action: reporters notice movement, name the trend, and publish it. Then the crowd, the market, the politicians, the voters - “the public” - does the grabbing, cheering, punishing, or rescuing. It’s modesty with an edge: we’re not the cat’s owners, he implies, but we’re the ones with the vantage point to see which way it bolts.

The line works because it flatters two audiences at once. It reassures skeptics that the press isn’t a self-appointed ruling class; it’s an observer, not an enforcer. At the same time, it quietly asserts agenda-setting power. “Which way the cat is jumping” isn’t just information; it’s the act of defining what counts as movement in the first place. If you decide what the cat is, where it is, and when a jump is happening, you shape the conditions for public reaction while pretending to stand outside the scrum.

Context matters: Sulzberger’s era was the consolidation of mass-circulation newspapers and the rise of “objective” prestige journalism as a civic institution. The quote reads like a publisher’s version of responsible influence - a defense against charges of meddling, propaganda, or partisan crusading. Yet the subtext admits what modern media debates keep circling: describing reality at scale is never neutral. The public “taking care of the cat” can mean democratic accountability, or it can mean mob impulse. Sulzberger keeps the newsroom’s hands clean, but not its fingerprints.