Margaret Sullivan has long been one of our best, clearest media critics. She’s probably best known for her stint as Public Editor — basically ombudsman — at the New York Times, a position the paper abolished. She has continued to keep a close eye on the media in an age of political intimidation, and this seemed like a good week to talk about where we stand. Transcript follows.
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Margaret Sullivan
(recorded 11/12/25)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone, Paul Krugman again. This week I’m going to be talking with Margaret Sullivan, who has been writing about the media and playing a role in it for some time. Most recently, she’s had a column at The Guardian and is the Executive Director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia. Before that, she was the media columnist for the Washington Post, and before that, was the public editor—ombudsperson—for the New York Times, which is kind of an intersection with my own life trajectory. And she has a Substack where she writes regularly about the media. God knows there’s plenty to talk about. I think we have some shared concerns.
Margaret Sullivan: Hi Paul, nice to be here with your listeners and your viewers.
Krugman: I want to have some broader discussion, but first let’s just talk about your most recent Substack, where you wrote about the kind of media freakout over mayor elect Mamdani here in New York, where we both live. Why don’t you tell us a bit about what you see as having gone wrong with all of that?
Sullivan: Well, he’s a somewhat unusual candidate and a somewhat unusual mayor elect. Democratic socialist, 34 years old, started his campaign when he was 33. He campaigned very vigorously to young people, used social media a lot, and had a really strong message about how unaffordable and difficult it is to live in New York unless you’re very rich. This really resonated with people, so he won. He won the primary against Andrew Cuomo, and he won the election just this month.
The news media has been uncomfortable with him. I would say that’s at the very least “uncomfortable.” Right wing media is in a complete freak out panic mode, or just using it as a way to stir up grievance, which is what they do. You’re getting all this stuff about how “he’s a communist.” President Trump likes to call him a communist. He’s not a communist; but you see that all across the right wing media and there’s all this stuff about how millions of people are going to move out of New York in protest, there’s no reason to think that. It’s actually a little bit entertaining, because it’s silly, but a little bit more interesting to me is how the serious legacy establishment media has reacted to Mamdani. During the whole campaign, The Times was really uncomfortable with him. They wrote a dumb story, in my opinion, about his application to Columbia University and the way he identified himself ethnically or racially, in part, as African-American. Well, if I have this correct, he was born in Uganda and spent the first seven years of his life there, so he wrote in “Uganda.” He’s also Southeast Asian and he said that too. So, I don’t know, it seemed pretty accurate, but they wrote a big story about how terrible it was that he was calling himself African American; and that wasn’t true, in many people’s opinion. So it was presented as some sort of “gotcha” scandal, but I think it could have been two paragraphs and a story about his education. By the way, he didn’t get into Columbia. That to me is very funny, he didn’t even get in. People were criticizing this sort of in the same way that they criticized Elizabeth Warren’s identification of herself at one point as Native American.
I’m going to stop for a breath here in a second, Paul, but you wound me up. The Times does not any longer endorse on its editorial page for local races. So they don’t endorse for mayor, but they somehow kind of did endorse Andrew Cuomo by—New York has this weird ranked choice voting—not even ranking Mamdani. Even though they don’t like Cuomo. There’s more, there’s this crazy thing that The Washington Post wrote a couple days ago on their editorial page about how Mamdani’s acceptance speech was divisive and angry, and how he dropped the mask and how radical he’s going to be. So, they’re highly uncomfortable, I think, and searching for a way to write about him or talk about him because they’re uncomfortable or unhappy.
Krugman: One point you made, which was sort of a side point, was that you really think that The Times’ “no endorsements policy” on local elections is really a mistake.
