"Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensationalized mundane.

These days, we can clearly see the fallout from decades of declining public trust, the result, at least partly, of so many years of the press being undermined and of undermining itself. What is that fallout? Americans no longer share a common basis of reality. That’s dangerous because American democracy, government by the people, simply can’t function this way. It’s high time to ask how public trust in the press steadily plummeted from the years following the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s—when seven of ten Americans trusted the news—to today’s rock-bottom lows".

My parents were both readers, which should come as no surprise. Mom, a homemaker, consumed a steady stream of mysteries her entire life, as least the part of it that included me. Dad worked at night, but would set aside some reading time every day, particularly on his days off. He was not much of a book reader, though. His preferred material was the newspaper. Well, newspapers. There was a flood of them coming in, the New York Post (pre-Rupert), the Daily News, The Herald Tribune, The Mirror, the Telegram, the Times. Not saying that we had all of these coming in every day, but all were well represented. And if you wanted to see what he was reading, it was not hard to figure it out. Next to his living room easy chair there was always a stack. If it were books, today, we would call it a TBR. But the stack had a life of its own, and a sorting that was inexplicable. He must have read a fair bit as he kept the pile from overwhelming the room, hell, the entire apartment. I cannot say that I was a big news-reader as kid. More sports than anything. I wanted to keep up with the teams I cared about, the baseball Giants, the Yankees, and eventually the Mets.

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Margaret Sullivan – image from PBS

I was very fortunate to have been raised in an environment in which reading the news, every day, was just a normal part of living. Even though my parents were not well-educated—Mom finished high school. Dad did not.—they valued staying informed. There was no talk at home about reporters slanting stories, although I am sure they did. The news was like the water supply, presumed to be potable, and universally consumed. But there was one exception. It was not until later in life that I began to read the news with a more critical eye, but even as a kid, I could see that sportswriter Dick Young was a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch, flogging right-wing bile that had nothing to do with sports. I guess that was my first real exposure, consciously anyway, to journalistic political bias. Young was not a person who could be trusted, even though he held a very public position at a major New York newspaper. I doubt, if Dad were still with us, that he would accept what he’d be reading today as revealed truth. But back then, mostly, though, we took the news at face value.

Margaret Sullivan, a doyen of media self-reflection, has not been happy with the face value of American news reporting for quite some time. The news media, in her view (and in the view of anyone with a brain) is far too concerned with the horserace aspect of political competition, far more than they are with the actual policy substance that differentiates candidates and parties. One of the most respected journalists of her generation, having led a major regional newspaper, and having held two of the most widely read and respected writing posts in contemporary American journalism, she has had a ring-side view of this in action. She worked for thirty-two years at The Buffalo News, rising to be their top editor and a vice president. In 2012 she moved on to be the Public Editor at The New York Times, and in 2016 headed to The Washington Post as a media columnist in the high-powered Style section. She retired from that gig in August of 2022, and is currently teaching part time at Duke while working on a novel.

She won a Mirror award for her writing on Trump’s first impeachment, served on the Pulitzer Prize board, and was a director of the American Society of News Editors. She has also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous sexism, as she worked her way through her share of glass ceilings. She knows a thing or two, because she has seen a thing or two. Newsroom Confidential is not just a personal memoir of her career in the newsroom, but a look at the changes that has taken place in journalism and in our view of journalism over her career.

"It’s high time to ask how public trust in the press steadily plummeted from the years following the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s—when seven of ten Americans trusted the news—to today’s rock-bottom lows."

The high point may have been the inspirational impact of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on the Nixon administration’s corruption, Watergate most particularly. It was seeing that journalism was a way to impact the world, to improve it, that moved her to pursue a career in the news. We follow her through the career travails at The Buffalo News. She tells a bit about her full dedication to work conflicting with the demands of having a family, exacerbated by having to cope with the extra resistance of gender bias in her struggle to advance her career.

