NEWSROOM CONFIDENTIAL

A veteran journalist recounts her life in the newsroom while prescribing cures for the media’s current woes.

“If one side claims it’s raining outside, and the other side claims the sun is shining, it’s not journalists’ job to quote both equally; it’s their job to walk outside, look at the sky, and report the truth.” So writes Sullivan, the media columnist for the Washington Post, who has been covering various beats since being lured into journalism by the glamour portrayed in the film version of All the President’s Men. The author found little glamour in her work at the Buffalo News, where she wrote about poverty, pollution, and political malfeasance and learned a lesson or two about how to overcome White privilege in a largely Black city. She joined the New York Times in the role of public editor, in which she acted as a post facto umpire on published pieces. The job, of short tenure by design so that the editor didn’t become part of the establishment, was full of fights. One obituary celebrated the domestic attributes of a subject in its lede before revealing that she was a distinguished scientist; concludes Sullivan, to the anger of the obituary writer, “the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote.” Small potatoes next to the biggest challenge she would face, though, when she moved to the Post and began covering Donald Trump’s countless distortions and lies, by which, thanks to his vengeful supporters, she “continually felt…irrational anger like an unending blast of liquid poison from an industrial-strength hose.” The author, whose liberal perspective is occasionally heavy-handed, acknowledges that Trump helped change journalism: It need not be adversarial, she holds, but it will necessarily be that way if it tells the truth about liars, and objectivity is a less-desirable standard than truth in the face of endless mendacity.

A welcome memoir of time in the reportorial trenches.