BuzzFeed News reaped the traffic for publishing a dossier in 2017 that contained explosive allegations about President Donald J. Trump, for example, even though it was largely discredited years later. There is often intense interest in the manifestoes written by perpetrators of mass shootings, but news organizations now shy away from excerpting them, for fear of encouraging copycats.

“I think today we have more conversations about minimizing harm, and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Even in the 1990s, Dr. Culver said, the ferocious debate in journalism circles seemed academic to much of the public, when a killer was on the loose and the newspapers might have the power to stop him. “My principal memory from the time was people outside newsrooms saying, ‘Why was this a question?’”

At the same time, however, newspapers have faced criticism — and sometimes lost readers’ faith — for being too close to government authorities. Insufficiently critical reporting by The Times during the months leading up to the war in Iraq in the early 2000s is one example. A second is the media’s failure to adequately scrutinize statements by police departments in the wake of protests over the killing of an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.

John Watson, a journalism professor at American University’s School of Communication, said the newspapers should have allowed the Justice Department to buy an advertorial section for the manifesto, to satisfy Mr. Kaczynski’s demands while separating it from editorial decision making.

“Journalists should never be seen to be on the same side as the police,” Dr. Watson said. “Their ability to be watchdogs depends on the public believing that they will never be in bed with the government, they will always be skeptical, even if it is obvious that the government is right.”

Through a Times spokesperson, Mr. Sulzberger declined an interview, deferring to his comments at the time. His son, the current publisher of the Times, A.G. Sulzberger, recently published a long meditation on the meaning and value of journalistic independence. He did not respond to an email asking whether he would have made the same decision as his father.