But while Buffalo may have occupied the bulk of her professional life, it does not occupy a proportional piece of the book. The real meat begins with her move to The New York Times. As Public Editor, her role was to be an outsider, looking critically as the work of Times reporters. Not exactly a recipe for making friends. Most editors were not particularly receptive to criticism, constructive or not. The sexism presented straight away, as a Times obituary about a very accomplished woman opened with a description of her cooking skills. Her job was not only to write about wrongs, but to offer recommendations for improvement. It would prove a Sisyphean task. She writes about her personal conflict in taking on a Public Editor investigation into a story written by a Times mentee of hers. While it may have been an important and high-profile position, it was a very tough job at times.

One thing I learned back in my twenties is that it is not only the content of articles that merits attention. Their placement is also significant, as is the heading given to those articles. These are often provided by an editor, not the reporter, and are often misleading. Sullivan writes about the most egregious example of the Times doing this, in its treatment of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. The paper saw Clinton as a “pre-anointed” candidate, presuming that she would win. They wanted to be seen as tough, and were very defensive about being seen as too soft on Democrats.

"The Times had certainly treated the FBI’s two investigations of the 2016 presidential candidates very differently. It shouted one from the rooftops, and on Trump and Russia the paper used its quiet inside voice, playing right into the Republican candidate’s hands. With a little more than a week to go before the election, the Times published a story with the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” If anyone was concerned about Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin, their fears might be put to rest by that soothing headline, though the story itself was considerably more nuanced. Even that reporting, not very damning for Trump, appeared on an inside page of the paper, a far cry from the emails coverage splashed all over the front page, day after day. We now know, of course, that Russia had set out to interfere with the election, and did so very effectively."

That sort of selective exposure was not exactly new. The Times had been aware, back when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, of a domestic spying program. They sat on the story for thirteen months, finally posting the information when the reporter who dug up the story threatened to scoop them with his book. The potential impact was considerable, as revelation of the program during the campaign might have impacted the election result. One collateral result of this was that when a later major leaker of government secrets was looking for a trustworthy outlet, the Times was bypassed, because there was no confidence that the paper would publish the material. The Washington Post and The Guardian received the materials instead.

She writes about the transition of the news business from paper to digital, the decline in readership overall, and the national decline in news outlets, noting some who railed against the change, and others who saw the future early on and climbed on board.

Sullivan’s real reporting bête noire is excessive reliance on anonymous sourcing, aka access journalism. Sure, there are instances in which getting on-the-record quotes is impossible, or even dangerous. But the over-reliance on anonymity has resulted in reporters being played for fools, being fed self-serving tidbits, often intended to dishonestly manipulate public perceptions, often aimed at using reporters as ordnance in internecine political battles, and far too frequently serving no public good. The classic example of this was Judith Miller at the Times, reporting inaccurate intel given to her by members of the Bush Administration in order to build support for a war that was already being planned.

In the digital age another piece of this is a compulsion to generate clicks. This creates an incentive for reporters to sometimes hold on to maybe-less-exciting policy stories in favor of pieces that are likely to raise a reader’s temperature. The old trope If it bleeds it leads has been translated into the age of digital journalism as favoring heat over light.

It is not really breaking news why people’s trust in journalism has declined. The news was once considered a realm in which professionals investigated and reported stories with an eye toward what was considered newsworthy. But with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine regarding broadcast news, the gates were opened for full-time partisanship in the airwaves. The concentration of media ownership into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations has diluted, if not entirely removed, local news reporting. Now, many local stations broadcast what their distant owners tell them to, including the airing of political puff pieces for favored candidates and issues, and political hit pieces for those they oppose. With so many places in the nation reduced to a single newspaper or local news channel, local news has become more and more a mouthpiece of national corporate views. And a reduction in the availability of diverse perspectives.

The rise of the internet has had a huge impact on how we receive and perceive news. But a major reason, maybe the biggest, for a loss of faith in the media is the relentless assault on mainstream media by the right. Bias in the media is hardly new, but the unceasing emotionally-charged torrent of lies from right-wing media has raised dishonesty to a new, steroidal level. Every article that portrays Republicans or their supporters in a less than flattering light is attacked as evidence of some imaginary left-wing bias. One result of this relentless attack machine is that many outlets have become reluctant to report actual facts, lest they be attacked as biased. The Times, for example, took years to finally come around to describing Donald Trump’s blatant lies as just that. Can you fully trust a paper that is so weak-kneed about reporting the facts? Even regular Times readers must wonder. And, of course, those on the right now attack any media outlet that does not totally support the GOP party line. Even where no bias is present, many, if not all, on the right claim to see unfairness because they have been told thousands of times that such bias is always present. And the right is fond of using the threat of lawsuits to harass their targets. Trump is notorious for suing the objects of his ire, not expecting to win in court, but hoping to cost the sued large sums of money in legal fees, thus intimidating them, and, he hopes, deterring them from crossing him again. At least the Times has the resources to stand up to such bullying, but there are many media outlets that do not. Thus, MSM reporting slants away from truth.

