On Saturday, October 19th, Margaret Sullivan joined us at the University of Chicago for a public dialogue cohosted by the Program for Public Thinking. Sullivan, one of the country’s most prominent media critics, served as the public editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, and went on to be a media columnist for the Washington Post and the Guardian. Sullivan got her start at the Buffalo News, where she rose through the ranks to become the paper’s first woman editor. She is the author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (2020) and the memoir Newroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (2022), which chronicles her pathbreaking career in journalism. Sullivan spoke with Point managing editor Rachel Wiseman on the stakes of the 2024 election and the role of the press in our national politics. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
●
Rachel Wiseman: Let’s start with what went wrong. The outcome of the 2016 election was, of course, a seismic shock to the U.S. media landscape. And it led to much hand-wringing and soul-searching among journalists. What do you think were the most critical mistakes made by news organizations in 2016, and what lessons did the media learn, or fail to learn, in 2016 and 2020?
Margaret Sullivan: When we think back on the 2016 election, a couple of things come to mind immediately. One was that the news media missed the boat in terms of where the country’s head was. The thinking was that Donald Trump was such a bizarre candidate: he had this checkered past, had never held public office, had numerous bankruptcies and all kinds of things that would make you think he would be a totally inappropriate president—and in fact, he was. But there was a sense that because it shouldn’t be that it wouldn’t be, and there was a failure to understand how a lot of people in the country were thinking about politics and the direction of the country.
So, in terms of being surprised, that definitely was a factor. But I also think that the media, led by the New York Times in this case, I would say, made some pretty bad mistakes—in overblowing the supposed “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and in trying to somehow create an equivalence between everything that Trump had done and was continuing to do with this practice of hers—which wasn’t ideal but was, in my mind, blown way out of proportion. And I think that it did contribute to people’s sense that maybe these candidates were kind of equal.
Another thing that was going on was that Fox News, which has a huge and very dedicated audience, was serving as a kind of propaganda arm for the Trump campaign. It continues to do that for his current campaign and has been hugely influential in making people think things that basically aren’t true. We know this to be the case because they’ve paid huge settlements to both Dominion voting systems and to Smartmatic, another voting system, about the lies that they spread about the 2020 election. And there was the demise of so many local newspapers, which meant that people were no longer getting their news from trusted sources in their community. And then there was also the effort by foreign leaders like Putin to control and influence the U.S. election and Facebook.
I can tell you that I walked into the Washington Post newsroom on election night of 2016 fully expecting to write a column about Hillary Clinton, the first woman president, and about whether she would be accessible to the press. And the whole newsroom was geared up that way. So then as the blue wall started to fall, everybody was scrambling, and I certainly was scrambling too.
RW: Following up on that, in your book Newsroom Confidential, you write about how in 2016, the news media didn’t believe it was really possible that Trump could get elected. They were so in thrall to his entertainment value that they overlooked, or didn’t properly assess, the threat that he posed. Now, almost ten years on, no one’s under that illusion anymore. If anything, the problem is not so much his novelty, but almost the opposite, right? Where so much about him feels obvious. He says all of these ridiculous things and does strange things, and yet it doesn’t really seem to be moving the needle. So how do you think that journalists ought to address that kind of challenge?
MS: One of the things I’ve written about a lot and that I’ve observed—and I’m far from the only one to do so—is this equivalency that’s created between the two candidates. Just to go back for a moment, I was in the Washington Post newsroom when the infamous Access Hollywood audio came out shortly before the 2016 election, in which Trump bragged about being able to grab women, etc. And, you know, everyone thought, “This is it. He can’t possibly survive this.” No candidate in the past had ever been able to survive anything close to that.
And it did look like that—I know that the Trump campaign thought that it was a very shaky moment. But shortly after that Comey came out with his announcement that “we’re going to look into this again because these new emails have emerged,” which turned out to be nothing. But that was just a few days before the election, and that seemed to invalidate the Access Hollywood tape.
The way the Trump campaign handled it was by saying—and even Melania Trump said this—it was locker-room talk. No one ever said that he didn’t really do this. It was just all kind of “guys will be guys” in talking about it. So, there’s that, again, false equivalency. And we’re seeing similar things now. But I don’t think we’ve ever figured out, as the news media writ large, how to cover Trump effectively.
It took the media a long time to use the word “lie.” You would always hear these terms like “baseless accusations” and “without evidence” and that sort of thing, but no one wanted to say he lies. No one wanted to use the term “racist.” You would hear the words “racially tinged”—it was all tiptoeing around and not calling things out as clearly as they should have.
