READINGS MARCH 17
A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges
Bad Behavior at the Top
“Careless People,” a memoir by a former Facebook executive, portrays feckless
company leaders cozying up to authoritarian regimes.
By Jennifer Szalai March 11, 2025 CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of
Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
The publisher of “Careless People” kept the existence of this memoir a secret
until a few days ago — with good reason, it turns out. For seven years,
beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at
Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy.
Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by
status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of
responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a
vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.
“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed
portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-
Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does
she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also
delivers the goods.
During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief
executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom
and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-
Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures”
and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Wynn-Williams was so
eager to work at Facebook that she pitched herself to the company for months
before it eventually hired her. Born and raised in New Zealand, she had been
working as a diplomat at her country’s embassy in Washington and, before
that, at the United Nations. She was drawn to human rights and environmental
issues. Relying on Facebook to stay connected with her friends back home, she
believed the platform “was going to change the world.” As governments
realized what Facebook could do, she sold herself to the company by telling its
officials they could use a diplomat. When they finally hired her, she was elated:
“I can’t believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of
my lifetime.”
What follows is a book-length admonishment to be careful what you wish for.
Any idealism about Facebook’s potential as “the greatest political tool” sounds
bitterly ironic now, 14 years later. By the end of her memoir, Wynn-Williams is
told that her superiors have “concerns” about her performance; she feels so
beaten down by her tenure at the company that she describes getting fired as a
“quick euthanasia.”
Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to
be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting
his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is
directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently
mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an
appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect
instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act
into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff
done.”
Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-
Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013
publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-
Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin
veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”
Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-
old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total
cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg
take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-
hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed
on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.”
Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.
Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues.
Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend
of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of
U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-
Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia
and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring
George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in
his administration.
Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at
a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird
comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an
amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while
she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him
she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you
bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation
into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Such scenes of personal degradation are lurid enough, but Wynn-Williams also
had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes. In the
lead-up to the 2016 election, Facebook employees embedded with the Trump
campaign helped it micro-target potential voters, feeding them bespoke ads
filled with “misinformation, inflammatory posts and fund-raising messages.”
(The Clinton campaign declined Facebook’s offer to embed employees.) The
following year, in Myanmar, a country heavily reliant on Facebook, hateful
lies propagated on the platform incited a genocide against the minority
Rohingya ethnic group. Wynn-Williams says she started raising the alarm
about Myanmar several years earlier, trying to persuade Facebook to beef up
its monitoring operations when she learned that hate speech was circulating on
the platform. Content moderation was painfully (and lethally) slow, she writes,
because the company relied on one contractor who spoke Burmese: a
“Burmese guy” based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar
and Facebook’s California headquarters. “Myanmar demonstrates better than
anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous.”
The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for
Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the
company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based
partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy
China’s ruling Communist Party.
Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from
Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. “There seems to
be no compunction about misleading Congress,” Wynn-Williams writes.
“Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any
truth.” When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate committee in
2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s
unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to
operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.” In his reply,
Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under
which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-
Williams comments: “He lies.”
Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and
Exchange Commission. Professionally, she has moved on, to work on policy
issues related to artificial intelligence and to pour her gallows humor into this
book. “Careless People” may contain a cast of careless people, but it’s
ultimately Zuckerberg who “wants to be the decider.” She shows him replacing
the imperfect system of checks and balances that her policy team developed
over the years with his decrees, which typically coincide with his business
interests: “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”
And autocracies aren’t bound by term limits. In 2016, during a summit of world
leaders in Peru, Wynn-Williams noticed that many faces were familiar; a
number of other leaders were gone. “I’m struck by the impermanence of
importance,” she writes. “Yet Mark could conceivably continue to hold his
place chairing world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off
and the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.”
READINGS MARCH 17
NPR Has Always Been Fighting for Its
Life
A new book by Steve Oney traces the public radio network’s turbulent history as
it once again becomes a political target.
By Sewell Chan Sewell Chan is executive editor of The Columbia Journalism Review.
March 11, 2025 ON AIR: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, by Steve Oney
When Brendan Carr, President Trump’s appointee to head the Federal
Communications Commission, opened an investigation into National Public
Radio’s use of commercial sponsorships in January, he struck an ominous note.
“For my own part,” he wrote, “I do not see a reason why Congress should
continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR.” Only a minuscule fraction of NPR’s
budget comes directly from the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
But the indirect support is critical: Member stations get roughly one-tenth of
their revenue from the government, and station fees in turn account for one-
third of NPR’s budget. So Carr’s threat is serious. It’s also familiar, as readers
of “On Air,” Steve Oney’s engrossing and entertaining new history of NPR, will
discover.
The book opens in 1983, when profligate spending by a visionary but
undisciplined NPR president, Frank Mankiewicz, drove the network to the
brink of insolvency. Only the intervention of congressional Democrats, who had
resisted the Reagan administration’s sweeping cuts to public broadcasting,
saved it. It was out of that financial crisis that NPR, under pressure to wean
itself from government funding, was permitted to name corporate donors in on-
air spots — the practice now attacked by Carr.
