Earnest question….has there been a “journalist” in the last 30 years with a profile big enough to break through who had the guts to push against their corporate overlords if it meant compromising their own paycheck? I can’t think of one. I will never forget Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala they were hurting America. He wasn’t wrong.
Money has become more important than truth. Sherri Redstone needs more money in the same way that Elon Musk does. If your only goal is trying to fill up that valueless hole inside of you, there will never be enough money.
Jon Stewart was the court jester, speaking truth to power wrapped in humor and hyperbole.
Is not just Ben the fall of institutions, but individuals.
Jake Tapper’s descent from “alternative facts are lies” to pushing a vile, petty book that would make Kitty Kelly blush.
Bob Woodward’s fall from Watergate to a scoop hungry sycophant who knew in January 2020 that Trump has told him Covid would be huge - then sat by as denialism and incompetence by the administration cost hundreds of thousands of lives, only to reveal the “scoop” a year later that he was saving for his book?
And the lesser groupie Maggie Haberman who did the same about document destruction in the White House?
In many ways, Bezos’s stomping all over the post’s endorsement of Harris was so trivia!. No one expected journalistic integrity from Bezos.
But we did from the others. And they let their readers, their profession, and their country down.
Stewart trashes liberals all the time, especially for their ivory-tower attitude and blindness when it comes to why they lost the election. He lacerated Schumer and Pelosi for dressing in Native American garb and looking ridiculous. He was brutal about Democrats covering up Biden’s mental decline. He is admittedly on the left philosophically but not a Democrat. I’m with him—furious with Dems but could never support a deranged Republican Party cowed by a Trump cult of lies, cruelty and derangement.
Like I said, apparently you don't watch his show. He's ferociously in search of truth, and it just happens that liberals have a lot more of it than so-called conservatives.
Margaret Sullivan: thank you for removing the paywall. i am subscribed to so many publications these days that i cannot afford anymore, regardless of how worthy they are or how much i want to read them.
to answer your last question regarding joe biden and his cancer diagnosis ... i am saddened by this diagnosis and surprised by the vehement public responses to biden and his family. i cannot understand how a terrible thing like cancer brings out the most evil, violent and hateful parts of many people's personalities. what could they possibly be gaining by reacting in such nasty mean-spirited ways? do they think biden and his family are not real people? seeing the naked cruelty online makes me wonder why ANY RATIONAL PERSON would ever go in to politics, and this alone makes me think that ameriKKKa truly deserves the pondscum that ends up in the white house.
The cruelty about his cancer is appalling. On top of his cancer, the cruelty about his dementia is just as bad imo, or maybe even worse. My husband was diagnosed with dementia recently and I am still gobsmacked. He’s a research scientist known the world over by his peers for the work he has done in his field. He’s 86 and retired at 78 but is still consulting. He’s always been the proverbial absent-minded professor about non-work things but not about his profession. So last Christmas Eve he started complaining about his knees and legs hurting and I thought he was talking about knee pain mainly and focused on getting some knee support for him for that. My son-in-law is a family physician and decided he should go to the ER and sure enough one of his meds for A-Fib had slowed down his pulse to 40 beats per minute and he was collapsing. I don’t know if that triggered undiagnosed dementia to rapidly increase or if I just attributed his ongoing forgetfulness to just lack of focus on Christmas preparations because he was thinking more about the research paper he was in the throes of writing. After his collapse, now being called heart failure, his incidents of dementia increased rapidly and he has/had no clue he was forgetting things more than just occasionally. He forgets common things about our home life mainly that he’s known for decades. The expression on his face in these instances is like it’s totally a new and surprising thing to him. I realized this wasn’t the usual bit of forgetting important dates or lack of attention but instead was a distinct memory lapse. It wasn’t just from not caring enough to recall an important event. It was innocence as if he just learned about this great appliance called a microwave. Yesterday he asked me where the thermostat is. This afternoon he asked me when I began using a rollator and why. He had no clue what was happening. When you talk about people with dementia, you should not be blaming them for what is happening to them. Blame those who are trying to hide it to protect them from pain or as in the case of Biden, be in denial that it isn’t something else like exhaustion or something benign that will go away when he gets some rest. Those around him are in shock and it’s painfully difficult to absorb what’s happening. All I know is some are innocent because they don’t realize what is happening. Others just become dangerous and meaner and those surrounding them use it to benefit themselves.