The thing I come back to all the time is this: if our job in the media is to let the whole country know the stakes of the election, to inform everyone so they can make an intelligent decision at the polls, I don’t think we’ve done that adequately. We haven’t gotten it across. And I think that’s partly because these big news organizations, including the Times and the Washington Post and others, don’t want to alienate a huge chunk of the country that they know are Trump fans. And so there’s a kind of “sanewashing,” in which all the meandering that Trump does at rallies and all the outrageous things he does—all the “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”—is turned into something that sounds much more normal.
I wish that the leaders of every major news organization had said to their staffs, This is a hugely consequential election, let’s make sure that we are getting the truth across to the U.S. public. Now, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Or maybe everybody’s so deep into their tribal corners that that nothing can get through to them. But I think it would have been nice to try.
RW: Do you think the job of journalism is to simply call things as you see it? So saying, “it’s a lie,” or “this is not just racially tinged language, this is actually racist.” But even then, people are still tuning that out. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about what it would take to puncture through that kind of disengagement.
MS: I don’t know. We can only do what we can do, but we have a lot of choices that we make: when we put a headline on a story, when we send out a news alert, what we decide what to focus our coverage on, how much coverage, how much steady, alarmed coverage. Has there been enough on Project 2025? Some people know about it and that’s fine, but not everyone does. And I think that it’s incumbent on the big news organizations to make sure that everybody understands that a second Trump term could change our country’s trajectory and turn us into something that’s not fully a democracy anymore.
So, the words “lie” and “racist” are just an example. There’s been too much tiptoeing around. But it’s also hard to get it right, especially when we’re dug into our ways of how we’ve always covered campaigns. It comes from a good place: we want to be independent, we want to be fair. But then we end up treating unequal things as equal. And that’s not good journalism.
RW: Whether it’s fair or not, there are a lot of Americans who don’t trust traditional legacy newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post. They believe that they are tainted with liberal bias. Do you think that there’s anything that news organizations like the Times and the Post can do to combat that perception? Or any productive ways that they might be able to restore trust with a public that is very divided and runs across the ideological spectrum?
MS: I think there are things we can do to help people understand our work better. And it may make a difference at the margins. We can be more transparent about our processes. We can explain ourselves to readers. We can try to go out there into the world and talk about how we do our journalism. But I’m not sure that we can really change the way people encounter the news—the way they feel it’s wrong, it’s fake, it’s liberal, it’s false. I don’t know how to go up against the Tucker Carlsons and the Sean Hannitys of the world, who spend every night railing about this stuff.
And I don’t know how much a paragraph that says, “Here’s how we did this story” is going to change that. To some extent, I think that maybe the question is not so much whether the press is trusted, but whether we can do trustworthy journalism. If we’re doing our jobs, there’s only so much we can do. We’re in a time of declining trust in all kinds of institutions, and we probably can’t fix that on our own. But we can make sure that our work is good—and it’s not always good. If it were always good, I wouldn’t be complaining about sanewashing, the false equivalency, and the both-sides thing that has been so prevalent in this campaign. Those are the things I think we can affect.
RW: As we are staring down the election on November 5th, I wonder if there are any concrete changes that you would like to see journalists make in the next several days, and in the days shortly thereafter, whatever the outcome is. What lessons do you think they really ought to learn this time around?
MS: Another person who looks closely at the media is Jay Rosen, who’s a professor at New York University. Early in this election cycle, he came up with a very felicitous phrase, in his recommendation about how the press should cover this campaign. He said it should focus on not the odds, but the stakes.
So, not the horse race, not who’s going to win, but what are the stakes, what are the consequences? Those six words say so much so as we go into the home stretch, if you want to stay with the horse-racing metaphor. The Guardian, which I write for, is doing a series called “The Stakes,” and it’s about what would happen under Trump, what would happen under Harris. It’s not about the polls and it’s not about who’s neck and neck. It’s about what comes next. So I think that kind of thing is good. Maybe even in these last days, there could be an effort to do more of that, to really get that kind of thing across.
As for learning lessons afterwards, I just think we may not be in a great position to be doing self-scrutiny about how to improve journalism. I think we’re going to be in a chaotic and possibly very dangerous situation after the election. I hope not, but, you know, whatever lessons there are to learn, I think probably they should have been learned already.
