Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson review – journalism's troubles
A former editor of the New York Times takes an unsparing look at the decline of US journalism
Heidi N Moore
Wed 30 Jan 2019 02.29 EST Last modified on Tue 5 Feb 2019 06.05 EST
New York Times employees protest against planned cutbacks in 2017. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
This book about the commercial takeover of the news business is sure to make a lot of powerful people very angry. Jill Abramson takes an unsparing look at US journalism's moral decline; as former executive editor of the New York Times, she is someone who knows where most of the bodies are buried and is prepared to draw the reader a detailed map. Names are named, mistakes are exposed, and the writing is unforgiving and unadorned, as befits a woman with "balls like iron cantaloupes", as one veteran journalist tells her. It is a cracking read, and a complicated one, flawed in many places yet absorbing in its frank desire to hold journalism to account for becoming overly willing to sell out to advertisers and thereby endangering its own future.
Abramson compares four media organisations: the New York Times; its longtime rival the Washington Post; BuzzFeed; and Vice. These last two digital media companies, born of early viral content and gonzo reporting, are often the madcap foils to the gravitas of the Times and Post – though by the end it's clear that all four are closer to each other than they may think. In fact, both the digital and traditional publications have shown great adaptability; BuzzFeed and Vice have unquestionably succeeded, in a short time, in producing compelling journalism, even in Abramson's telling. As well as a Pulitzer nomination, both have won highly respected awards, including Emmys and Peabodys.
The occasion for the book is the inescapable collapse of journalism as we know it; newsroom jobs have fallen 23% in 10 years, according to Pew Research, and each month brings more closures and layoffs. (A thousand jobs were lost in newsrooms – including at BuzzFeed and Huffington Post – last week.) In other words, it looks like the end times and it is natural, after the Flood, to look up to the heavens and ask why, Lord, why. Merchants of Truth feels biblical in length – 544 pages – and, as it turns out, is biblical in purpose: Abramson sets out on a quest in search of the original sin that has brought journalism low. And the poisoned apple she finds? The fruit of advertising that media executives are all too willing to eat and by so doing, to destroy the industry's claim to unbiased truth-telling.
During her tenure as editor of the NYT (2011-14), Abramson was among those who refused to nibble. She knows she is not a digital native, that this was her achilles heel, but nevertheless maintains that the internet, with its fast pace and fake news, chipped away at the soul of the industry: "I didn't think technological change should sweep in moral change." As far as this goes, Abramson is, in the words of William F Buckley, standing athwart history and yelling "stop!" She maintained a chilly approach to the Times' business executives: "I was not willing to sacrifice my ethical moorings for business exigencies," she says. She took exception to the launch of a Thursday lifestyle section not for journalistic reasons – the paper already had a Sunday lifestyle section – but primarily because the idea, meant to goose luxury advertising revenue, came from the commercial side of the company.
But this resistance, multiplied over months and years, took a personal toll. Abramson, eager to be in the scrum of news, found the constant fight against financial imperatives life-negating. By the end, she says, "I felt lonely and depressed at work ... everything was about saving or generating money."
Dark comic relief is provided by vice co-founder Shane Smith, who has a penchant for running naked through the office
She criticises news outlets that, in her opinion, allowed too close a relationship with advertisers: after describing "a recurring BuzzFeed segment, the 'Giant Little Story'", she adds pointedly that it was "brought to you by Wendy's Giant Junior Bacon Cheeseburger". She contends that one of her peers, who raised the Washington Post's traffic numbers by double digits, did so by "dumbing down" some of the coverage and pandering to readers with clickbait. Among the executives she discusses is Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the NYT publisher who abruptly fired her, and with whom she achieved a kind of reconciliation – but she nonetheless manages to repeat a dig at him by the writer Gay Talese: "Every once in a while you get a bad king."
A book of this scope gives Abramson the chance to relay her performance reviews of the man who fired her and her successor, Dean Baquet, who backed her removal. It is an opportunity she takes often throughout the book. Times Kremlinologists – of whom there are many in the US – will have much to discuss, especially in her account of the NYT's controversial coverage of the 2016 election (which Abramson praises for taking Trump to task).
The closest thing the book has to comic relief – the laughs here are dark – is Vice co-founder Shane Smith. Bullshitter Shane, as he is dubbed, aggressively chases advertisers' favour and their money. He has a penchant for cocaine and animal suits, on one occasion pranced naked through the office and once tweeted gleefully: "let's fuck news in its naughty ass". Whenever he enters a scene in the book, one imagines that Abramson has chosen as his musical accompaniment not the pounding of heavy metal but the distant sound of kazoos.
