Margaret Sullivan, "Newsroom Confidential"

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Margaret Sullivan, "Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries)

from an Ink-Stained Life" (2022)

 

 Buffalo News chief editor (1999-2012), New York Times public editor (2012-2016), 그리고 Washington Post media columnist (2016-2022)에 이어 현재 Columbia Journalism School 교수인 언론인 Margaret Sullivan의 회고록이다.  네 달 전에 읽은 Adam Nagourney, "The Times" (2023)도 떠올리며 재밌게 읽었다. 그녀는 여러 각도에서 쓰고 또 쓰고픈 미디어 칼럼으로 "the 'don't magnify political lies' column"을 꼽는다.

 

The New York Times 서평 서평에서:

 

She invokes Maria Ressa, the Filipino online news publisher and 2021 Nobel laureate: “In a battle for facts, in a battle for truth, journalism is activism.” Sullivan calls on journalists to drop a posture of “objectivity” and refashion their work to counter propaganda and defeat insurrectionists.

 

She argues at length that The New York Times badly overplayed its coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email practices during the 2016 campaign and she concludes that The Times certainly contributed to Clinton’s defeat.

 

본문에서:

 

The traditional media -- what I call the reality-based press -- was at fault, too, in creating this democracy-threatening mess. In a less obvious way, they worsened the harm. They did so by treating the denialists as legitimate news sources whose views, for the sake of objectivity and fairness, must be respectfully listened to and reflected in news stories. (p. 3)

 

One of the worst repeating problems, as I've noted, was the Times' overuse of unnamed sources, also known as confidential sources or anonymous sources. (p. 120)

 

In 2005, the level of public trust in news media ... dropped to 50 percent; it had been steadlily falling from its height of 72 percent in 1976, in the post-Watergate era and, perhaps coincidently, the year that All the President's Men came out. By 2007 ... public trust in the news media had dropped to 47 percent. It would continue to fall. (p. 128)

 

Facebook alone was well on its way to being one of the chief enemies of democracy, as its algorithms favored the crazily false over the verifiably factual. People's news feeds were inundated with various posts from organizations and people passing along supposed "news" that was at best skewed and at worst just outright false....

 

[W]e need a widespread effort to educate the public -- not just schoolchildren but adults, too -- about news literacy, and about the deadly harm of not knowing the difference. (p. 231)

 

"Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan, They want to defend themselves against charges of bias," I wrote in the column. "So they equalize the unequal [i.e. the truth and lies]. This practice seems so ingrianed as to be unresolvable." (p. 236) 

 

The ones I have the greatest respect for are those -- no matter how prominent or obscure -- who are the most unflinching in seeking out the truth and presenting it straightforwardly. In the words of the classic New York Times axiom, they do their work "without fear or favor." ... I give CNN's Jake Tapper credit for refusing to thoughtlessly magnify the voices of liars, as so many TV anchors do. (p. 263)

 

I joked with my colleagues that there were really only five posssible media columns, and I would wrte aspects of them over and over. There was the "Evils of Facebook" column; the one about the tragedy of local newspapers' decline at the hands of hedge-fund owners; the Fox News damage-to-society column; the "don't magnify political lies" column; and the one about the mainstream media's intransient flaws. (p.265)

 

Once again, I experienced the peculiar thrills of creativity under deadline. Like life itself, this assignment didn't go according to plan. Disappointments and unforeseen challenges forced me to go off-script. I had to scramble, improvise, and find another way. And it worked out pretty well. Against the odds, it gave me an unaccountable joy. (본문의 끝, p. 269)