Sullivan: It is a mistake. Local elections are an area in which a newspaper—if we can still call The Times just a newspaper, it’s obviously much beyond that—can be useful because their editorial board can have these people come in and interview them and compare them and look at their records, which are things that would be really useful to the electorate. But The Times doesn’t do that anymore. However, it does endorse, for example, presidents. I think that’s upside down. We all know, we don’t really need the New York Times to tell us who to vote for president. But it might be useful to have them go through the propositions that are on the ballot and say, “these are good and these are bad.” And say, “by the way, here’s a state senator you ought to look at.” I don’t know, I think it’s too bad.
Krugman: Yeah. I have to say, I live here, and I know that I cannot name a single member of the council. I cannot tell you anything at all about really local government offices or propositions.
Sullivan: Some of that is because your main source of local news, which probably is The Times, doesn’t really pay attention to that too much.
Krugman: Yeah. A couple more recent things. No Kings Day. I don’t know if you got to see any of it.
Sullivan: I mean, I don’t participate, but I certainly was well aware and following it closely.
Krugman: Did I participate? I did walk a long part of the March route, certainly would be happy to be considered, but mostly I walked next to it so I could get a read on the crowd and what it looked like. So I was half reporter, half advocate, I guess.
But, particularly again, The Times really stood out. There were several hundred thousand people demonstrating in New York City, and we think something like 6 or 7 million nationwide; The Times really seemed to not want to talk about it.
Sullivan: Yeah, they downplayed it, I would say. They had reporters all over the country filing about it. But, I think now people will say, “you can’t look at the print newspaper and make any judgments because we live in a digital world,” etc. However, I think a print front page is a way to gauge how important editors think a story is. So if you accept that as a premise, No Kings was on Saturday, 6 or 7 million people around the country and with a huge crowd in New York. Yet the way it was treated on the front page was no story. Two photographs that were small together below the fold and coverage inside the A section.
So, that was really quiet, and it was duly noted. I wrote a Substack, it’s called American Crisis, and it’s about the news media. My readers were inflamed about that. I think rightfully so, if you looked at some of the local newspapers around the country, it was like their lead story with a big piece of art and a headline that gave it some attention and covered it.
The Times covered it, but they seem to have told us, “we’re not too excited about this.” When they were asked about it by my colleague Bill Grueskin at Columbia, the answer was sort of, “well, we save our Sunday front page for things that you can’t get anywhere else.” Okay? They also said, “we covered the No Kings protests in June and July,” or whenever they were. I didn’t think any of that was a good answer. You can’t really say “we’re only going to put stories that are our own investigations that we hope will win a Pulitzer on the front page on Sunday.” But anyway, that was the response. I did think it was unfortunate, because it’s a big deal. It was the single largest protest of the modern era. It’s rivaled or exceeded only by Earth Day, decades ago, which was kind of a different thing.
Krugman: I think it’s not universal, but the Washington Post actually had an editorial defending Trump’s tear down at the East Wing and his ballroom. You waxed a little bit outraged about that.
Sullivan: Well, The Washington Post editorial page, as you and your folks know, has taken a weird turn and has really had a huge turnover in personnel and in tone and in subject matter. But, yes, there was a big editorial. If you did see it in print, it had a huge presence on their editorial page that said, “In defense of Trump’s ballroom,” something like that. And it was all about how, “yes, maybe it is a good idea to have a place to entertain dignitaries,” but what it didn’t say in the initial editorial—which was online—was that Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, was that his Amazon—not he directly, but Amazon—was a contributor to the construction of the ballroom, and that is notable. It was added, eventually. But The Post editorial page has taken a Right turn.
Krugman: Yeah. Editorial and opinion section as well.
Sullivan: Yes, I’m kind of using “editorial” as an overall umbrella term, but the whole opinion section.
Krugman: When I left The Times, I was telling people, “if you want someone who can step into the role that I’ve been playing, you should be trying to hire Catherine Rampell from The Post,” and instead she quit and is on Substack now.
Sullivan: Well, it’s happened to a lot of people, and you made that decision, are you happy with it?
Krugman: Oh, yeah. Though, there’s still nothing quite like the reach of especially The Times. Not sure about The Post at this point.