Oney, a veteran journalist, deftly captures the exuberant, often countercultural
ethos that defined NPR’s creation in 1970. Its staffers were mostly in their 20s,
and their optimistic and internationalist orientation was a product of the
moment. Rare among postwar news organizations, NPR was known for its
talented women journalists. Its “founding mothers” — Susan Stamberg, Nina
Totenberg, Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer — forever disrupted the male-
dominated world of Washington journalism.
Unlike the formal staccato of early radio broadcasts in the 1920s and ’30s, NPR
“established a sound that imaginatively conveyed the times,” Oney writes.
“With its emphasis on well-produced, character-driven dispatches that brought
issues to life and highlighted the human voice, NPR was at the forefront of new
ideas about broadcasting.” Reviving radio as a storytelling medium, the
network captured the voices of Vietnam War protesters with startling
immediacy; provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1973 Watergate hearings
and the 1978 debates over ratification of the Panama Canal treaty; and
produced landmark radio documentaries like “Father Cares,” about the mass
murder-suicide at Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in 1978.
NPR’s shows, which reached a national audience through member stations,
were yet another innovation. For millions of people, listening to “Morning
Edition” and “All Things Considered” became a daily ritual, turning hosts like
Stamberg and Bob Edwards into household names. ut even before NPR’s first
decade was over, its lack of political, socioeconomic and racial diversity was
apparent. “Young, brainy, upper-middle-class, politically liberal, artistically
adventurous and typically white, the NPR archetype was taking shape,” Oney
writes. In cramped edit booths, staffers cut lines of cocaine and engaged in
trysts.
Oney celebrates the culture of free-spiritedness, but as NPR matured, that
culture’s blind spots became painfully evident. Most prominent is race. “On
Air” devotes many pages to recounting the resentment Black and Hispanic
journalists faced from white colleagues who considered them incompetent,
unlikable or a poor fit — notably Adam Clayton Powell III, who was hired as
director of NPR News in 1987 and fired less than three years later, and Juan
Williams, an iconoclastic Black commentator whose ouster from NPR in 2010
precipitated another crisis.
Williams had told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he felt “nervous” seeing
airplane passengers in traditional Muslim attire while flying, remarks that
stoked liberal outrage. But his haphazard dismissal only fanned the flames. An
investigation by an outside law firm found that Williams was given little
rationale for being let go, and prompted the resignation of NPR’s top news
executive at the time, Ellen Weiss. Then, as the scandal seemed to be blowing
over, the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe released hidden-camera
video showing NPR’s chief fund-raiser slamming conservatives. The C.E.O.,
Vivian Schiller, formerly a digital executive at The New York Times, was forced
out.
The Juan Williams debacle, Oney writes, was “arguably the opening battle of
the conflict that would define America during the early decades of the 21st
century — the culture wars.” By 2011, NPR was being roasted even by allies
like Barack Obama — at a now notorious White House Correspondents’ Dinner
where he also mocked Trump.
A second blind spot is age. Although the word “boomer” appears only once in
the book, NPR’s ongoing struggles stem in part from its singular identification
with its founding cohort. A “collectivist mentality” and college radio sensibility,
as Oney describes it, have made the network particularly difficult to manage,
“less a business than a dysfunctional family,” plagued by leadership turnover.
Oney likens NPR in its early days to a “troubled kid” with “a chip on its
shoulder.” That may once have been charming, but now the kid is a senior
citizen who won’t get out of the way.
“On Air” is a major work of media history, building on ground covered in
“Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers
of NPR” (2021), by Lisa Napoli, and “This Is NPR: The First Forty Years”
(2010), by a group of NPR veterans. Oney’s subtitle, “The Triumph and Tumult
of NPR,” is on point; he balances victories, like Anne Garrels’s genre-defining
coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, against the various institutional crises
and more personal trials, such as Garrels’s agonizing struggle with alcoholism.
(Oddly, he does not mention Nina Totenberg’s scoop about Anita Hill’s sexual
harassment complaints against Clarence Thomas, or the controversy
surrounding her friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Still, a book this size would have benefited from less gossip and more critical
analysis. The final chapter centers on the radio producer Ira Glass, who
struggled to find his place as a young NPR staffer in the 1980s, only to create
the blockbuster series “This American Life” after moving to Chicago and
partnering with WBEZ. Without more context, this episode feels out of place.
In a three-page epilogue Oney claims that NPR is “a beacon of not just news
but, in a divided nation, of fair-mindedness.” Readers of this newspaper will
likely agree — as I do — but a large plurality of Americans may not. Today, the
network faces declining listenership and sponsorship, and that was before
Trump was elected to a second term. Whether NPR diversifies and innovates
will determine whether it survives for another half century.
