Picking Up the Flag of the Sun
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One day in April 2002, the managing editor of what was about to become The New York Sun, Ira Stoll, sat down with a reporter for the paper, Ben Smith, for an interview with New York’s new mayor. When conversation turned to the proposed Second Avenue subway line, Mr. Stoll inquired whether the city might sell the subways to a private entrepreneur. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, responded with the question, “What are you smoking?”
That question inspired the headline over the Sun’s first editorial, announcing the paper’s penchants for free markets and private enterprise. “We have chosen to pick up the flag of the Sun,” the editorial said, in a reference to the famed New York broadsheet that folded in 1950 after more than a century of publication, “because it reminds us more than that of any other newspaper of the importance of guiding principle. For more than a century, the Sun stood for constitutional government, equality under the law, free enterprise, and the American idea.”
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