Democracy is under threat, and that’s where news reporting must be focused at the moment, said Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for The Washington Post and public editor at The New York Times. “People recognize that there are election deniers out there. Of course, a bunch of them just got elected,” Sullivan said. “But this…
BY GEORGE SALAMON / Just this past Sunday journalism’s unceasing debate on anonymous sources reared its head again. In the October 13 Sunday Review section of The New York Times Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s fifth public editor, wrote about “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources.” Dan Okrent, first public editor from 2003 to 2005, confronted the same issue during his tenure. Even then, novelist and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen had already had enough: “…the customary righteousness, disingenuousness, futility and wonky tedium of such debates are for me almost unbearable.”