All day is a long time. That’s both an observation and the name of a novel by David Sanchez. The book’s protagonist is a man named David who gets addicted to drugs and alcohol when he is young and eventually cleans up with the help of a community college course he takes in great literature. Classic books save him: Moby Dick, Inferno, Invisible Man, and Faulkner.

I was thinking of David while considering the media and the recent election of Donald Trump. Like David, the media has an addiction problem. It began 50 years ago with Watergate. For an entire generation of journalists, the Watergate story of the early 1970s was like cocaine. The toppling of Richard Nixon provided a high. Called by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “the longest shot in the history of American journalism,” Watergate altered the American political and media landscape the way heroin rewires the brain.

The point of journalism went from covering the news to making it by destroying the president—especially if such figure were a Republican or a conservative. The language of addiction, words like “rush” or “mania,” came to describe the media’s behavior whenever there was a political scandal. They even created fake scandals to feed their jones. In her book Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life, veteran journalist Margaret Sullivan reveals how the end of Nixon was her first great buzz.

Sullivan was in high school in her native town of Lackawanna, New York when Watergate hit. A kid who loved language, by the time President Nixon resigned she was already the editor of her school newspaper. Regarding Woodward and Bernstein she writes: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman…. I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.’” That the comfortable deserved to be afflicted is assumed rather than explained.

“Everything happened fast for years,” says David, the narrator of All Day is a Long Time. He’s talking about the thrill and craziness of being involved in an active addiction. He spends “a couple months on the street, a couple months in jail, a couple in the psych or the halfway and back on the street again. This job, that job, always only for a couple months or weeks before something happened. Sober for a few months and then not.” Like other highs, the high reporters were seeking for decades after Watergate consumed them. It wasn’t enough to write well about sports, or community events, or the often-boring grind of ordinary politics. Everything had to be compared to Watergate. Everything had to give writers that next high—be the next Watergate. Whether it was Iran-Contra, the Bork hearings, Hurricane Katrina, or Russiagate—being a journalist was like being a crackhead, and the only satisfaction would come from torching another Republican leader. The press often hated the target that would nonetheless deliver the high.

One of the funniest parts of Newsroom Confidential are Sullivan’s reports of the freakout in the Post’s newsroom when Trump was first elected. Editor Marty Baron had to keep reassuring the staff that they had to just “keep doing their jobs.” (Spoiler alert: they didn’t.) Their jobs, as far as they were concerned, were to destroy Trump. Getting Donald was fentanyl, an insanely powerful drug that was equally dangerous. The press passed over the Hunter Biden story, defended the security agencies they had once ferociously distrusted after Watergate, and speed-balled the idea that there was a seven-hour “gap” in President Trump’s White House phone logs. Bob Woodward, the original scandal dealer, was rolled out of his mothballs to huff and puff and proclaim that this was, yes, worse than Watergate. The story turned out to be false. 

Sullivan claims that the Jan. 6 riot—a horrible event whose perpetrators, in some cases, deserved punishment—was “one of the hinge events in all of American history.” This is a ridiculously hyperbolic view. She’s all-in on Russiagate, however, despite having no evidence: “Anyone who bothered to read the report issued by special counsel Robert Mueller would know that Russia was guilty of illegal interference ‘in sweeping and systemic fashion’ and that the Trump campaign was willing to receive that help.” In fact, The Mueller Report found no evidence to warrant any criminal indictments—not against Trump, not against his associates, nor against any other American. The language in the report is clear: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

All Day is a Long Time gets its title from the reality that when one finally kicks drugs and alcohol, the time one spent while drunk or using suddenly stretches out to what seems like an infinite expanse. Hours seem like days. How to fill the time? In the book David saves himself by moving back home and studying literature at a local college. He expands his imagination and grows in patience as well as love.

There will be no such outcome for our diseased and addicted media. Four more years under President Trump are going to be an eternity for them, and as often happens with addicts, they have run out of tricks to improve their fading high. Phony scandals don’t work. Impeachment doesn’t work. Russiagate II won’t work. The ultimate junk supplier, the deep state, is going out of business. 

I guess there’s always wokeness, which is not Watergate but does offer a self-righteous buzz. The most telling section of Margaret Sullivan’s book comes near the end, when she admits to being on the side of the new generation of woke journalists demanding race-based hiring, printing unproven assertions, and censoring ideas they don’t like: “Perhaps surprisingly, given my age and long experience in newsroom management, I found myself in sympathy with those demanding radical change. Often, I was on the side of what was despairingly and falsely called the ‘woke mob’—the younger, more diverse staffers who were supposedly running roughshod throughout Big Journalism’s newsrooms.” 

Sullivan also backs the terrible work of “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times series about slavery that was challenged by many prominent historians. “Despite the pushback (a tiny portion of which was grounded in objections by a few historians to some of the project’s assertions),” she writes, “it accomplished its goals: Whether they accepted it or not, many more people—in the United States and around the world—are aware of this neglected and ignored history than before Hannah-Jones began to write about it.”

I’m sorry, but Gordon S. Wood, James McPherson, and Sean Wilenz, who criticized the 1619 Project, are hardly right-wing historians, and their objections are serious and legitimate. But no matter to the junkies—the project “accomplished its goals.” Despite Sullivan’s recommendations for how the media can win the public back, it’s far too late for that. After all, Sullivan and her colleagues can’t even admit they have problem—the first step to recovery. Five decades after Watergate, it is still the case that all that matters to them is the rush of that self-righteous liberal high. It’s too good to quit.