Sullivan’s experiences writing for the Times and Post are fascinating, offering a view from inside the fishbowl, of the cultures, and some of the personalities, the battles that were fought against external attackers and the internecine conflicts that occur everywhere.

If Dad were around today, I expect he would approve of the many news subscriptions my wife and I share, the Times, the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily Beast, our local paper, et al. Our stacks of unread material may not accumulate next to chairs in our living room, but reside instead in a black hole of unread materials and a digital TBR of things we intend to get to. We have come to view news reporting with critical eyes, sensitive to biases that creep into (or are on full display) the text of pieces, aware of how those pieces are presented, where, when, and why. The sort of trust in the news that was extant in the middle twentieth century is gone. But that does not mean that all trust has been lost. For those willing to do the work, it is possible to discern good from bad, both in publications and reporters. But it takes a lot more effort today than it ever did. We are aware, as our parents’ generation was less likely to be, of a reporter’s bent. As the world has forced us to look closer at all sorts of informational input (think ingredient lists on food packages), we have become more discriminating consumers of news. This reporter can be relied on. That one cannot. The fracturing of the news into a galaxy of providers has made it easier than ever to choose only the news that that fits preconceived perspectives. But it is not exactly a news-flash is that it remains possible to find quality reporting. It just takes a bit of digging.

As for Sullivan’s look back at her career and the shift in public perceptions, it is revelatory, informative, and engaging. If you know anything at all about Sullivan’s writing, this will not come as a shock. The bad news? The decline in public trust of media is very real, as is the reduction in local reporting. The good news? (I believe) people are becoming more aware of bias in supposedly neutral news media. Trust in journalism can be rebuilt, but it is clear that many outlets rely on readers/watchers accepting their reporting with uncritical eyes. After you read Newsroom Confidential you will have a greater sense of what the journalistic challenges are today, both for readers and producers of news. You will not be able to say That’s news to me.

Review posted – 11/18/22

Publication date – 10/18/22

I received an ARE of Newsroom Confidential from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair and balanced review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating an ePUB.

For the full review, with links, please go to https://cootsreviews.com/2022/11/18/newsroom-confidential-by-margaret-sullivan/

whoa! What a read. This was perfect for Nonfiction November. I was enthralled by how Margaret navigated her career as a journalist in such toxic environments. I could not put this one down!

I loved learning about how she obtained leadership roles and the paths she took to make sure the stories we heard were truth. I appreciate this more that I can portray. Hearing about Hilary Clinton and Elon Musk was especially fascinating.

Thank you SMP for the ecopy and paperbook copy. I learned so much about how

I found the author's book to be a good look at the state of journalism over the past several decades. I was especially impressed with her rise through the ranks in what was an "old-boys" network. This makes her accomplishments much more impressive. I guess that I am used to the "tell-all" gossip mongering books usually presented in this vein. While I found the book to be rather dry in that sense, I appreciate her ability to present her story without relying on that type of sensationalism.

This is an interesting look at how journalists have changed their tenor in reporting over the past 40 years. Written by a seasoned journalist, the most interesting part of me was her assessment of the state of reporting since 2015. Changes need to occur! Worth the read.

I received this book as an ARC and this is my review. I loved this book! The story is timely and hard-hitting and Sullivan is neither neutral nor impartial. So refreshing! I have a journalistic background and realize the importance of sometimes just speaking out to emphasize the relevance of a story. This is a true behind-the-scenes view with well-known characters on all sides. Definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants an all-sides view of America at this moment in time.

