The Read: Margaret Sullivan, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’ve really appreciated Sullivan’s work at the New York Times and Washington Post.
Is it what I thought it was?
It’s a memoir. I appreciated getting to know more about her career overall. But it is also so steeped in the careful balancing act that characterized Sullivan’s writing at the Times and Post that it feels almost like she’s writing as a public editor about herself. Scrutiny but also a kind of distancing, and a tremendous amount of caution and restraint in describing her work.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m not I’d read this again alongside other engagements with our journalistic moment or the information crisis at the moment. It’s mostly just a comfortable revisitation of the work that made Sullivan a national figure in the first place.
Quotes
“I couldn’t help but feel we were in real trouble, and I have serious doubts about whether America’s news media will be up to the task and whether the level of most Americans’ news literacy—the ability to tell lies from truth in the media—is high enough to support our system of government by the people. How do you battle against the social media algorithms that incentivize lying and outrage for the sake of profit? How do you introduce factuality and reason, not to mention civility, into disagreements that are getting more tribal all the time?”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
One disappointment I had was that I expect the book to at least argue for a return to having public editors at all major newspapers (and news magazines). Sullivan notes that when the Times eventually folded the position a few years after she left, many readers (me among them) were disappointed or angry with that decision, and that the publisher’s explanation of the change was thin and unconvincing—that the Times readership now had so many avenues for communicating with the paper about its coverage that they no longer needed a public editor to act as their representative. I think the basic idea of hiring a person who has access to everything you do and no role in the standard chain of hierarchical management whose role it is to offer principled criticism of the work of the organization is important not just for journalism. I think academia should have ombuds as well. I think government should (and sort of does—that’s what the Congressional Budget Office is, for example). I understand why that’s a very hard position to fill with the right person—you don’t want a lunatic who starts think it’s their job to persecute everyone and you don’t want a sycophant who pretends to be doing diligence but is mostly just fawning over the editors. I understand also that editors think they’re already doing the work of diligence day in and day out, so who needs another person who doesn’t have to make the tough judgment calls but just gets to second-guess them. But that’s the whole point: who can afford to discuss the judgment calls in public? Someone who isn’t at that moment in time actually making them. Why do you need that? Because we have a crisis of faith in journalism that extends even to people who believe in it and rely on journalism every day. How do you restore faith? Partly by doing your business in the open and by demonstrating a willingness to listen to and accept criticism. The NYT staff, as Sullivan points out, have always been reluctant to show that willingness and that remains just as true as ever.
Sullivan does a good job of dismantling both-sides-ism and misunderstandings of “objectivity” but she manages—consciously and otherwise—to document how deeply many of her colleagues and peers in the American media are attached to the troubled and vulnerable meanings of those concepts even now. Overall, the book depresses me because it’s clear that some of American journalism’s problems are self-inflicted wounds, the result of a persistent inability to understand the problems with the way they imagine their profession. I even felt occasionally that Sullivan suffers from some of the same issues (which, to her credit, she acknowledge) in the sense that she doesn’t really probe that deeply into the history of American journalism’s long complicity in protecting both government and corporations from scrutiny. Journalists love the heroic stories—the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, the Spotlight investigation of sexual abuse, the investigation of Harvey Weinstein and other #MeToo reporting, but even with those stories, they don’t often like to visit just how often those stories almost didn’t happen, how often journalism’s hierarchies nearly stopped or truncated such investigations. Partly because that might uncover a much vaster legion of stories that should have run which we’ve only learned about far later. Sullivan talks at one point about a column where she looked back at the NYT’s woeful role in protecting the Iraq War from scrutiny (and got severe push-back from the editors for it) but I feel as if there’s an underappreciation of how common some of that constraint has been, before her time and during it.
Sullivan is a role model for a kind of scrupulous fairness, but it does take the edge off of the memoir, where perhaps you’re allowed to be a bit more shoot-from-the-hip. Almost nobody comes off badly in her evaluation (there’s one sports editor at the NYT who she pretty clearly still sees as an asshole). I think that’s fine in the sense that the issues she means to call out are deeper than the judgments of individuals, but it means that the memoir part has a kind of restraint to it that blunts its vividness somewhat—you don’t always get a richly observed feeling for what it was like to be Margaret Sullivan in her two most iconic jobs or a keenly witnessed view of what life was like inside both of those workplaces. She’s so judicious in running through some of the big controversies she witnessed that her account feels like a knowing outsider’s version. On the flip side, it also means that her overall critique of American journalism and her suggested solutions don’t ever have the sharp focus that they might because they’re embedded inside of the story of her career. The book ends up being half-memoir, half-polemic and not really fully satisfying as either.
She’s also polite but persistent about the numerous ways in which being a woman led to her being treated differently, most recently by Trump-following readers who responded with fury to her Post columns. A familiar story but an important one.
I liked the book well enough—and I still think she created a terrific model for the work of a public editor. I remain irritated—angry, even—that the role is not a common one in our present moment.