Sullivan: I always say and feel that there is no platform that I’ve experienced or even observed like The New York Times; I mean, its reach, its influence. That’s why we have to take very seriously what it does, because it is so influential. Even now in this very divided and very fragmented media world, it sets the tone and it leads the way. So it’s not just about what they do on their front page or on their opinion pages or sections. It’s also how they’re leading.
Krugman: The Times can make an issue salient, and its choice not to make an issue salient is tremendous.
Well, I want to come back to some of that in a bit, but what do we think is going on? Certainly, in the case of The Post endorsing the ballroom, that’s pretty straightforwardly sinister, right? I mean, the paper is the property of somebody who has a financial stake in buttering up the administration.
Sullivan: Exactly, it’s one example, a bad one, but far from the only one, of these billionaires and corporate figures, very rich people, who are cozying up to Trump and the Trump administration. I don’t think it’s too much of a logical stretch to say that they’re doing so because they’re trying to promote their own interests, whether those are direct commercial interests or whether they’re personal wealth preservation and enhancement interests. But we see it. It’s happening. We saw it at the inauguration, the prominent row of Zuckerberg and Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong–I think was there—and the owner of the LA times, it was quite a display.
Krugman: The thing is, we now have a fair number of major media organizations that are owned effectively by billionaires, directly or indirectly, and appear to be being used to promote their personal interests.
Sullivan: It’s very disturbing because that’s not what owning a news organization should be about. We have the press in this country in order to provide truth and information to citizens so that they can do their part in the democracy. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, not gilding our own lilies, or feathering our own nest, so it’s very disheartening.
The other thing that we’ve seen is media organizations or news organizations that are owned by big corporations, like ABC is owned by Disney. CBS is now owned by a big corporation that used to be called Paramount Global, then there was a merger. But, each of them was sued by Trump and the cases were highly defendable in court.
But those news organizations, or their parent companies, chose to settle. As Trump likes to say, “they gave me lots of money.” Well, they did give him lots of money. It wasn’t the right thing to do, and it’s part of this capitulation that we’re seeing. And it’s very, very damaging and unfortunate.
Krugman: The Times is actually a weird organization historically, it’s a family business, in the Sulzberger family. But with a tradition of noblesse oblige, The Times still doesn’t do that kind of crude stuff. I think that’s an important part of why it’s such a uniquely influential organization. But there’s something, and I thought the Mamdani hysteria kind of—somehow or other the plutocrat class carries a lot of weight in what is considered to be respectable opinion.
Sullivan: Right. There’s a lot of talk at The Times and elsewhere about wanting to have a wide range of opinions, but is there really a wide range of opinions, or is it center right to slightly left of center once in a while? We can delve into that more, but I should say, though, in fairness, that The Times has also been sued by Trump and so has the Wall Street Journal, and unlike CBS and ABC, they are not yielding and they are not settling. I would be shocked to see the New York Times settle a defamation case. It’s very shocking to see what’s happening at the Washington Post, but I think we can count on The Times—and I feel glad about this—to not buckle in court or give him some sort of unnecessary settlement to make him happy.
Krugman: I mean that would be a brand destroying event, which kind of it has been for The Post.
Sullivan: Something like 300,000 Washington Post subscribers have decamped, have canceled their subscriptions starting last fall, when Bezos yanked an already written editorial endorsing Kamala Harris and said, “well, we’re not going to endorse anyone,” really it was like, “we’re not going to endorse her.” Then it kind of went from there and that really disturbed people.
All these other changes, as you said, all these prominent columnists and other reporters going to other news organizations, many subscribers have left The Post. I find it very sad because it’s been such an important news organization and I should make the point that it’s still on the news side rather than the opinion side. I think it’s still doing very good work, and I would not cancel my subscription—of course, I write about the media, but even if I were just a regular reader—I would hang in there because of the news coverage. But on the opinion side, it’s been very disturbing.