I love a good journalism memoir, and I was really excited for this one because it focused on two of the biggest newspapers in the world: The New York Times and the Washington Post. Sullivan was the Times’ public editor, which meant that she would report on the Times’ reporting and share her own commentary on whether she thought the Times was being fair and accurate in their journalism. I was really not familiar with that type of role before reading this and found it to be BEYOND fascinating. Actually, I wish we had gotten more stories from that part of her career in here! After leaving the Times, Sullivan became a media columnist for the Post. While I really enjoyed this part as well, I thought that some of her discussion on truth, the role of journalism in democracy, the industry as a whole felt a little heavy-handed. I agreed with pretty much everything she was arguing, but I think there was a little too much of that element and not enough memoir in the back half of the book.

I was a bit surprised that I didn't enjoy this as much as I expected to.
Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC for review.
Obviously the author is a professional writer, but content-wise I expected more behind-the-scenes dirt and grit from newsrooms.
Instead it felt a bit like an expanded resume of accomplishments. Which is fine, just wasn't for me.
I tend to gravitate toward the "confidential" books in hopes of capturing the magic that Anthony Bourdain once did with Kitchen Confidential.
You simply can't replicate his original.

I was spectacle about this title/synopsis, but I’m glad I committed to this book! The author makes several viewpoints that I can jump on board as an educator. Although I’m not going to purchase it, I will be suggesting it as required reading to my students!

This is an interesting memoir of a journalist who rose to the top of her field. Along the way she encountered sexism and was able to break through the proverbial glass ceiling. She reported on many historical events that you will recognize without needing a lot of background. She is a skilled writer and the best part was her call to action for current and future journalists about reporting the facts and the importance of not over-sensationalizing statements and situations that are not fact-based - be more discerning about what should be amplified and given a platform. The first part of the book turned me off because she lacked humility. I did check myself to make sure I was not being biased and affirmed I don't like this quality with men either. But with that aside, this is a very timely and important book and is worth the read.

In this book, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan shares her experiences as the first woman Public Editor of the New York Times & her career in journalism. She shares anecdotes about columns she wrote, experiences she had with colleagues, & the "big" issues she sees in journalism today--the lack of trust from the public, the mainstream media's tendency to cover politics as a horserace, the lure of propaganda and a public that doesn't have a shared belief in facts, and the misogyny and legacy thinking that hamper newsrooms and their work.

I loved the portions of this book that spoke to Margaret's work as oversight for The New York Times. The public editor position was eliminated in 2017, one year after Margaret moved on, which is a shame considering it seems like the position--and Margaret's work in it--provided some much-needed perspective and accountability for the paper and its work.

I also liked the behind-the-scenes info Margaret shared. Her insight into the missteps--and the reverberations of those missteps that we still see today--regarding the press's coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails and the rise and presidency of Donald Trump are intriguing, especially due to her close access. She does offer some solutions to the BIG issues she sees with journalism today, yet they seem rather pat and unrealistic considering the level of divisiveness and the reality that many Americans no longer believe in a shared set of facts.

I would have liked to learn more about Margaret's personal life and its challenges amidst this intense work. Many of the sections also contain work we can find on the internet. While this book is interesting, I feel like it's not as comprehensive and effective as it could be. Still, hearing from a well-regarded female journalist who broke the glass ceiling and provided accountability for "the paper of record" is absolutely worth the time.

Props to Lisa Flanagan for a stellar narrating of this audiobook. And thanks to @netgalley and @stmartinspress for the free copy in exchange for an honest review. I did my usual listen to some/read some of this book.

This memoir detailing the author’s life in journalism touts truth over two-sided storytelling. But her reflections on her white privileged past are often cringeworthy.

Margaret Sullivan gives an in-depth perspective to today's "real" and "fake" news in her memoir. Her experience and expertise provides her an authoritative voice on how social media, influencers and newsrooms themselves affect what's considered news, who the audiences are and the slant in its presentation. As a former newspaper editor, I really appreciate that she's trying to separate the real deal and the real bad.

Margaret Sullivan is a famous editor who for many years ran the Buffalo News before going on to the New York Times and later the Washington Post. She writes here about her time in newsrooms and the relationship between news and the public. This book is shorter, thank goodness, because it is somewhat dry (or merely journalistic) and very "inside baseball". If you want to hear all about newsrooms and the difficult state we are in with people's trust in media at an all-time low, then this is the book for you.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advance copy for review.

