On Wednesday, Steve Kraske had the nation’s foremost press and media critic on his “Up to Date” show.
In the 26-minute interview — she was not in the studio — Margaret Sullivan gave listeners a lot of insight into the state of the news media.
Sullivan is former editor of The Buffalo News, former public editor at The New York Times (she followed Arthur Brisbane in that role), and former media columnist at The Washington Post. She has also written two books: “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, most recently, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life.”
Following are excerpts — some edited for clarity and length — from the interview. (You can listen to the entire interview here.)
Question: Has the media lost its voice of authority and, if so, can it ever get it back?
Sullivan: Well, one thing that’s happened over the past 50 years or so is that the trust in the news media has really plummeted. At the time of the mid-‘70s, after Watergate and after the Pentagon Papers were published, trust in the news media was quite high — in the mid-70s percentile, 76 percentile. That has dropped precipitously year after year after year, and so it’s low now; it’s certainly well below 50 percent, and sometimes, depending on what you look at, it could be in the 30s. So I do think that the voice of authority from kind of big-establishment media has been diminished, and there’s lots and lots of reasons for that.
Question: Why has trust in the media plummeted?
Sullivan: Well, one of the things that’s happened is now we have 24/7 cable news, and we have the internet and we have all of this information — and sometimes misinformation or even disinformation — coming at us all the time. The other thing that’s happened (is that) local journalism is actually more trusted, but the business model has been so diminished and newsrooms have been so shrunken that there’s less content and less ability to go out and report those stories. And meanwhile, you know, Fox News and all the other hyper-partisan news media are doing their thing. I think that all contributes.
Question: Can the media ever get it back, or are those days gone for good?
Sullivan: I think it’s a tough thing. I think we in the media can do some things to help that along. One of the things we can do is to explain ourselves better to our readers and listeners and viewers and kind of take people behind the curtain and be more transparent. And I think another thing that needs to happen is local news needs to be shored up and helped along. Not just newspapers but the new digital-only sites, public radio, radio in general, TV. All of these things can be sustained better, and that will help with trust as well.
Question: What effect did Donald Trump have with his constant attacks on the media?
Sullivan: I think that former President Trump did a lot of damage, as he used the disparagement of the news media as a central part of his initial campaign and of his administration and afterwards. And, as he so often did, he said the quiet part out loud. So he actually said to Leslie Stahl of CBS News at one point, “You know why I do this, right? It’s so when you do a negative story about me, no one will believe it.” So he was pretty up front about what he was doing, but, at the same time and by the same token, it has worked.”
Question: How much responsibility does the media have at this moment, with our democracy under assault?
Sullivan: Well, you know, I think we always have to remember that we in the news media are very unusual in that we have a constitutionally protected role. There’s nothing else that has an amendment essentially devoted, at least in part, to protecting our role in the governance of our country. So, you know, we need to remember that. We have a job, which is to inform the public and to do it properly. And our our job is not to just get the most clicks, and it’s not to get the most corporate profits, but it is to inform citizens so that they can be self-governing. And I think we’ve kind of lost touch with that, to some extent, and some of that is because there are so many pressures – competitive pressures, financial pressures – on journalists and on the news leadership that we’ve kind of, I think…only in the back of our heads do we recognize, “Oh, yeah, we actually have a public mission here.” And that should be first and foremost.
Question: What effect has the proliferation of news outlets had on the way people consume news?
Sullivan: We are really in our echo chambers; there’s no question about that. And I think social media, whether Facebook or Twitter or whatever it may be, has really exacerbated that so that you want to tune out or un-follow or block people who don’t agree with you. And so you hear the things from your own cohort and you get even more entrenched.
Question: So news consumers have a responsibility to be somewhat discerning?
Sullivan: Absolutely, and it’s hard because we have this kind of fire hose of information just blasting at us all the time, often from our phones. And this is another part of the problem: it’s very — I guess the technical term for it would be disaggregated. It’s all in sort of the same form. So it’s not as if in the old days you would read the newspaper and you’d see, okay, this is the news section, and now this is the opinion section, these are the editorials. It’s all kind of one thing, and it’s not very well labeled, and it’s not very well differentiated. So it all seems like a big blob.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
That was a great Kraske interview and I appreciate Sullivan’s straight talk – we must be vigilant as we work to discern what the new model of trusted media will look like.
Everyday, I thank my lucky stars that none of my three kids (all in their 20s) chose journalism as their profession like their dad did. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be a reporter these days.