Krugman: It’s interesting, The Journal, their news coverage is actually extremely good. Their opinion section, their editorial page, are batshit crazy, but have been for basically my entire adult life.
Sullivan: They went on a huge anti-Mamdani campaign throughout the whole election season. There were something like 50 editorials and OP-ED pieces about what a “terrible idea this would be.” Everyone from the editorial board to Peggy Noonan and many others, just ranting and raving about what an awful thing this would be. And we don’t know what kind of mayor he’s going to make. But The Journal’s editorial page, they were on a tear.
Krugman: Side thing, but in America, even people who call themselves socialists are not recognizably what we used to mean by socialist. They’re not what Europeans mean by socialists. They’re kind of just a little bit lefter then center left.
Sullivan: Yeah, Socialism-light I guess. I should have mentioned when we were talking about news coverage of Mamdani, because some of it is sort of entertaining, it’s just so crazy; the day after the election, the New York Post, the tabloid that is owned by or controlled by the Murdochs, had an image of Mamdani in—if I’m remembering this correctly—a red suit and it said, “the red apple.” He was wielding a hammer and sickle and it was going heavy duty into this whole “we’ve elected a commie.”
Krugman: One thing that struck me—I see it in other areas as well, I see it in policymaking, even under Democratic administrations—is that there is this gravitational pull of great wealth that sets the Overton window and shapes what people feel that they should say or are allowed to say, even when there’s no crass financial implication.
Sullivan: I’ve been watching the news media for a long time and of course politics as well. I do think we’ve turned some kind of weird corner in which the extremely wealthy—in my mind, obscenely wealthy—are in control of society in a way. That wasn’t the case previously. I was drawn into journalism because of the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. I was a kid. I was a teenager. But, I don’t think that would happen now for many reasons, partly because of the media and partly because the responsible Republicans are almost nonexistent and partially because we’re almost an oligarchy these days.
Krugman: Partly it’s actual ownership of stuff, and it’s direct pressure, but I think it’s very hard to avoid it: taking the views and the feelings of people with a lot of money seriously, even when there is no reason at all to believe that they have any idea what they’re talking about.
Sullivan: Well, and they also throw their money around. So, in the case of Zuckerberg, for example, the founder of Facebook and now Meta, he gives money to Trump, a lot of money, in one form or another. And Bezos too, Amazon bought this Melania Trump documentary for some astronomical amount of money. I mean, it’s not really too hard to figure out what’s going on there.
Krugman: That is, by the way, that is really new. We used to say that just raw personal enrichment of political figures, to influence their policies, was something that we had kind of purged from US politics, generations ago. Now it’s back.
Sullivan: Back in force. Something that I’ve observed is that in some ways, we’ve been up until the first Trump administration on the honor system about a lot of things. And then, the actual rules and regulations were things that we knew—there was a Hatch Act—but is there any enforcement of this stuff? Now we find out that, “oh, we’re not on the honor system anymore and anything goes.” So it’s pretty depressing.
Krugman: Yeah. Okay...
Sullivan: (laughs) We can bring up some happy things.
Krugman: We’ll talk at the end about things we can do.
You’ve written a bit about, and certainly I assume that all of us and all in this business are thinking about last week’s elections, about most of the gubernatorial elections. Mamdani was, in many ways, the least significant of the big three elections out there. At least I think so. I live in New York and you live in New York, and we both know that it’s not very representative of America.
Sullivan: No, it’s its own thing.
Krugman: But what happened in Virginia and New Jersey, how did you feel about the way that those elections were covered? I mean, I don’t think it was egregious, but I think there were some real issues.
Sullivan: I guess I’m not sure what you mean by that. I do think that, as with many things, there’s a kind of false equivalency that comes up in political coverage, so that people who are happy to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election are treated pretty much the same as traditional candidates. So that kind of thing, we see that a lot, and it continues. So, yes, I think we did see that; I call it performative neutrality.