I'm a survivor of Prostate cancer it is tough reading about public discussion that should be only the patient his treatment staff and family....it's a personal battle
Yes, I am disgusted. I’m also disgusted by big media’s days long promotion of the Tapper-Thompson book. While it’s news, it shouldn’t be leading newscasts for days, CNN and Axios. Particularly when our current president can’t go a single day without causing a constitutional crisis.
Thank you for the most complete explanation on this topic and the NYT piece. I appreciate your making. This free. Those who appease keep appeasing to even worse requests.
"Are you as disgusted as I am about those on the right who find it an opportunity to trash the former president and his family?" Equally disgusted by people like Jake Tapper, making money on Biden while Rome burns.
I am equally disgusted by both of those things - but for me, Jake Tapper takes the cake. I will not buy his book. I will not even read the reviews of his book. The sky would fall before this would ever happen but in my fantasy world, the publishers would have withdrawn the book the same day Biden‘s diagnosis was announced. To paraphrase, do these people have no decency?
Bravissima maestra. The first TV col. I ever wrote was a fill-iin for a vacationiong Gary Deeb. It was in 1969, I think (possibly 1970). "60 Minutes" was still relatively new and not yet sked-crushingly popular. I wasn't able to write about it yet but when I was, I was nearly delirious with happiness. I am, like you, mourning its integrity and CBS' current state.
So much of value is being destroyed that it is an honor for 60 min to join NOAA and USAID. We will need many people and much time to rebuild once the oligarchs are defeated (again). Welcome back to the Robber Baron & Hearst rerun show.
As journalists, all we have to sell is our credibility. Your voice of experience and authenticity reminds us of that simple truth. Margaret, keep ringing that clarion bell.
A Presidency is not the President, it’s the entire Administration. Biden’s was excellent and experienced and hit the ground running with expertise about how legislation is accomplished and power is wielded in the United States. If he had taken a victory lap at the two-year mark and paved the way for a full primary, we might not be here now. If he had used his honeymoon period to get the bones of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the elimination of our corporate-money politcal takeover (Citizens United) instead of trying to help the economy by building back better, we might not be here now. Instead, he captained some really astoundingly progressive (in this political era) legislation and we, the people, proved again how little we understand about how legislation works in this country, the time lag involved. And he proved (to our time-lagged dismay) how hard it is for a person (and the cabal around him) to admit they’ve lost a step, they’ve gotten old.
We expect instant gratification from a three-headed government that was crafted to be slow, steady and never gratify any particular political ideology for very long. We do a pathetic job of teaching ourselves how our democratic republic works — or is supposed to work — and with our conception of public service and public servants (which is what our leaders, legislatively and executively are supposed to be) so disordered and our grasp of civics so miniscule, maybe 250 years is all we can get out of our founding.
Hopefully we’ll have a Romanian moment and reclaim some enthusiasm and devotion to our founding documents and how much better they can be — if we will just read and live them. Can Substack or something like it be the Free Press that we need, because a corporately owned Press is by definition not Free? When advertising and journalists are not separated, journalism does not happen. The avenue for corruption — especially municipal and statewide corruption — is wide and getting wider without local newspapers covering city councils and state legislatures. The Press was critical to making this American experiment work, but with the social media taking all the advertising revenue money then selling its individualized data collection and AI writing half the copy, we’re now in the midst of an international, oligarchical experiment in information without context and individual attention spans too fleeting for analysis.
Looking for the journalistic paradigm through this thick Tik-Tok fog.
"Trump and his minions will never be satisfied with any settlement or negotiation.
Appeasement never works.
The goalposts will always be moved, and then moved again."
This is the consistent historical truth of authoritarian leaders. They are never satisfied, and will turn the screws ever tighter till they either destroy their "enemies", or until they transform them into sycophantic monsters as evil as they are.