For all of journalism’s challenges, Mike, I think it remains an excellent option for smart, young people who have a talent for writing and are innately curious about what’s going on in their cities, states, nations and world. It’s the very best field for cultivating high-level communication skills. I can’t imagine where I’d be today without my 37 years of professional journalism experience. It almost certainly would have been a much less interesting life.
And as far as the money, we didn’t get into it for that; we knew we weren’t going to earn extremely high salaries and get big pensions. But we knew we could (and it still can be done) carve out a decent living.
I wish our daughter Brooks — an excellent writer — would have gone into journalism, but, alas it’s just not up her alley.
Yes, Fitz, my life has been more interesting too thanks to the 20 years I spent working at The Star. And I made friends with people who are still among my dearest friends today. But it came at a significant personal and mental cost.
You work your butt off reporting and writing stories for not only a daily edition but a weekly one as well (and at times, it was bi-weekly). That meant covering a lot of night meetings that stretched well past your children’s’ bedtimes and coming back to the office early the next day to write about what happened at those meetings _ and no, calling sources to find out what happened at those meetings was not going to cut it_ you had to be there.
There were plenty of missed baseball games and barely making it to your child’s daycare before the 6 pm closing time because some editor wanted you to check out a meaningless story that Channel 9 had. Plenty of evenings being interrupted because a top level editor heard or saw something and couldn’t wait until the next day.
All of that effort and sacrifice only to be told at your annual evaluation that you weren’t any good because you didn’t get enough A-1 stories, thus giving the paper an excuse to give you a less than 1 percent raise and keeping you from taking those kids on vacations.
I’ll take the boring desk job I currently have any day. It may not be helping the common good but at least I’m happier.
“And I think another thing that needs to happen is local news needs to be shored up and helped along. Not just newspapers but the new digital-only sites, public radio, radio in general, TV.”
But how? Starting in the mid-’90s, newspapers conditioned generations of readers to expect news to be free. Good luck convincing enough people to start paying to get enough revenue to fund a decent newsroom.
Local TV news also probably won’t be around inside of a decade. Peacock and Paramount are examples of how the networks are increasingly going straight to consumers. They might keep their O&Os but likely will ditch their affiliates. Will locals be able to attract enough eyeballs and advertisers with rerun networks such as Grit to fund newsrooms? I guess we’ll see.
You make an excellent point, Tim. It’s easy to say and see what is needed…Much harder to get there.
In the case of The Star, it was not the perpetual disappointment in the paper that led me to cancel subscription after decades of loyalty; I was proud to be a subscriber and supporter of its often flawed but critically important work. It was the damn subscription process that went haywire. I have a lot more trust in the reporters than the managers. Now I guiltily read The Star faithfully and freely on the KC Public Library website. I do pay for the NYTimes and WaPo. Too many failed efforts at subscribing have led me to balance my shame as a free-loader with some sort of stupid self-righteous principle to protest the management. I am still shocked when I run into folks who have a stake in the life of the city who do not read The Star.
You’re no freeloader, Vern; you’re just taking advantage of what’s readily available to you. I should do that, too, but I’m too lazy. I go to The Star’s website several times a day and just don’t want to add another step to get there. Get me there vite, vite, vite!
In late 1980 I went from a $24,000 a year, mind-numbing perfunctory office job to $8,000 a year as a 31-year-old cub reporter at a weekly newspaper in a small town. It changed my life. Being curious, nosey and writing to explain what I saw on a deadline based on the facts at hand offered me the intellectual discipline I needed, the stimulus I craved. Those opportunities are rare now, the pay scale pretty much just as penurious, and the effort even less respected some four-plus decades later. This is the era of information over facts and comprehension. Professional journalists are needed now more than ever before, yet the incentive to become a journalist is lower than ever.
“Fox News and all the other hyper-partisan news media” Strange, journalists never seem to mention MSNBC or CNN in their condemnation of hyper-partisan news media.
And one can only dream of a young journalist who was “innately curious”. Most of what I see has about as much curiosity as some state owned rag in a third word dictatorship.
I blame so-called journalists for the polarization we see. People seek out honest brokers who can be trusted to provide objective reporting on, and this is key, topics they’re interested in and failing to find any, turn to those who simply reinforce their own biases, pulling then farther and farther into ideological extremes.
Thanks to journalists like Bari Weiss and friends, we’re beginning to see a minor drift in the right direction