What happened: Columbia University hired Margaret Sullivan, a liberal hack who worked for the New York Times and Washington Post, to lead the "ethics" department of its journalism school.
• Sullivan, who most recently served as a boring weekly columnist for the left-wing Guardian, started her new gig on Monday as executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia Journalism School, widely regarded by élite journalists as the premier institution of journalistic education.
Why it matters: Ivy League universities are a joke, so hiring Sullivan to run the "journalism ethics" center at Columbia makes perfect sense. She is a liberal hack who spent the last several years shrieking about Donald Trump, Fox News, disinformation, and threats to American democracy while cultivating an audience of mentally disturbed liberals who already agree with her.
• In her 2022 memoir, Newsroom Confidential, Sullivan implored journalists to seek "the truth" while also stressing the importance of promoting a left-wing political agenda. For example, she praised Nikole Hannah-Jones and the controversial 1619 Project, which "accomplished its goals" despite the "objections by a few historians to some of the project's assertions."
• Sullivan described feeling "sickened" by the American public's lack of trust in mainstream media institutions, especially among "non-college" rubes who don't obsessively follow politics. In order to restore public trust, Sullivan argued, journalists should shriek even harder about Donald Trump, Fox News, disinformation, and democracy.
What they're saying: "Late to the party but so excited for you @Sulliview!!!" wrote Katie Couric, the former NBC personality who provided the front-cover blurb for Sullivan's memoir, praising the author for explaining "how journalism really works."
• Couric is best known for being an unethical journalist. In 2016, she refused to apologize after the Washington Free Beacon exposed her for deceptively editing an interview with gun-rights activists.
• In 2021, Couric bragged about refusing to publish portions of her 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg—in which the late Supreme Court justice criticized Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes for kneeling in protest during the National Anthem—because she thought the comments were "unworthy of a crusader for equality" and wanted to "protect" Ginsburg from criticism. That same year, Couric was named co-chair of the Aspen Institute's commission on media disinformation.
• Couric hung out with notorious sex pests Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein for decades, and attended a dinner party at pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's mansion in 2010—after the prolific Democratic donor became a registered sex offender. Couric's former employer, NBC News, spiked Ronan Farrow's reporting on Weinstein's sex crimes under pressure from Hillary Clinton operatives. Ethics!
Crucial context: Notable graduates of the Columbia Journalism School include Adamu Adamu, the former education minister of Nigeria, and Robert Henry Best, the New York Times contributor best known for broadcasting Nazi propaganda during World War II and dying in federal prison while serving a life sentence for treason.
• Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, reportedly told his former editor at the New Yorker that he was seriously considering leaving the country after Trump was elected in 2016.
• The dean of Columbia Law School, Gillian Lester, in November announced plans to resign amid widespread criticism of her response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. Several days later, Columbia students organized a rally to celebrate "the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism."
• In the weeks following the Hamas massacre, more than 100 faculty at Columbia signed an open letter in support of anti-Semitic efforts to "recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023" as a justified "military response" against the "fascist, racist, and colonial" Israeli government.
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