You can usefully think of them as any one of a number of parasites that feed on their host until it dies. And how does a host rid itself of a parasite? To take action before it is so weakened that action is no longer possible or effective. What, specifically, that action might be has not yet emerged. We are doing things piecemeal and we need a comprehensive plan for resistance as well as a unified vision for the future if we are, as a nation, to survive. It may well be that we have reached the point of no return, however sad to say. IMHO only the Democratic Socialists among us have even approached the problem, which might be why their rallies are attracting everyday Americans of all ages and party affiliations.
Redstone is not a journalist, her background is not in that sphere. Her interest is strictly dollars and cents. What is the best way for her to enrich herself. This is what happens when oligarchs get control of our news sources. The LA Times, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC and CNN to name a few. We need to stop relying on them for factual based reporting. Subscribe to independent news outlets. Your local newspaper.
[[What baffles and infuriates me is how the leadership figures of these major institutions refuse to recognize the harm they are doing, including to the places they are supposed to be stewarding — and to their own reputations.]]
The leadership figures of these major institutions quite readily recognize the harm they are doing. They. Just. Don't. Care. They are focused on money and power, not journalism or any other form of public service.. And why should they care about their own reputations? When you're a billionaire, you can buy any reputation you want.
Regarding former president Joe Biden's sad cancer diagnosis, I am disgusted by the responses of the right wing, but I am not surprised. What really raises my ire, however, is how much U.S. news media is focusing on, and in some cases exaggerating, problems with Biden's mental acuity near the end of his term when we have a president in office RIGHT NOW who is evil, stupid, AND senile. THAT is what the media should be focusing on, not the (exaggerated) problems of a man who didn't run for president in 2024 and won't be running in 2028, or ever.
Margaret, thank you again for what you do. You are a national treasure -- in fact, given your work for the Guardian, I think you are an international treasure.
Agree in every respect, both about the perverse distraction of discussing Biden’s mental and verbal acuity now and the way Margaret is calling out the foolishness of the appeasers. They lack common sense as well as courage and their greed continues to wreak havoc on the rest of us. No appeasers worse than the Red Team in Congress, but the many heads of major institutional powers (media, universities, law) who are offering a profile in cowardice will soon be asked for still more concessions. Bullies are not appeasable.
Just an old hippy here who grew up watching Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and other journalists who I trusted to tell me the truth. The FCC had rules governing broadcast news which made it a public service not revenue generating programming. Cable services ruined that paradigm. Now money is all that matters, owners of news organizations used to take pride in their product, now money, money ,money. Since the elite began hoarding all the wealth provided by the increase in productivity they have been buying up news services so their views will be prioritized. The truth is no longer the priority, propaganda has replaced it. We all suffer for that.
Once considered the gold standard of broadcasting led by Walter Crockett. It is sad to see them bowing and kissing the ring of the illiterate, incompetent, malignant sociopath, in the White House. Had they the temerity to do a show about that I’m sure it would be their last. Paramount is the real culprit here. Let’s not forget it rots from the top.
Oliver Darcy reports today that 3 Senators—Warren, Wyden and Sanders—have written Sheri Redstone warning her of possible criminal bribery in capitulating to Trump for the Skydance deal! That’s a great development. And doesn’t this dirty deal also risk shareholder lawsuits? So, as Darcy put it, pressure is coming from many sides, including from within. So, maybe she’ll see the light beyond her fears. That’s my hope, at least.
In the words of George Orwell: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”
CBS is now in the PR business.
Earnest question….has there been a “journalist” in the last 30 years with a profile big enough to break through who had the guts to push against their corporate overlords if it meant compromising their own paycheck? I can’t think of one. I will never forget Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala they were hurting America. He wasn’t wrong.
Money has become more important than truth. Sherri Redstone needs more money in the same way that Elon Musk does. If your only goal is trying to fill up that valueless hole inside of you, there will never be enough money.
Jon Stewart was the court jester, speaking truth to power wrapped in humor and hyperbole.
Is not just Ben the fall of institutions, but individuals.
Jake Tapper’s descent from “alternative facts are lies” to pushing a vile, petty book that would make Kitty Kelly blush.