Krugman: I was struck by—I think you can do a bit of number crunching on this, but more that you can just look at some revealing pieces that I saw—where actually some people, including people who were by no means the worst, in Virginia there was a surprise in 2021 when Youngkin won the state as a Republican and there were endless amounts of editorials on “what this means,” and, “how the center of gravity of American politics is shifting.” And then, Spanberger just won and Youngkin won by 1.5 percentage points and Spanberger won by 15. I have seen at least some explicit statements: “yeah, but Spanberger’s win was less significant.”
Sullivan: Even though it was by a much larger margin. Yeah, I think that’s true. The media and the political world seem to want to latch on to someone like Youngkin or Ron DeSantis as, “oh, this is the face of the more moderate, more acceptable, less crazy, Republican Party and isn’t it interesting? And aren’t we kind of glad about all this?” But that’s not the sort of coverage that Spanberger, or Mikie Sherrill have gotten at all, I think you’re right. These are regarded as, “that’s interesting but not significant.”
Krugman: There was Youngkin and DeSantis as well who were like, “oh, this shows the power of anti-wokeness, as a political force.” And as far as I can tell, there’s really very little evidence that moved votes as opposed to “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Sullivan: It’s really not my original thought, but it’s a good one, so I’m sharing it. Greg Sargent at The New Republic wrote a really good piece, right after the election, saying that there’s a sort of false debate, about should the Democrats go heavy on to this affordability message or should they be pushing, “Trump is bad,” that message; the lawlessness, all of that with Trump and which way to go. And his point is it should be a unified message and that they actually go quite well together and that it’s a winning message for the Democrats. Whether the Democrats can summon themselves to do something that’s that organized, I don’t know.
Krugman: Well, this is a question: who are the Democrats? If Chuck Schumer is the Democrats, the answer is “well, no.” But there are a lot of other people out there.
Sullivan: There are. I’ve been watching Chris Murphy from Connecticut with quite a bit of interest. I like that he’s so eloquent, he’s outspoken, and he seems pretty strong to me.
Krugman: I look at—this is not an endorsement but—J.B. Pritzker just because of the toughness that he projects. Anyway, there did seem to be an eagerness to move on, particularly New Jersey, where the narrative was that this was a close race.
Sullivan: Well, the media narrative is always, “make it into a close horse race because then it makes the coverage more interesting.” And it’s very driven by polls, and polls are often wrong. And, Paul, you probably know if you watch any television in, New York City, we saw a lot of New Jersey TV ads that were very negative for Mikie Sherrill, the Democrat, funded by those who wanted Jack Ciattarelli, a Trumpy guy, to be elected, and it was not a close race and it didn’t seem to make much difference what that negative message was.
Krugman: It was kind of interesting because if you followed people who are serious poll analysts and discount the partisan polls and the low quality polls, it didn’t look that close, although we didn’t expect a 13 point margin, but the media narratives were “this is a neck and neck race.”
Sullivan: Exactly, and we see that a lot: “isn’t this exciting and don’t you need to come back tomorrow or an hour from now because we’re going to be following this close neck and neck race?” I mean, if you put out there that the election is all but over, it doesn’t tend to engage people that much. So there’s a commercial interest, I don’t know how conscious it is, but in making it more exciting.
Krugman: I constantly get mail from readers who saw—I don’t actually watch TV, like, ever. Which is not a statement of virtue, it’s just how my life has worked. So I didn’t see any of this but—I get someone who saw some analysis on TV that says, “there’s a poll that says that the race in New Jersey is tied,” or there’s a poll that says that “Trump is winning at the shutdown.”
Sullivan: It was not what the numbers actually said.
Krugman: Yeah. I don’t know if you noticed this, and I was just out that we’re recording this on Wednesday morning, and I just had a Substack out this morning, and you may not have had a chance to read it this morning.
Sullivan: I did see it, I read you this morning.