On Saturday, October 19th, Margaret Sullivan joined us at the University of Chicago for a public dialogue cohosted by the Program for Public Thinking. Sullivan, one of the country’s most prominent media critics, served as the public editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, and went on to be a media columnist for the Washington Post and the Guardian. Sullivan got her start at the Buffalo News, where she rose through the ranks to become the paper’s first woman editor. She is the author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (2020) and the memoir Newroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (2022), which chronicles her pathbreaking career in journalism. Sullivan spoke with Point managing editor Rachel Wiseman on the stakes of the 2024 election and the role of the press in our national politics. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
●
Rachel Wiseman: Let’s start with what went wrong. The outcome of the 2016 election was, of course, a seismic shock to the U.S. media landscape. And it led to much hand-wringing and soul-searching among journalists. What do you think were the most critical mistakes made by news organizations in 2016, and what lessons did the media learn, or fail to learn, in 2016 and 2020?
Margaret Sullivan: When we think back on the 2016 election, a couple of things come to mind immediately. One was that the news media missed the boat in terms of where the country’s head was. The thinking was that Donald Trump was such a bizarre candidate: he had this checkered past, had never held public office, had numerous bankruptcies and all kinds of things that would make you think he would be a totally inappropriate president—and in fact, he was. But there was a sense that because it shouldn’t be that it wouldn’t be, and there was a failure to understand how a lot of people in the country were thinking about politics and the direction of the country.
So, in terms of being surprised, that definitely was a factor. But I also think that the media, led by the New York Times in this case, I would say, made some pretty bad mistakes—in overblowing the supposed “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and in trying to somehow create an equivalence between everything that Trump had done and was continuing to do with this practice of hers—which wasn’t ideal but was, in my mind, blown way out of proportion. And I think that it did contribute to people’s sense that maybe these candidates were kind of equal.
Another thing that was going on was that Fox News, which has a huge and very dedicated audience, was serving as a kind of propaganda arm for the Trump campaign. It continues to do that for his current campaign and has been hugely influential in making people think things that basically aren’t true. We know this to be the case because they’ve paid huge settlements to both Dominion voting systems and to Smartmatic, another voting system, about the lies that they spread about the 2020 election. And there was the demise of so many local newspapers, which meant that people were no longer getting their news from trusted sources in their community. And then there was also the effort by foreign leaders like Putin to control and influence the U.S. election and Facebook.
I can tell you that I walked into the Washington Post newsroom on election night of 2016 fully expecting to write a column about Hillary Clinton, the first woman president, and about whether she would be accessible to the press. And the whole newsroom was geared up that way. So then as the blue wall started to fall, everybody was scrambling, and I certainly was scrambling too.
RW: Following up on that, in your book Newsroom Confidential, you write about how in 2016, the news media didn’t believe it was really possible that Trump could get elected. They were so in thrall to his entertainment value that they overlooked, or didn’t properly assess, the threat that he posed. Now, almost ten years on, no one’s under that illusion anymore. If anything, the problem is not so much his novelty, but almost the opposite, right? Where so much about him feels obvious. He says all of these ridiculous things and does strange things, and yet it doesn’t really seem to be moving the needle. So how do you think that journalists ought to address that kind of challenge?
MS: One of the things I’ve written about a lot and that I’ve observed—and I’m far from the only one to do so—is this equivalency that’s created between the two candidates. Just to go back for a moment, I was in the Washington Post newsroom when the infamous Access Hollywood audio came out shortly before the 2016 election, in which Trump bragged about being able to grab women, etc. And, you know, everyone thought, “This is it. He can’t possibly survive this.” No candidate in the past had ever been able to survive anything close to that.
And it did look like that—I know that the Trump campaign thought that it was a very shaky moment. But shortly after that Comey came out with his announcement that “we’re going to look into this again because these new emails have emerged,” which turned out to be nothing. But that was just a few days before the election, and that seemed to invalidate the Access Hollywood tape.
The way the Trump campaign handled it was by saying—and even Melania Trump said this—it was locker-room talk. No one ever said that he didn’t really do this. It was just all kind of “guys will be guys” in talking about it. So, there’s that, again, false equivalency. And we’re seeing similar things now. But I don’t think we’ve ever figured out, as the news media writ large, how to cover Trump effectively.
It took the media a long time to use the word “lie.” You would always hear these terms like “baseless accusations” and “without evidence” and that sort of thing, but no one wanted to say he lies. No one wanted to use the term “racist.” You would hear the words “racially tinged”—it was all tiptoeing around and not calling things out as clearly as they should have.
