A stained record

A new memoir by American media critic Margaret Sullivan, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) is a handy guide to the colossal missteps of journalism over the last two decades.

Sullivan toiled for most of her journalism career at the Buffalo News, rising from intern in 1980 to editor in 1999, the first woman to hold the post.

Her 32-year stint in the newsroom gets very little ink in the memoir, even though it forged her credentials for later work. There is the casual misogyny, of course, and a marriage breakup unfairly blamed on her ambition. Sullivan also acknowledges mistakes, including the paper’s racist, victim-blaming decision to report the criminal backgrounds of blacks killed in a 2010 mass shooting in Buffalo. Hit with a furious backlash from the black community, she apologized and took redemptive measures in the newsroom.

Most of the book is about her later career, first at the New York Times  as “public editor” (2012-16), then as media critic for the Washingon Post (2016-22). In both jobs, she critiqued journalism rather than committed it. The work brought her into contact with well-known editors, such as Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet at the Times, but Sullivan stayed at arm’s length to maintain her perspective as the reader’s representative at the paper. She was more integrated into the Post’s newsroom, but even there maintained a certain distance.

The result is a dearth of anecdotes about how the news was shaped in the trenches each day, or about the working habits of national reporters. This is not a blow-by-blow, such as brilliantly told in Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said, about reporting on Harvey Weinstein; or John Carreyrou’s riveting Bad Blood, about reporting on a Silicon Valley scam. Nor does the memoir offer much insight into the characters of star journalists, despite the promise of “confidential” in the title.

Rather, Sullivan is strongest in calling out the news media’s appallingly bad judgments since 2001. The litany begins with breathless reporting of “weapons of mass destruction,” the Bush administration’s phony justification for launching the War in Iraq. Sullivan also condemns the Times’ wall-to-wall coverage of Hilary Clinton’s run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, particularly its highly torqued stories about her emails.

She even knocks Bob Woodward, her youthful Watergate inspiration, for delaying release of damning information about Trump, the better to boost sales of his book Rage. Sullivan also rejects the “false equivalence” of climate journalism, which gives equal weight to the views of deniers in a misguided pursuit of balance. And she rails, quite rightly, against the overuse of anonymous sources, especially at the Times: “Far from being treated as a last resort, anonymity was being handed out as generously as Snickers bars on Halloween.”

Her recounting is forceful and insightful, though there’s not much she adds to the record. Sullivan gamely offers solutions, in the chapter “How to Clean Up the Mess We’re In.” She says the “reality-based” press has to reframe its mission as supporting democracy, rather than chasing clicks, prizes and profits. She calls for a war against news outlets that traffic in lies and conspiracies, urging lawsuits, ad boycotts, even regulation. Sullivan also wants more education in news literacy, and better support for local news outlets.

In the end, Newsroom Confidential is a useful compendium of journalism’s modern failures, and a diligent stab at solutions. Nothing particularly new or even juicy here, no unexpected insights certainly, but a painful reminder nevertheless of how the profession has stumbled so badly into the 21st century stuck on the last century’s paradigms.

Nov. 16, 2022