Jill Abramson on Truth and News
Jill Abramson, political columnist for the Guardian, former executive editor of The New York Times, talks about her new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts (Simon & Schuster, 2019), and responds to the charges of plagiarism leveled against her.
"What happened here, and it’s limited to the chapters on Vice, where I think some of the employees did interpret what I wrote as old-media snobism, I did not mean it that way. I did find Vice + Buzzfeed to be the most interesting places to do my reporting in," says @JillAbramson.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 20, 2019
"I had to focus on the fact that Vice News Tonight on HBO is geared towards making nightly news appealing to a younger audience… and I probably made too much about how these correspondents looked. I can see now how that that seemed to be trivializing their work," @JillAbramson.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 20, 2019
Why compare The New York Times and The Washington Post to Buzzfeed and Vice?
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 20, 2019
"They were at the forefront of native and branded advertising. In some ways, in their early days, they were more advertising agencies than content creators," says @JillAbramson.
"Why are there five different Trump stories? .... I think just because a story gets so many clicks there’s a bit of an incentive to have so many," says @JillAbramson.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 20, 2019
"[Bezos] has been an excellent steward of The Washington Post. He’s given them new resources to come back to the quality of the Bradlee era. We should be grateful to him for saving an important American institution, truly," says @JillAbramson.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 20, 2019
