When Margaret Sullivan left The Washington Post last August after six distinguished years as the paper’s media columnist, she sold her New York City apartment and moved to her family’s old place on Lake Erie. “I had this idea in my head—I used the acronym FBT—I was going to go Full-Bore Thoreau,” she said. “I was going to live a very simple life and stare at the lake a lot.”
But she didn’t last long in the wilderness. “I felt the pull,” she said. “I guess I felt like I still had something to say.” She now writes a weekly column for the Guardian US and teaches journalism at Duke University. Starting Wednesday, however, she will also host a new podcast on Substack, American Crisis. The show, she said, will address “whether journalism, at its best, can help save democracy.” Two specific crises that were hinge points in US history will be used to frame her conversations with guests: Watergate and January 6.
Sullivan’s first guest is her friend Molly Jong-Fast, the podcaster and Vanity Fair special correspondent. Future guests will include Asha Rangappa and Carl Bernstein. Full episodes will be exclusively for paying subscribers, and Sullivan is donating any net proceeds in the first month to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. We spoke ahead of the podcast’s launch, and the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Vanity Fair: What is the American crisis? What crisis are you identifying?
Margaret Sullivan: Well, “American crisis” has two meanings in terms of this podcast. One is, these two events were crises in modern American history. But our crisis right now, which is really the focus of the podcast, more than looking back at Watergate, is whether our democracy is really under threat. And I think it absolutely is. It didn’t start with the Trump era, but what’s happened in right-wing politics and media puts us—we’re in a scary place. There’s a kind of creep. There’s an antidemocratic creep that’s happening in the United States. It’s very troubling. And it’s not about to stop anytime soon. I mean, I’m sitting here, I happen to have the print edition of The New York Times in front of me. I’m reading a headline above the fold: “Trump allies plan to stifle Justice Dept.” Again, this is not just about [Donald] Trump, but it certainly wouldn’t be moving at this rate of speed without him. So, you know, I think the fact that we have a presidential election coming up, things are ramping up that way, it feels very timely.
You talk about these two hinge points for media and politics, Watergate and January 6. I understand Watergate. Why January 6, as opposed to any other number of moments from the Trump era?
It was such an unforgettable and frightening demonstration of all the other things that had been happening. You know it’s going to be a major event in the history books. And yet, it’s so fresh for us. I mean, it seems like it was just yesterday.
It’s so fresh and unforgettable, as you said, but there is an active effort to forget it.
That’s right. Part of doing this is to, you know, excavate it a little bit and to say, what is the deeper meaning of this? How could this have happened? What are the guardrails? Why weren’t there sufficient guardrails? And what guardrails have been rebuilt, if any?
When media critics talk about threats to democracy, threats that are posed in part by a right-wing media machine, it’s often dismissed as a “liberal” or “Democratic” complaint. What do you say to that?
I think everyone can understand that if a democracy is going to function and is going to endure, the citizens need to have a common basis of facts. They need to have a common basis of truth. They can disagree about things, they can disagree about policy or personalities or events, but there needs to be sort of a base, a foundation, of shared reality. And we really don’t have that anymore. There is reality. But there’s also a big swath of the country that doesn’t want to believe it.
Brian Stelter
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