Jill Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, is billed as a “definitive report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade,” even as Abramson concedes halfway through that “[a]ny narrative, even one that is scrupulously factual and deserving of the omniscient third-person voice of the journalist-historian, is subjective by nature.” The common ground between “subjective” and “definitive” is a small place, but Abramson, as the first woman executive editor of The New York Times, is well placed to claim it. Her tenure at the top of the Times, from 2011 to 2014, coincided with the great shift in news publishing from print to digital, with all the financial chaos and ethical quarrels over clickbait that followed. The book is also a bitter account of the end of Abramson’s career at the Times, placing her own story in the middle of an ongoing debate over diversity in the newsroom.



MERCHANTS OF TRUTH by Jill Abramson Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $30.00

Abramson’s experience at the pinnacle of American journalism could make her the best person to tell this story, since she had such a good view. It could also make her the worst, since she has a personal stake in trashing certain people and organizations. In Merchants of Truth, she ends up being a little of both. To write the history of the news industry in the twenty-first century, Abramson juxtaposes the troubles of the Times and The Washington Post with the rise of Vice Media and BuzzFeed. It is very clear where Abramson’s heart lies, and the heart tends to lead one’s head. The chapters on the Times and the Post are excellent. The other chapters are not.

In recent weeks, several younger journalists cited in Merchants of Truth have sparked a huge backlash to the book on social media, claiming that Abramson has misreported everything from their gender to the color of their shoes. Although the screenshots of errors circulating on Twitter were from uncorrected proofs, several significant errors remain in the final book that bear out her critics’ misgivings. The chapters on BuzzFeed and Vice mar what is otherwise an incisive autopsy of print journalism. The major reporting lapses all occur in these lesser sections analyzing the new online wave.

But therein lies the key to understanding Abramson as a journalistic animal. She derides new digital media as much with her tone as with her reporting, and yet the very same digital journalists she maligns now wield great influence within the industry—precisely as this book contends, while failing to truly reckon with how this all came to pass. Abramson’s mistakes and the controversy she has attracted have been useful in that respect, offering both a more vivid demonstration of her own argument and pointing us toward the psychological impetus that so many autobiographers suffer: the urge to turn oneself into the center of history.