Krugman: So the affordability stuff, that was a common theme of the last elections, right? In their different ways, Spanberger, Sherill, and Mamdani all ran on affordability; I’ve been, and people are acknowledging, that Trump really has a problem here, that his polls on handling of the economy and inflation have really cratered. But I’ve been seeing—there are multiple stories saying—”he’s in denial and it’s just like Biden.”
Sullivan: You made the point in your piece that there was high inflation, but Biden didn’t communicate very well about the reality and when he did have victories or good economic news, he didn’t really communicate it all that well. Whereas Trump is, as you pointed out, just flat out lying about inflation being down and grocery costs being down. They’re not. It’s an amazing phenomenon that he creates— not for people who are really grounded in reality, but for a lot of other people—this idea that the stuff he’s saying is true, just because he says it over and over again. It’s a great propaganda tool, but it’s not the case.
Krugman: What got me is that a lot of the media coverage said—Biden himself was not often in front of the public enough in general—that Biden’s officials pointed to good economic numbers, that, “inflation rates are way down, wage growth has exceeded inflation, real wages are up,” which didn’t resonate with the public. But making that the equivalent of Trump saying “grocery prices are way down,” which is not a mystery, that’s just a flat out lie, which as far as I can tell, the Biden people never did.
But I’ve seen a lot of them saying explicitly that it’s exactly the same.
Sullivan: I mean as we look back on what Biden did or didn’t do, the media coverage—the narrative—around it is pretty negative. We know what happened. We all saw it happen before our eyes. But he did a lot, that was right. The decency, I always come back to that, the decency of Biden, to me, stands out.
Krugman: And the honesty of the people around. You may think they made bad political judgments, but I cannot think of a major issue on which they said things that were just flatly untrue.
Sullivan: Now you can’t even really keep track of it. The Washington Post did try to keep track of the misstatements and false statements and lies for a long time, but Glenn Kessler, who did that work, is now no longer at The Washington Post.
Krugman: He’s also gone. I saw a CNN had actually a very good piece on this. But then I looked at the byline and it’s Daniel Dale, who has been covering these disputes for a long time. Good for CNN to keep him on. But it’s really not so much institutional as one heroic truth teller still doing his job.
Sullivan: There are a few more.
Krugman: What can we do? I bailed out and I’m writing Substack, maybe sooner or later Substack itself gets enshittified—to use Corey Doctorow’s phrase—but we now know that it’s possible for individual-name journalists to strike out and get themselves an audience.
It’s not easy. But that’s not an adequate substitute for a full scale media organization that can really do reporting.
Sullivan: That’s right. And that’s why I want to continue to give the big news organizations credit for that, for the big investigations they do, for the fact that they have investigative teams and many editors who can steer those things and then the rest of us can opine on it. It is unfortunate. It’s tragic, really, that some of the, some of the major ones have fallen and I keep coming back to the Washington Post, in sadness. But what can we do? I mean, what I think your viewers and listeners and readers can do is to vary their news diets and to make sure that they’re getting quality news and supporting it.
I do write for the Guardian, and I’m impressed by the fact that the Guardian doesn’t have a paywall. I worry about the fact that a lot of the higher quality news is behind a paywall, but there’s a lot of really lousy stuff that is free and circulating on social media. So, that worries me. So I think there needs to be support. There should be support in local communities for local news organizations, including traditional newspapers, but also startups and non-profits. We need to be wise consumers of the news and supportive of the stuff that we find to be of high quality. That’s part of it.
Krugman: People talk to me about leaving The Times and they say, “should I drop my subscription?” I always say, “no.” I had an unhappy last year, but there’s still nothing like that reporting.
I’m taking some of my Substack royalties and plowing it back into continuing subscriptions at basically all of the major news organizations, but I do worry about the structural attrition, and I also worry about the absence of any universally trusted figures.
Sullivan: You mean in the media, or in politics?