As a former journalist, I was thrilled to get an advanced reader’s edition of this book. (Thank you @stmartinspress and @netgalley).

Margaret Sullivan is a true trailblazer in that she smashed glass ceilings in newspaper journalism. She was the first female editor of the Buffalo News, where she worked her way up, and the first female public editor of the New York Times.

For reference, the public editor position was one where the editor was independent from the newsroom and focused on reader complaints and investigated what went right and wrong in the reporting of news. You can imagine that would be a difficult position as you are essentially critiquing the reporters and editors at your own paper.

This is a memoir that all interested in news reporting/ the media will want to read. The prose is great (no big surprise!), and Sullivan makes some very thought provoking arguments about the role of the media in today’s heated political environment.

I completely agree with her that Americans have lost their trust in the media. She posits some interesting recommendations for how to regain that lost trust.

As would be expected from someone with her training and experience as a journalist and editor, Margaret Sullivan has delivered a very readable memoir covering her career in journalism. She returns to her experiences in high school with the school newspaper to demonstrate how her love for the field began, and continues to her early work as a reporter for the Niagara Gazette and then the Buffalo News, leading to her eventual promotion as that paper’s chief editor. Her subsequent roles as public editor for the New York Times and media columnist for The Washington Post moved her to national fame. As the public editor for the Times she found herself in the middle of multiple controversies about that paper’s coverage of political events, representing the rights of the readership to know more about faulty and uneven by her colleagues of those events. Her move to the Post gave her a wider mandate, able to cover journalist choices in all national media.

The later parts of the book are what I consider its most important, as she delves into a discussion of the state of local and national news coverage in today’s political climate. She tries to identify ways in which the media should be covering events and stories in a world of news filled with misinformation. This book should be required for aspiring (and experienced) journalists as a guide on how to present the news honestly in a time when balanced news coverage may not be accurate.

Thank you for the advanced copy, St. Martin's Press!

This book definitely scratches the itch for those who are interested in journalism and particularly how stories have been covered in the last 30 years. As an admirer of the profession, I found the book very interesting and have a ton of respect for how Margaret Sullivan held her co-workers and the industry accountable in her role as the public editor of the New York Times. Though, many of the specifics on the writers and industry references went over my head. I loved the first half of the book and learning about her rise to her position at the NYT. Admittedly my eyes glazed over when the book began to cover the 2016 election - it was full of politics and I just was not in the mood to relive that time or dive into those challenges again.

Overall - for a fan of the industry or someone wanting to learn more about the waning trust of journalism in America, I would recommend this book. I found it particularly interesting to learn more about Margaret and her impressive career.

A fascinating look at the life of a talented journalist as she climbed her way to the top to become the first female public editor of the New York Times. An inspiring book for people wanting a peek behind the curtain at some of the most influential news agencies in the country.

Margaret Sullivan writes in a very comfortable style making this memoir a book that will appeal to both those who are knowledgable of the ins and outs of journalism and those who are not. I wasn't bothered by names and newspapers that were new to me. I wanted to know how we came to find ourselves with such a small portion of Americans trusting the news. Her position on the 2016 election and Clinton's emails and its aftermath made for a hard discussion but a very necessary one. The role of journalism in these days of social media and the lack of fact checking is important. It's no wonder the public has such a low opinion of journalism. They have lost trust. Can it ever be recovered?
My thanks to the publisher St. Martin's and to NetGalley for giving me an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Enlightening book. It’s a topic that is important in today’s world because the media has changed so drastically. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what is right/wrong with media and the author certainly has strong opinions as well but they are grounded in years of experience as a journalist. She brought up many interesting points but I particularly liked her thoughts on whether journalists should be neutral and present all sides of a story equally. It helped me understand the bias that is so predominant today in the news.

An intriguing look behind the scenes at journalism. Sullivan has worked in multiple capacities at multiple papers, notably the Washington Post and the New York Times but while this does take you through her history, it's stronger sections (and the ones I found most discouraging) are about how journalism has changed in the last 8 years, Her job at the Post had her looking at media but it's now that she's able to look back at the 2016 and 2020 elections and point fingers. Over to others on those sections- it's still a wilderness of mirrors. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For those interested in journalism.