Margaret Sullivan

President Trump started a trend: calling unfavorable news coverage fake. Foreign leaders — especially dictators and authoritarian regimes — have followed suit.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan went to the Rust Belt and asked about perceptions of journalism. She learned it’s a lot more complicated than it appears from Washington.

In the year since Donald Trump was elected president, the national news media has congratulated itself on a new golden age of accountability journalism. And it’s true in many ways. The scoops have been relentless, the digging intense, the results important. But in another crucial way, the reality-based press has failed. Too often, it has succumbed to the chaos of covering Trump, who lies and blusters and distracts at every turn.

It wasn’t just the complicit silence around Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment that made it so dangerous. It was the opposite of silence, too. It was the public humiliation that could be used to retaliate against alleged victims who spoke out. Weinstein used the media like a bludgeon to keep his alleged victims in line, by many accounts. He did it skillfully — and with plenty of help.

Margaret Sullivan weighs in on the controversy around ESPN anchor Jemele Hill’s tweets on President Trump, and she has little to laud in the network’s response. She says Hill isn’t a reporter of straight news but an anchor and commentator called upon to share her views. For that matter, Sullivan argues, ESPN isn’t a news network either, and “at a time in America when authoritarian tendencies are rising, shutting down voices such as Jemele Hill’s is worse than inappropriate,” she writes. 

With the issue of false equivalency front and center once again, a profound question arises for journalists: What does true fairness look like in covering this president? If objectivity is a “view from nowhere,” it may be out of date. What’s never out of date, though, is clear truth-telling.

Is Fox News a stalwart defender of the press freedoms it depends on? Well, that may depend on the year. It might even depend on who is the president.

The signs about Megyn Kelly’s one-on-one NBC interview with the despicable conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been bad from the start. The situation now is a mess. Here’s the way out: Kill the planned segment as a one-on-one interview, and use the material as one piece of a no-holds-barred investigation of Alex Jones and others like him. Don’t leave it up to Kelly, but pull in one or more of NBC’s top reporters.

Margaret Sullivan: “In a government increasingly obsessed with secrecy, and guilty of rampant over-classification, leaks are necessary and, largely, a very good thing. Let’s look back at what we wouldn’t know without leaks, bearing in mind that not all leaks are created equal. Some are document dumps; others the result of dogged reporting and the cultivation of confidential sources.”

When Donald Trump’s candidacy sent TV ratings soaring last year, CBS honcho Les Moonves infamously summed up his reaction: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” The same emphasis on corporate profits is surely the driving force behind the decision to pull Scott Pelley from the CBS Evening News anchor chair.

On Tuesday, President Trump warmly welcomed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House. Just hours later, we found out that Trump would like to put reporters in jail. There’s a connection here. And it’s not good news for America’s journalists or the citizens who depend on them to hold their government accountable.

Margaret Sullivan: This year, the White House correspondents’ bash is worse than embarrassing. It’s poised to tip over into journalistic self-abasement. It’s time to stick a silver-plated fork in it.

Margaret Sullivan: “Most mainstream organizations don’t want their reporters or editors carrying pickets signs — whether at a protest against the immigrant travel ban or at the antiabortion March for Life. The conflicts often play out on social media, and editors find themselves acting as the Twitter police for their staffs. From BuzzFeed to The New York Times, top editors repeatedly have told their reporters that impartiality matters and to cut the snark.”

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office Friday, becoming the 45th president, two factors will have helped in a big — no, huge — way. He had one dominant message and one dominant messenger. A new Pew Research study shows that Trump voters coalesced around a single primary news source: Fox News.

The president-elect will surely be a “gaslighter-in-chief,” Margaret Sullivan argues, regularly distorting reality. He’ll also punish journalists from doing their job and will “relentlessly manipulate,” as he did by stacking his first press conference with jeering-at-the-media staffers in the audience.

Journalists may thrive on news — by definition, the unexpected or novel — but they’re terrible at getting out of their own comfortable ruts. Donald Trump has been a candidate and will be a president who requires vastly different coverage. If the ’70s brought, via Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, what was called “the New Journalism,” I suggest we now need a New New Journalism. Here are some ways journalism must be reinvented.

Margaret Sullivan says that Lesley Stahl blew an important chance to call Donald Trump out as a liar on his Iraq War position in her 60 Minutes interview Sunday. “Stahl — busy trying to herd the other rhetorical cats set loose in the interview — did not say what she should have,” she writes, kicking off what’s likely to be a healthy streak of meta-criticism on the media’s closer scrutiny (or lack thereof) of Trump’s claims.

Margaret Sullivan says that Lesley Stahl blew an important chance to call Donald Trump out as a liar on his Iraq War position in her 60 Minutes interview Sunday. “Stahl — busy trying to herd the other rhetorical cats set loose in the interview — did not say what she should have,” she writes, kicking off what’s likely to be a healthy streak of meta-criticism on the media’s closer scrutiny (or lack thereof) of Trump’s claims.