How Margaret Sullivan Became the Last Gatekeeper of a Journalism Nobody Trusts

A VINNEWS OP-ED

The temple is empty, but the high priestess still preaches.

Margaret Sullivan — four decades deep in the cathedral of legacy media — spent her career polishing pews in a church whose congregation has fled. She rose through the ranks by perfecting the rituals of an old antiquaited media with its liberal anti-Jrwish bias. First female editor of The Buffalo News. Public editor of The New York Times. Media columnist at The Washington Post. Now, throne secured at The Guardian, she lectures Americans about democracy from an institution that couldn’t win their trust if it tried.

When they write the autopsy of American journalism’s credibility, her name will appear in every chapter — not as villain, but as something worse: the believer who never noticed the pews were empty.

The Softest Tyranny

Sullivan’s power has always been velvet-gloved. Her tone ever maternal. Her prose drips concern. She scolds gently, critiques politely, and always — always — from inside the institutions least capable of seeing themselves clearly.

But beneath the soft edges lives an iron conviction: journalism’s duty is not to question the progressive order. It’s to protect it.

She has made a career of sitting in judgment while standing on sinking ground.

The Reader’s Representative Who Forgot the Readers

As public editor of The New York Times, Sullivan held what should have been journalism’s most dangerous position — reader’s advocate, the voice from outside the bubble. Instead, she became the bubble’s most eloquent defender.

She scolded for tone. Never for ideology.

She critiqued excess. Never orthodoxy.

When the Times tilted its coverage of Israel, faith, or working-class America, her pen went silent. Oh, so deafenly silent. But challenge the sanctity of diversity initiatives or identity politics? The sermon arrived, crisp and certain, about “standards.”

The position was designed as a check on power. She turned it into a mirror that only reflected what the newsroom wanted to see. The readers — the actual readers — were never in the room.

The Crisis She Won’t Name

At The Washington Post, Sullivan perfected her brand: the worried guardian warning of “disinformation,” “threats to democracy,” and “right-wing narratives” while the audiences hemorrhaged and trust collapsed.

She wrote like a school principal mystified by falling enrollment. When Americans stopped believing legacy media, she didn’t ask what the press had done to lose them. She blamed the public for being misled.

To her, the crisis wasn’t journalism’s arrogance. It was the audience’s stupidity.  Oh, those idiot readers, I know so much better.

Her columns were never written to win back skeptics. They were written to reassure Columbia graduates that they were still the heroes of this story. That the world’s mistrust wasn’t a verdict — it was a misunderstanding.

Always Departing Before the Crash

Watch Margaret Sullivan’s career path and you’ll see a pattern: rise, judge, exit.

At The Buffalo News, she presided over a front-page disaster — publishing shooting victims’ criminal records, sparking outrage so fierce – that people burned her paper in the streets. She left.

At The New York Times, she departed with praise, conveniently before the next wave of credibility crises hit.

At The Washington Post, she stepped down just as internal wars over identity politics and collapsing morale went public.

Now she’s at Columbia, and the Guardian – teaching “journalism ethics and security.” And writing for an outlet that fits so snugly to her warped self-perception. The security, it seems, is for her reputation.

The Monopoly She Mourns

Sullivan’s writing is soaked in nostalgia for the Cronkite era — when “truth” meant whatever three networks agreed it was. What she never admits: that model only worked because most voices were locked out.

The internet didn’t destroy truth. It destroyed the monopoly. And Sullivan has spent years trying to rebuild the walls.

Her latest crusade — attacking Bari Weiss — has nothing to do with journalism. It’s about hierarchy. Weiss left the cathedral, built her own platform, found her own congregation. To Sullivan, that’s not innovation. It’s heresy.

Journalism, in her vision, must flow from credentialed institutions, blessed by ethics boards, sanitized by committees of the likeminded. Independent voices are viruses. They must be quarantined.

Training Tomorrow’s Thought Police

At Columbia’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, Sullivan is teaching the next generation a peculiar catechism:

“Ethics” means activism.
“Objectivity” means complicity.
“Balance” is rebranded as “bothsiderism.”

It’s an inversion so complete it’s almost beautiful. The language of fairness deployed to justify bias. The vocabulary of openness weaponized for conformity.

She teaches “engagement.” What she really teaches is obedience.

The Room Has Emptied

Margaret Sullivan still writes as if she’s the adult and everyone else is the problem.

But the room has emptied. The audience is gone. Not because Americans hate truth, but because they recognize condescension when they hear it.

The great irony: the independence she dismissed — embodied by journalists like Weiss — is what’s keeping actual reporting alive. The truth no longer belongs to the credentialed. It belongs to whoever has the courage to tell it and the humility to admit uncertainty.

Sullivan’s power was always performative. It lasted as long as people feared her disapproval. But the spell broke. The gates rusted open. And the world walked past her podium without looking back.

The Last Believer

Margaret Sullivan is not journalism’s enemy. She’s its fossil — a relic of an age when conformity passed for credibility, when gatekeeping was mistaken for judgment.

Her attacks on Weiss, on Musk, on anyone who refuses to kneel aren’t critique. They’re the cries of a priestess guarding a temple whose worshipers have found other gods.

The real journalists are already outside — building something freer, messier, and alive. Something that doesn’t need her blessing. Something that doesn’t want it.

That is what Margaret Sullivan truly finds “weird and worrisome.” Not Weiss’s appointment. Not threats to democracy. But the end of an era where people like her decided what counted as truth.

The congregation has left. The priestess remains, preaching to empty pews, wondering why no one listens anymore.

The answer is walking past her, in the sunlight, beyond the walls.