Current Affairs

How To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan)Margaret Sullivan is one of the country’s most astute media critics. During her time as Public Editor of the New York Times (essentially an ombudsman) Sullivan became widely respected for her willingness to call out the paper’s lapses, often to the considerable consternation of her Times colleagues. Sullivan criticized the paper’s reliance on anonymous government sources, its practice of allowing sources to approve their own quotes, its previous deference to the Bush administration's "national security" justifications for suppressing a story, its failure to adequately cover the Panama Papers, Chelsea Manning's trial, and the Flint Water Crisis, and even the paper’s habit of reporting nonexistent style trends as if they were real things (e.g., the supposed hip comeback of the monocle).Sullivan also spent much of her career in local journalism, serving as the managing editor of the Buffalo News. Her book Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the