Accuracy in Media

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan disagrees with Sean Hannity that journalism is dead, but she admits that it is suffering from some self-inflicted body blows—namely the sharp drop in public trust—and she’s advising her colleagues on how to restore it. “‘Maybe this situation calls for a return to the old view, which asks for […]

In a bit of a surprise announcement, The Washington Post announced that it has hired The New York Times’ departing public editor Margaret Sullivan. Sullivan notified the Times in December that she wouldn’t be renewing her four-year contract—which expires in August—citing her belief that there should be a “clear time limit” for the public editor role. During […]

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan gave her students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism some advice last week based on what she’s learned in the last three decades, since she entered the field: About social media. • No road rage; walk away from the keyboard. • Be useful. • Be responsive. • […]

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has “reconsidered” her blog post from last August, in which she criticized the Times for using anonymous sources to seemingly defend Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown. Sullivan, who criticized a Times story from August 20th that she said suffered from “dubious equivalency” […]

Reacting to reader complaints, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan says that the paper shouldn’t confuse readers with news that’s actually opinion and that they should be labeled as “commentary.”

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan encouraged student journalists to be accurate in their reporting, and to not plagiarize: And last, another certainty is the need to get it right. We need the strongest possible commitment to accuracy and its close cousin, fairness. Yes, we’re all in the biggest rush in the world to […]

The Twitter account known as @GSElevator, which has been fascinating Wall Street for the last three years with its tweeting, was finally exposed on Tuesday, though it still managed to suck in the New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan. The tweets were purportedly loose talk from Goldman Sachs employees, including deal talk, overheard in the […]

Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times public editor, is a busy woman. For the third time in less than two weeks, she has taken the paper to task for its reporting. In her latest column, Sullivan criticizes the paper for making changes to a story on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie without alerting readers to the […]

For the second time in less than a week, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has taken the paper to task for its reporting. This time Sullivan is wondering what has happened to real news at the Times: It’s a Monday morning in mid-January. Your print edition of the Times is at hand, along […]

In her latest column, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wondered why the paper’s coverage of the annual March for Life rally in Washington was limited to a photograph buried deep within the paper, instead of a more substantial news story: Hundreds, if not thousands, of New Yorkers – many of them Catholics – […]