Bob Woodward’s fall from Watergate to a scoop hungry sycophant who knew in January 2020 that Trump has told him Covid would be huge - then sat by as denialism and incompetence by the administration cost hundreds of thousands of lives, only to reveal the “scoop” a year later that he was saving for his book?
And the lesser groupie Maggie Haberman who did the same about document destruction in the White House?
In many ways, Bezos’s stomping all over the post’s endorsement of Harris was so trivia!. No one expected journalistic integrity from Bezos.
But we did from the others. And they let their readers, their profession, and their country down.
So glad you mentioned Haberman her columns, articles are just gossip columns and stuff that the Whitehouse doesn't mind being in public...
No. The days of powerful journalism are over.
John Stewart isn't brave. His career was made by joining one side. Glenn Greenwald is brave. He joined neither side, and paid the price
Apparently you don't actually watch Jon Stewart. He's very even-handed, but reality isn't.
Stewart trashes liberals all the time, especially for their ivory-tower attitude and blindness when it comes to why they lost the election. He lacerated Schumer and Pelosi for dressing in Native American garb and looking ridiculous. He was brutal about Democrats covering up Biden’s mental decline. He is admittedly on the left philosophically but not a Democrat. I’m with him—furious with Dems but could never support a deranged Republican Party cowed by a Trump cult of lies, cruelty and derangement.
Even handed? Surely you jest. He's ferociously partisan. It's his whole schtick, fer pete's sake
Like I said, apparently you don't watch his show. He's ferociously in search of truth, and it just happens that liberals have a lot more of it than so-called conservatives.
That's even handed : )
He's a loon.
Margaret Sullivan: thank you for removing the paywall. i am subscribed to so many publications these days that i cannot afford anymore, regardless of how worthy they are or how much i want to read them.
to answer your last question regarding joe biden and his cancer diagnosis ... i am saddened by this diagnosis and surprised by the vehement public responses to biden and his family. i cannot understand how a terrible thing like cancer brings out the most evil, violent and hateful parts of many people's personalities. what could they possibly be gaining by reacting in such nasty mean-spirited ways? do they think biden and his family are not real people? seeing the naked cruelty online makes me wonder why ANY RATIONAL PERSON would ever go in to politics, and this alone makes me think that ameriKKKa truly deserves the pondscum that ends up in the white house.
I, as someone with Stage 4 Prostate Cancer (Gleason 8), am so irritated by the nastiness and the ignorance people are showing!
The cruelty about his cancer is appalling. On top of his cancer, the cruelty about his dementia is just as bad imo, or maybe even worse. My husband was diagnosed with dementia recently and I am still gobsmacked. He’s a research scientist known the world over by his peers for the work he has done in his field. He’s 86 and retired at 78 but is still consulting. He’s always been the proverbial absent-minded professor about non-work things but not about his profession. So last Christmas Eve he started complaining about his knees and legs hurting and I thought he was talking about knee pain mainly and focused on getting some knee support for him for that. My son-in-law is a family physician and decided he should go to the ER and sure enough one of his meds for A-Fib had slowed down his pulse to 40 beats per minute and he was collapsing. I don’t know if that triggered undiagnosed dementia to rapidly increase or if I just attributed his ongoing forgetfulness to just lack of focus on Christmas preparations because he was thinking more about the research paper he was in the throes of writing. After his collapse, now being called heart failure, his incidents of dementia increased rapidly and he has/had no clue he was forgetting things more than just occasionally. He forgets common things about our home life mainly that he’s known for decades. The expression on his face in these instances is like it’s totally a new and surprising thing to him. I realized this wasn’t the usual bit of forgetting important dates or lack of attention but instead was a distinct memory lapse. It wasn’t just from not caring enough to recall an important event. It was innocence as if he just learned about this great appliance called a microwave. Yesterday he asked me where the thermostat is. This afternoon he asked me when I began using a rollator and why. He had no clue what was happening. When you talk about people with dementia, you should not be blaming them for what is happening to them. Blame those who are trying to hide it to protect them from pain or as in the case of Biden, be in denial that it isn’t something else like exhaustion or something benign that will go away when he gets some rest. Those around him are in shock and it’s painfully difficult to absorb what’s happening. All I know is some are innocent because they don’t realize what is happening. Others just become dangerous and meaner and those surrounding them use it to benefit themselves.
