Welcome to Jen Rubin's Green Room. This is Jen Rubin. One of the questions I get a lot from readers or from viewers at MSNBC is why does the press behave as it does? Why do they seem to give

Republicans a break? Why do they seem to default to, well, on one hand this and on the other hand

that? And many of these frustrations I share. I write about them. Sometimes I am perplexed as readers are,

but there's someone who I think is absolutely perfect ideal to help us untangle all of that.

That's Margaret Sullivan. She was a former colleague of mine at the Washington Post as a media

critic. She was the public editor at the New York

Times. She's the author of two books on the latest being Newsroom Confidential. She now teaches at Duke.

And she is the smartest person I know who talks about the media and what's wrong, what's right with it.

So without further ado,

nice to have you, Margaret. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. We miss you back at the Washington Post, but you have gone on to great things,

and I'm sure we'll continue to hear from you. Thank you. Sometimes when I read you, Margaret, it's like I'm talking to myself because the frustrations I have about the press, but also the moments of pride, you seem to reflect.

Give us a big picture sense of what you think the biggest problem that the press has in the era in which we are

presently find ourselves, which is war on truth, democracy in peril, one political party

seems to have completely gone off the rails. What do you see is the biggest challenge,

the biggest problem for the press? Well, there's kind of two things that are going on that worry me. One is the entire right-wing

media ecosystem, of which Fox News is the centerpiece, but not, obviously, not the only part of it.

But the problem with that whole area is that very often they are untethered from the truth

and don't seem to worry about it too much.

I mean, that's so, and I think there's a whole swath of the

country that is very affected by that, that is, and therefore is kind of, they are kind of

unhinged from the facts, from the facts, untethered from the facts.

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