Krugman: Certainly in the media. I’m just old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, and that there was a time when there were certain people who really were, I’m sure there was always probably 30% of the public who would believe whatever they wanted to believe, but if Walter Cronkite said, “that’s the way it is,” it was.
Sullivan: And now we see what’s happened. We haven’t talked about CBS at all.
Krugman: I really have not been following that closely.
Sullivan: It’s another news organization that has a very storied history. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and 60 minutes and Scott Pelley and all these people who’ve really done important and good journalism and now, under corporate ownership, David Ellison is the head honcho. He is the son of Larry Ellison, who might right now be the richest person in the world, or maybe number two. The decisions that have been made there, one of which was to hire as editor in chief Barry Weiss, who had been at The Times and left, unhappily. She’s kind of made her reputation with this outfit called the Free Press, which is anti-woke and certainly she is known to be a staunch Zionist. She doesn’t have experience running a news organization or even as a reporter. So it was a sort of a strange, but notable decision to make her the editor in chief. I don’t know long term what that means for CBS.
But some good people have left, the executive producer of 60 minutes left. This was before Barry Weiss came on. He said he left because he didn’t think he had the editorial freedom he needed, and it’s worrisome. It’s another one of these places that we need to be good, and I don’t know how good it’s going to be.
Krugman: What I’m seeing is that the straight reporting—again, I don’t watch on TV— has not been affected yet, as far as I can tell, or it’s not obvious, but the analysis pieces, which are always important, have been diminishing in both quantity and quality.
By the way, Barry Weiss, Substack has its bestseller lists and Free Press is still number one, very influential.
Sullivan: It’s been very successful. And, from that standpoint, you have to give her credit. Whether that means she should be running CBS news is another question.
Krugman: Opinion and news are not the same thing. Gosh, I probably shouldn’t say it, but Free Press is number one on politics on Substack. I’m number seven. So can somebody give me a news organization? No, they don’t want me running one (laughs).
I worry. A number of people have been pointing out that most people have consumed almost no news. They get stuff on social media or what they’ve heard. We built up this incredibly important institution, which is–
Sullivan: The press.
Krugman: It’s not an objective news media, but it’s always been on a very shaky foundation. First, advertising, then now paywalls. But only a handful of organizations are managing to make a go of that. I wonder, how will people have any idea what’s out?
Sullivan: I won’t go on and on about this, but it is a great interest of mine, what’s happened to local news? As the print advertising declined to very little, newspapers in every community in the United States have suffered and many have gone out of business. I was the top editor of the Buffalo News in my hometown for a long time. We had a staff of 200 journalists, and now they’re below 50. That’s happened all over the country. And so, what gave people a grounding in sort of shared common reality in a lot of communities has really diminished. That tends to drive people into their tribal corners and they get their news, as you said, Paul, from social media. They become less engaged in their communities. A lot of bad stuff happens. So I think it is really important to foster and support local news when we can.
Krugman: Okay. I think that probably in the long run, we just need something like public support, but I guess that’s a non-starter right now.
Sullivan: I mean, we’ve seen what’s happened with public radio and PBS in this country, and now the BBC in the UK is really having a crisis and Trump is threatening to sue them as well. So, a lot of these problems are not just in the United States, but are broader.
The idea of a really responsible, important, public support for, independent media. I would love to see that. But I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Krugman: It’s a troubling landscape.
Sullivan: Paul, I would like to say, I still see a lot of important and good journalism being done. I think it’s absolutely crucial for the future of the United States. There’s a lot of really fine journalists out there who are doing great work. I want to end on that note, that it’s worth noting, it’s worth supporting, and it’s worth encouraging.
Krugman: Yes, I will say, I start my day with The Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, CNN, all of which are what’s happening in the world. All flaws and complaints aside, journalism is not yet lost.
Sullivan: Absolutely. And it can’t be.
Krugman: Okay. Well, thank you so much for talking to me.
Sullivan: Thanks for inviting me. Be well. Hang in there.