Ignore it. It's a distraction by a lazy news media and right wing assholes.
Best wishes, take the best care of yourself.
I echo MaryCat, Dayton. The very best for good care by the medicals and by yourself.
I'm a survivor of Prostate cancer it is tough reading about public discussion that should be only the patient his treatment staff and family....it's a personal battle
Yes, I am disgusted. I’m also disgusted by big media’s days long promotion of the Tapper-Thompson book. While it’s news, it shouldn’t be leading newscasts for days, CNN and Axios. Particularly when our current president can’t go a single day without causing a constitutional crisis.
Indeed. And Jake Tapper going on Fox to promote the book tells you all you need to know about his motivations.
Tapper is shit. Full stop.
Agree. And when the current president is addled and incoherent.
I was about to make the same comment!
I just did. :-)
Bullies don't stop bullying unless someone stands up to them. ABC is realizing that now.
The Mob always returns. Always.
Thank you for the most complete explanation on this topic and the NYT piece. I appreciate your making. This free. Those who appease keep appeasing to even worse requests.
"Are you as disgusted as I am about those on the right who find it an opportunity to trash the former president and his family?" Equally disgusted by people like Jake Tapper, making money on Biden while Rome burns.
I am equally disgusted by both of those things - but for me, Jake Tapper takes the cake. I will not buy his book. I will not even read the reviews of his book. The sky would fall before this would ever happen but in my fantasy world, the publishers would have withdrawn the book the same day Biden‘s diagnosis was announced. To paraphrase, do these people have no decency?
Bravissima maestra. The first TV col. I ever wrote was a fill-iin for a vacationiong Gary Deeb. It was in 1969, I think (possibly 1970). "60 Minutes" was still relatively new and not yet sked-crushingly popular. I wasn't able to write about it yet but when I was, I was nearly delirious with happiness. I am, like you, mourning its integrity and CBS' current state.
That timing sounds right, Jeff. Yes, it’s so sad and regrettable.
I'm afraid this will be 60 Minutes' last season.
So much of value is being destroyed that it is an honor for 60 min to join NOAA and USAID. We will need many people and much time to rebuild once the oligarchs are defeated (again). Welcome back to the Robber Baron & Hearst rerun show.
As journalists, all we have to sell is our credibility. Your voice of experience and authenticity reminds us of that simple truth. Margaret, keep ringing that clarion bell.
Thanks, Tim.
A Presidency is not the President, it’s the entire Administration. Biden’s was excellent and experienced and hit the ground running with expertise about how legislation is accomplished and power is wielded in the United States. If he had taken a victory lap at the two-year mark and paved the way for a full primary, we might not be here now. If he had used his honeymoon period to get the bones of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the elimination of our corporate-money politcal takeover (Citizens United) instead of trying to help the economy by building back better, we might not be here now. Instead, he captained some really astoundingly progressive (in this political era) legislation and we, the people, proved again how little we understand about how legislation works in this country, the time lag involved. And he proved (to our time-lagged dismay) how hard it is for a person (and the cabal around him) to admit they’ve lost a step, they’ve gotten old.
We expect instant gratification from a three-headed government that was crafted to be slow, steady and never gratify any particular political ideology for very long. We do a pathetic job of teaching ourselves how our democratic republic works — or is supposed to work — and with our conception of public service and public servants (which is what our leaders, legislatively and executively are supposed to be) so disordered and our grasp of civics so miniscule, maybe 250 years is all we can get out of our founding.
Hopefully we’ll have a Romanian moment and reclaim some enthusiasm and devotion to our founding documents and how much better they can be — if we will just read and live them. Can Substack or something like it be the Free Press that we need, because a corporately owned Press is by definition not Free? When advertising and journalists are not separated, journalism does not happen. The avenue for corruption — especially municipal and statewide corruption — is wide and getting wider without local newspapers covering city councils and state legislatures. The Press was critical to making this American experiment work, but with the social media taking all the advertising revenue money then selling its individualized data collection and AI writing half the copy, we’re now in the midst of an international, oligarchical experiment in information without context and individual attention spans too fleeting for analysis.
