Margaret Sullivan Sounds the Alarm for Journalists in the Age of Trump

Great journalists have a rare talent for weaving together stories and ideas in ways that make complex topics feel connected. In her 2022 memoir, Margaret Sullivan does just that - drawing surprising links between topics such as Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” and the Watergate investigation.

Margaret Sullivan’s career memoir “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life,” details her career spanning several decades as a journalist working for some of the most credible news organizations in the country.

Beginning her career at a young age as an intern for the Buffalo News, she was inspired by the heroic story of the Watergate scandal as portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men.” The film influenced her career aspirations as a journalist who would expose corruption and engage in top-secret meetings with sources.

Sullivan soon discovered the reality that as a young woman in a male-dominated field, she could not so easily rise to the level of her idols. She recounts consistently being the minority in a room and the lessons that encouraged her as an advocate for diversity in the newsroom.

As Sullivan narrates the details of her experiences as the public editor of The New York Times and columnist at The Washington Post, she hits on three key themes and critiques of her industry. The first consistent battle that Sullivan faced throughout her career was over the abuse of anonymous sources in the newsroom. This point came to light most prominently during her stint as public editor with the Times. She wrote blog posts about the subject, publicly criticizing her colleagues’ over-use of the unnamed source in their reporting. She took issue with not only the loss of credibility that accompanies the practice, but more importantly the notion of taking part in the “devil’s bargain,” as Sullivan called it, in which the reader is the one who loses.

Secondly, Sullivan consistently references the state of public trust in the media during the period mentioned. According to Sullivan, public trust was somehow always at an all-time low. She connects the lessons learned throughout various current events to the duty journalists have to their readers as a pillar of democracy. As a load-bearing post, its demise in the eyes of the public is perilous.

The dangers of journalists habitually equalizing the unequal in their reporting is Sullivan’s final, and possibly most important, theme. This topic is discussed in the most detail in the final chapters of the memoir, in which Sullivan predominantly directs her focus toward critiquing reporters in the era of Donald Trump. Earlier in the book, she exhausts the topic of how dominating news outlets ultimately did a disservice to their readers by over-covering Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. I read this to be a prime example of Sullivan’s cry to the industry to move away from the unrealistic and occasionally dangerous practice of over-covering topics of mundane importance or, even worse, undercovering perilous threats to the future of American democracy.

Perhaps the most compelling criticism of journalists that Sullivan presents, relating to the last point, is the often embarrassing inability of journalists to see and understand the public’s concern with their work. When the Times published a tone-deaf article on Serena Williams’ body image or a demeaning portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a planet, those responsible could not understand the public’s negative reactions. These examples speak to Sullivan’s observation that journalists have tunnel vision when it comes to how their work will play out in the real world.

While Sullivan’s career and stories are nothing short of admirable, this book occasionally felt like an attempt to separate herself from the errors of her peers. Perhaps in an attempt to reach for a moral high ground, she places the blame of questionable practices before and during the first Trump presidency on her colleagues with little explanation of the efforts she made.

My feelings aside, I admire the explicit and courageous steps taken by Sullivan in the final chapters of this book to commend journalists who work toward a stronger democracy instead of getting lost in the traditional expectations of objectivity.

In “Newsroom Confidential,” Sullivan invites us to critically examine the power journalism holds to fight threats to U.S. democracy. She lays out the necessary tools and weapons, and as we begin a second Trump presidency, the battle starts now.