To understand the modern media, it helps to view journalists as similar to alcoholics or drug addicts. This analogy will help you understand Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life, the new book by Margaret Sullivan.
Sullivan is a veteran of the Buffalo Evening News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
THE OTHER SLAVERY EXPOSES THE 1619 PROJECT’S FRAUD
For an entire generation of young journalists, the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s was like a powerful drug. The toppling of Richard Nixon provided a high. Called by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “the longest shot in the history of American journalism,” Watergate altered the political and media landscape the way heroin rewires the brain. The point of journalism went from covering the news to destroying the president — especially if such a figure were a Republican or a conservative. The language of addiction, a “rush,” came to define the media’s behavior whenever there was a political scandal. They even created fake scandals to feed their habits.
Sullivan was in high school in her native town of Lackawanna, New York, when Watergate hit. A kid who loved language, by the time Nixon resigned, she was the editor of her school newspaper. Here she is on Woodward and Bernstein: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman … I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.'” (Why the comfortable should be afflicted is never explained.)
Sullivan went from Georgetown University in the 1980s to an internship at the Buffalo Evening News, and in 1999, she became the paper’s editor. She then became the ombudsman, or “public editor,” of the New York Times in 2012. She followed that in 2016 with a job as a columnist at the Washington Post. The high of righteousness she relished could be always attained, mostly by mainlining Republican failure. Among the funniest parts of Newsroom Confidential are Sullivan’s reports of the freakout in the Washington Post newsroom when Donald Trump was elected president. Editor Marty Baron had to keep reminding the staff that they just had to “keep doing their jobs.”
This was not possible. Trump was fentanyl, an insanely powerful drug that was equally dangerous. The media went crazy. They simply could not let the man do his job. The press suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, defended the security agencies they had ferociously distrusted after Watergate, and speed-balled the idea that there was a seven-hour “gap” in President Trump’s White House phone logs. Bob Woodward, the original scandal dealer, was rolled out to huff and puff and proclaim that this was, yes, worse than Watergate. The story turned out to be false.
Sullivan claims that the Jan. 6 riot — a horrible event whose moronic perpetrators should be punished — was “one of the hinge events in all of American history.” This is a ridiculously hyperbolic view. She’s all-in on Russiagate, however, despite no evidence: “Anyone who bothered to read the report issued by special counsel Robert Mueller would know that Russia was guilty of illegal interference ‘in sweeping and systemic fashion’ and that the Trump campaign was willing to receive that help.” In fact, the language in the report is clear: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
The most telling section in Sullivan’s book comes near the end, when she admits to being on the side of the new generation of woke journalists demanding race-based hiring, printing unproven assertions, and censoring ideas they don’t like: “Perhaps surprisingly, given my age and long experience in newsroom management, I found myself in sympathy with those demanding radical change. Often, I was on the side of what was despairingly and falsely called the ‘woke mob’ — the younger, more diverse staffers who were supposedly running roughshod throughout Big Journalism’s newsrooms.”
Sullivan then backs the terrible work of the 1619 Project, the New York Times series about slavery that was challenged by many prominent historians. “Despite the pushback (a tiny portion which was grounded in objections by a few historians to some of the project’s assertions),” she writes, “it accomplished its goals: Whether they accepted it or not, many more people — in the United States and around the world — are aware of this neglected and ignored history than before Hannah-Jones began to write about it.”
I’m sorry, but Gordon S. Wood, James McPherson, and Sean Wilentz, who criticized the 1619 Project, are substantial historians, and their objections are serious and legitimate. But no matter — the project
“accomplished its goals.” Despite Sullivan’s recommendations for how the media can win the public back, it’s far too late for that. After all, Sullivan and her colleagues can’t even admit they have a problem, which is the first step to recovery.
Five decades after Watergate, all that still matters is the rush of that self-righteous liberal high. It’s too good to quit.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