The thing I come back to all the time is this: if our job in the media is to let the whole country know the stakes of the election, to inform everyone so they can make an intelligent decision at the polls, I don’t think we’ve done that adequately. We haven’t gotten it across. And I think that’s partly because these big news organizations, including the Times and the Washington Post and others, don’t want to alienate a huge chunk of the country that they know are Trump fans. And so there’s a kind of “sanewashing,” in which all the meandering that Trump does at rallies and all the outrageous things he does—all the “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”—is turned into something that sounds much more normal.
I wish that the leaders of every major news organization had said to their staffs, This is a hugely consequential election, let’s make sure that we are getting the truth across to the U.S. public. Now, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Or maybe everybody’s so deep into their tribal corners that that nothing can get through to them. But I think it would have been nice to try.
RW: Do you think the job of journalism is to simply call things as you see it? So saying, “it’s a lie,” or “this is not just racially tinged language, this is actually racist.” But even then, people are still tuning that out. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about what it would take to puncture through that kind of disengagement.
MS: I don’t know. We can only do what we can do, but we have a lot of choices that we make: when we put a headline on a story, when we send out a news alert, what we decide what to focus our coverage on, how much coverage, how much steady, alarmed coverage. Has there been enough on Project 2025? Some people know about it and that’s fine, but not everyone does. And I think that it’s incumbent on the big news organizations to make sure that everybody understands that a second Trump term could change our country’s trajectory and turn us into something that’s not fully a democracy anymore.
So, the words “lie” and “racist” are just an example. There’s been too much tiptoeing around. But it’s also hard to get it right, especially when we’re dug into our ways of how we’ve always covered campaigns. It comes from a good place: we want to be independent, we want to be fair. But then we end up treating unequal things as equal. And that’s not good journalism.
RW: Whether it’s fair or not, there are a lot of Americans who don’t trust traditional legacy newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post. They believe that they are tainted with liberal bias. Do you think that there’s anything that news organizations like the Times and the Post can do to combat that perception? Or any productive ways that they might be able to restore trust with a public that is very divided and runs across the ideological spectrum?
MS: I think there are things we can do to help people understand our work better. And it may make a difference at the margins. We can be more transparent about our processes. We can explain ourselves to readers. We can try to go out there into the world and talk about how we do our journalism. But I’m not sure that we can really change the way people encounter the news—the way they feel it’s wrong, it’s fake, it’s liberal, it’s false. I don’t know how to go up against the Tucker Carlsons and the Sean Hannitys of the world, who spend every night railing about this stuff.
And I don’t know how much a paragraph that says, “Here’s how we did this story” is going to change that. To some extent, I think that maybe the question is not so much whether the press is trusted, but whether we can do trustworthy journalism. If we’re doing our jobs, there’s only so much we can do. We’re in a time of declining trust in all kinds of institutions, and we probably can’t fix that on our own. But we can make sure that our work is good—and it’s not always good. If it were always good, I wouldn’t be complaining about sanewashing, the false equivalency, and the both-sides thing that has been so prevalent in this campaign. Those are the things I think we can affect.
RW: As we are staring down the election on November 5th, I wonder if there are any concrete changes that you would like to see journalists make in the next several days, and in the days shortly thereafter, whatever the outcome is. What lessons do you think they really ought to learn this time around?
MS: Another person who looks closely at the media is Jay Rosen, who’s a professor at New York University. Early in this election cycle, he came up with a very felicitous phrase, in his recommendation about how the press should cover this campaign. He said it should focus on not the odds, but the stakes.
So, not the horse race, not who’s going to win, but what are the stakes, what are the consequences? Those six words say so much so as we go into the home stretch, if you want to stay with the horse-racing metaphor. The Guardian, which I write for, is doing a series called “The Stakes,” and it’s about what would happen under Trump, what would happen under Harris. It’s not about the polls and it’s not about who’s neck and neck. It’s about what comes next. So I think that kind of thing is good. Maybe even in these last days, there could be an effort to do more of that, to really get that kind of thing across.
As for learning lessons afterwards, I just think we may not be in a great position to be doing self-scrutiny about how to improve journalism. I think we’re going to be in a chaotic and possibly very dangerous situation after the election. I hope not, but, you know, whatever lessons there are to learn, I think probably they should have been learned already.
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