Looking for the journalistic paradigm through this thick Tik-Tok fog.
"Trump and his minions will never be satisfied with any settlement or negotiation.
Appeasement never works.
The goalposts will always be moved, and then moved again."
This is the consistent historical truth of authoritarian leaders. They are never satisfied, and will turn the screws ever tighter till they either destroy their "enemies", or until they transform them into sycophantic monsters as evil as they are.
No one wins, everyone loses.
You can usefully think of them as any one of a number of parasites that feed on their host until it dies. And how does a host rid itself of a parasite? To take action before it is so weakened that action is no longer possible or effective. What, specifically, that action might be has not yet emerged. We are doing things piecemeal and we need a comprehensive plan for resistance as well as a unified vision for the future if we are, as a nation, to survive. It may well be that we have reached the point of no return, however sad to say. IMHO only the Democratic Socialists among us have even approached the problem, which might be why their rallies are attracting everyday Americans of all ages and party affiliations.
Redstone is not a journalist, her background is not in that sphere. Her interest is strictly dollars and cents. What is the best way for her to enrich herself. This is what happens when oligarchs get control of our news sources. The LA Times, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC and CNN to name a few. We need to stop relying on them for factual based reporting. Subscribe to independent news outlets. Your local newspaper.
So many so-called local newspapers are part of corporately-owned chains. Are they independent?
Something an individual would need to verify.
No.
[[What baffles and infuriates me is how the leadership figures of these major institutions refuse to recognize the harm they are doing, including to the places they are supposed to be stewarding — and to their own reputations.]]
The leadership figures of these major institutions quite readily recognize the harm they are doing. They. Just. Don't. Care. They are focused on money and power, not journalism or any other form of public service.. And why should they care about their own reputations? When you're a billionaire, you can buy any reputation you want.
Regarding former president Joe Biden's sad cancer diagnosis, I am disgusted by the responses of the right wing, but I am not surprised. What really raises my ire, however, is how much U.S. news media is focusing on, and in some cases exaggerating, problems with Biden's mental acuity near the end of his term when we have a president in office RIGHT NOW who is evil, stupid, AND senile. THAT is what the media should be focusing on, not the (exaggerated) problems of a man who didn't run for president in 2024 and won't be running in 2028, or ever.
Margaret, thank you again for what you do. You are a national treasure -- in fact, given your work for the Guardian, I think you are an international treasure.
Far too kind, but much appreciated, Lex.
Agree in every respect, both about the perverse distraction of discussing Biden’s mental and verbal acuity now and the way Margaret is calling out the foolishness of the appeasers. They lack common sense as well as courage and their greed continues to wreak havoc on the rest of us. No appeasers worse than the Red Team in Congress, but the many heads of major institutional powers (media, universities, law) who are offering a profile in cowardice will soon be asked for still more concessions. Bullies are not appeasable.
Just an old hippy here who grew up watching Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and other journalists who I trusted to tell me the truth. The FCC had rules governing broadcast news which made it a public service not revenue generating programming. Cable services ruined that paradigm. Now money is all that matters, owners of news organizations used to take pride in their product, now money, money ,money. Since the elite began hoarding all the wealth provided by the increase in productivity they have been buying up news services so their views will be prioritized. The truth is no longer the priority, propaganda has replaced it. We all suffer for that.
100%
Once considered the gold standard of broadcasting led by Walter Crockett. It is sad to see them bowing and kissing the ring of the illiterate, incompetent, malignant sociopath, in the White House. Had they the temerity to do a show about that I’m sure it would be their last. Paramount is the real culprit here. Let’s not forget it rots from the top.
Oliver Darcy reports today that 3 Senators—Warren, Wyden and Sanders—have written Sheri Redstone warning her of possible criminal bribery in capitulating to Trump for the Skydance deal! That’s a great development. And doesn’t this dirty deal also risk shareholder lawsuits? So, as Darcy put it, pressure is coming from many sides, including from within. So, maybe she’ll see the light beyond her fears. That’s my hope, at least.