Jill Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, is nothing if not ambitious. From the beginning, she takes it upon herself not only to depict the last 15 years for four separate news organizations, but to glean something about the state of the mainstream media.
It’s an undeniably difficult task: how can an author weave the decade-long stories of four completely different organizations together into one cohesive tapestry that magically shows where the media went wrong and how it can right itself again?
The answer is apparently that no one could. Or at least, Abramson didn’t.
The book follows a relatively formulaic format, one Abramson explicitly takes from David Halberstam’s 1979 landmark book on the media landscape, The Powers That Be. Abramson divides the book into three parts, each featuring a chapter on one of her chosen organizations: BuzzFeed, Vice, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
These four organizations earned a place in Abramson’s book because they “are among the leaders in producing the big stories … that we discuss everyday … and all four are endangered.” From there, Abramson plunges into each of their stories.
Abramson details how BuzzFeed developed a formula to reliably spread cat pictures and heartwarming stories throughout the internet before it introduced quality journalism through BuzzFeed News’s reporting in 2012 and Pulitzer Prize nominations.
Vice earns a decidedly uncharitable depiction; Abramson argues that it began as a “shameless assertion of masculine id” and later concludes that “the bad-boy brand … had not really grown up.”
Abramson picks up with The New York Times in the mid-2000s, taking it through the paper’s digital transition and the 2008 financial crisis, which the paper barely weathered, as well as the 2016 presidential election, for which Abramson gives the Times plenty of flak.
Abramson follows The Washington Post through the same period, which included massive layoffs and new ownership under Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
The book’s biggest problem comes from Abramson’s clear preference for the Times model. She worked at The New York Times for almost 20 years, spending three years at its upper echelons as the first female executive editor. She even has a tattoo of a “T” in the paper’s trademark font.
Although Abramson is a well-trained journalist and attempts to take a nuanced look at the media landscape, readers can clearly see that her beliefs bend toward Times traditionalism.
BuzzFeed and Vice bear the brunt of her veiled condescension toward innovative media strategies. The chapters for both organizations are peppered with asides where Abramson attests to how positively “unTimesian” their behavior is.
BuzzFeed’s early model of not publishing negative book reviews finds Abramson aghast, given that “the Times existed to discomfit the affluent … to get them engaged in global issues.” Vice’s occasionally haphazard approaches to international reportage similarly come off unsatisfactory when juxtaposed to own experiences at the Times, which she inserts when talking about Vice.
Even when BuzzFeed News poached a longtime Times editor, Abramson inconceivably argues that the editor lacked much “actual journalism experience.”
Although Abramson reasonably takes on both organizations for their questionable coziness to their advertisers and questionable treatment of employees, the instant insecurity she expresses toward the newcomers indicates her failure to escape her own experiences. No matter how many Pulitzers or Peabodies they pick up, BuzzFeed and Vice will likely remain the simplistic candy to the Times’s sophisticated caviar.
When it comes to the Times itself, Abramson’s connections occasionally do provide unique insight into the world’s most respected news organization. But while Abramson uses her power effectively in some instances, she sometimes seems more like a disgruntled employee than a disinterested journalist.
Abramson describes the boss who fired her as a weak-willed leader who was insecure enough that “he felt compelled to talk about the number of books he read.” One of her rivals comes out of her depiction a self-satisfied dictator, the other an “unknowable” leader “who often sidestepped messy confrontations and decisions.”
Even if her descriptions were completely accurate, the inclusion of personal potshots reflect a larger problem: is this a journalistic endeavor or a personal one?
There really isn’t anything wrong with an embittered writer taking to the page to settle scores—oftentimes it makes for fascinating memoirs. Except this book was meant to be a roadmap for the media landscape, not a forum for Abramson to nurse her wounds.
Maybe a memoir would have been a better option. Maybe Abramson could’ve written the same book but replaced the Times with a different legacy newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The Los Angeles Times. Either way, what she ended up producing was a messy mix of interesting stories.