These characterisations don't give the reader much faith in the leadership of the news business as we know it, and perhaps that is Abramson's point. Yet while the leaders have made notable mistakes, they had help. Facebook, which might be considered the Lucifer in the story of journalism's embrace of advertising, gets some mention, but it should be more central to any account of journalism's struggles since 2015. It was Facebook's role as a provider of all that internet traffic that lured newsrooms to adapt their coverage to attract mass readership. The rise of bots on such social networks as Facebook and Twitter spread fake news, destabilising the authority of real journalism. Along the way, Facebook did an end-run around newsrooms and took much of the advertising for itself, and Google took much of the rest. The industry may well have sold itself out for ad dollars; the tragedy is, it did so for Facebook's table scraps.
There is also the question not just of the dangers of the advertising money coming into the industry, but the ethics of how and where that money was distributed once it got there. A great deal went into ill-fated pivot-to-video strategies, which drove several newsrooms to their deaths within months. It certainly didn't go into salaries, nor did it fend off redundancies, which have occurred in every digital and traditional newsroom in the past five years. (She quotes a departing NYT copy editor's poignant and cutting note in response to a cull among the editorial ranks at the paper; it ends, "excuse me while I go cease to exist".) Abramson describes the pain of laying off talented journalists at the Times and mentions the "indentured status of the workforce" at Vice, earning $28,000 a year on average while their boss Smith, casually posing as a rebel, became increasingly rich. (How anarchic can someone be with a $23m mansion to go home to, after all?)
Jill Abramson … her writing is direct, unforgiving and unadorned. Photograph: Ali Smith/The Observer
Abramson never becomes polemical and one gathers that she believes journalism can dig itself out by emphasising quality and giving up on the pursuit of scale in favour of appealing to discerning readers (who will pay for subscriptions). Where her account shines is in her stories of the thrill of the news chase: she describes talented journalists, from BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman and Jason Leopold to Vice's Elle Reeves, following tips and tracking down difficult, award-winning stories.
But she is as hard on younger journalists – who have walked into a broken business for little pay – as she is on their elders, who, with ample time and resources, drove that business into the ground. There is a dismissive reference to "hipster phenotypes", and the way in which young workers in digital media style their hair and clothing to signal disdain for hierarchies; she describes a group of diverse Vice correspondents as "impossibly hip, with interesting hair" – which is, to say the least, reductive.
She is also quick to describe anyone under 40 as having scant experience. This strange disconnect falls into place later when she notes that Cliff Levy, at 40, was considered by the Times mandarins to be remarkably young to earn one of the paper's prestigious foreign postings. "The average age in the newsroom," Abramson writes, "was 50, and many reporters were in their 60s and 70s."
Similarly, in several places Abramson seems perplexed by how news has changed, particularly around the growing interest in social movements concerning gender and race. She attributes BuzzFeed's coverage of LGBT and gender issues to their being "reliable traffic drivers" that allowed the media outlet to "ingratiate itself with the younger generations". What she misses is that coverage of these issues is not a matter of the latest fashion; it's a shift in American history.
Despite that, her best storytelling in the book is about women in journalism, including herself. The chapters on her departure from the NYT are engaging, as honest about her own motivations and failings as those of her rivals.
Yet as Abramson recounts her shortcomings the question hovers: would these flaws have been as fatal to her career at the Times if she were a man? Sulzberger, she comments, once called her, in a sexist phrase, "his go-to girl". In her telling, her firing came just as she asked for higher pay. She relates that the current Times editor Dean Baquet lashed out in an email to a reporter using the phrase: "I hope your colleagues rip you a new asshole." Even though Abramson had left by then, and she provides no commentary, the reader can sense her implied question: if she, or any woman, had said such a thing to a reporter, would she have been allowed to keep her job?
Abramson knows she is not alone in raising these issues. She mentions, often, the open sexism that women in journalism face – some are refused promotions, some shown the door, most are told to be nicer to men – and in those stories, her deadpan scepticism gives way to curiosity and sympathy.
Merchants of Truth in its frankness is an essential read, and its skewering of journalism's leaders will earn Abramson some new enemies, as well as provoke old ones. But it's unlikely that a woman with balls like iron cantaloupes will much care about that, as long as she sounds the alarm.
• Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution by Jill Abramson is published by The Bodley Head (RRP £25). To order a copy for £20, saving £5, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
Jill Abramson