Bitter Clingers: How Mainstream Journalists Mourn the Loss of Cultural Supremacy

We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but come on. There is surely an exception for Newsroom Confidential by Margaret Sullivan, the cover of which features a blurb from Katie Couric about “how journalism really works.” Dan Rather must have been too busy looking for work. It sounds like a joke, but until recently the disgraced news anchor had a steady gig discussing media ethics on a show called Reliable Sources.

Having seen this, and noting the author’s work history at the New York Times and Washington Post, I judged Sullivan’s book to be an unserious work of #Resistance fan fiction. I read it to make sure, but I needn’t have bothered. For example, there is an entire chapter—”But Her Emails…”—about how the media’s “endless emphasis on [Hillary] Clinton’s email practices doomed her campaign perhaps more than any other factor,” in which the author approvingly cites noxious partisans such as David Brock, Charles Pierce, and Ian Millhiser.

Like a white nationalist aghast at the country’s demographic transformation, Sullivan is “sickened” at the mainstream media’s loss of cultural supremacy. The author and her industry peers aren’t as influential as they used to be, which is bad because their opinions are the right opinions. They “base their views and actions on science and reason.” Alas, the American people don’t trust them anymore, but that’s mainly because of the Iraq war and Fox News, the author insists. Nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake.

To paraphrase our country’s preeminent communicator: You go to these big newsrooms in New York and Washington, D.C., and, like a lot of media outlets, the ratings and traffic are way down and nothing’s replaced them. Everyone keeps saying their audiences are going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to democracy or the war in Ukraine or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their frustrations.

Newsroom Confidential is half memoir, half lament for the media’s fading relevance. Sullivan recounts the “lessons” and “worries” she accumulated over the course of her 42-year career in journalism, which more or less traced the industry’s rise and fall in the post-Watergate era. A wide-eyed intern who worked her way up to editor of the Buffalo News, she abandoned the Rust Belt for the Upper West Side and the “singular … cachet” of the Times, where she served