Book review time. One thing we can say is: At least we didn't pay for it.
It
is NEWSROOM CONFIDENTIAL: LESSONS (AND WORRIED) FROM AN INK-STAINED
LIFE. We got an advance copy. Margaret Sullivan wrote the book. We remember her as a very weak
public editor for THE NEW YORK TIMES. Daniel Okrent was the only one
who really did work worth praising in that position.
We picked up the book thinking it might explain to us why she was such an awful public editor.
The book explains a lot.
Including the delusions and out-of-touch nature of Sullivan. Life begins and ends with Donald Trump for nutso.
At
one point, after the 2016 election, she's puzzled and decides to do her
own version of SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS -- it's highly amusing but not for
the reason she hopes. She ventures into the world and encounters people
-- actual people. She is shocked, dismayed to discover they don't
believe what she does. Apparently, she'd conned herself into believing
she was the standard. She is aghast to discover people who, for
example, believe that 9/11 was an inside job. We're aghast to discover
that this is the first time Sullivan's ever encountered anyone with that
belief.
We're also disgusted
that she can't grasp why things like that happen. 9/11? We were not
there. We were there for the lies. We were there for Saudi Arabia getting
away with murder. We were there when former US Senator Bob Graham (of the
Graham family that used to own THE WASHINGTON POST) told a number of us
about how the Saudis shouldn't have been flown out of the US. We were there when the 9/11 commission was stacked with people that shouldn't
have been on it. And we were there when the Jersey Girls had to fight for any
bit of truth the American people got.
We have read the PDB Bully Boy Bush got ahead of 9/11. You know, the one
Condi Rice tried to lie about in the public hearing until she was
finally forced to provide the title "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US."
When alternate hypotheses pop up, there's usually a reason and it goes to the creation of mistrust.
We find it appalling that a supposed journalist is unaware that some
people question the official 9/11 narrative until 2017. What world did
this idiot live in?
She and Dan Balz speak. He's a useless piece of garbage (Hey, Dan!) and we say that as two who've known him for years.
The problem, Margaret and Dan insist, with journalism today is that Watergate led to 'gotcha coverage' and this bred mistrust in government.
No, shoulder the stupidity, don't wave it around in front of people.
Tricky
Dick authorizing illegal spying, compiling an enemies list, ordering
the Watergate break-in and much more bred mistrust in government. These were crimes -- carried out by the government.
Watergate
was followed by a brief period of real investigative journalism which
quickly stopped -- Katharine Graham, then publisher of THE WASHINGTON
POST, gave the notorious speech about how it was time to once again hold
journalists in check. A detail that Sullivan also seems unaware of.
Over and over, in this book by a journalist, the media is the problem. Never for suppressing the truth, you understand, but for reporting.
The
media, Crazy Sullivan insists, cost Hillary the election in 2016. They
shouldn't have been covering the e-mails, she argues. For the first time, a
presidential candidate was the subject of a criminal investigation. It
was news.
Sullivan really doesn't understand what news -- or journalism -- is.
She
tells you how the media could have elected Hillary without ever
grasping that it is not the media's role to determine elections. It is
the media's role to report on what happens.
She misunderstand her own job.
Which
is how we get back to her time at THE NEW YORK TIMES. Even Margaret
Sullivan realizes she was awful there and that she is too close to the
staff that she is supposed to be monitoring as the public editor. So
she quits. It's a shame she ever took the job considering she wasn't up
for it. Reading NEWSROOM CONFIDENTIAL, you have to wonder if she's
ever been up to any professional task.