Gladstone has covered
media for much of her career. In the early 1980s, she covered public broadcasting for the industry newspaper
Current and reported for
Cablevision and
The Washington Weekly in Washington, D.C. In 1987, Gladstone joined
National Public Radio, first as editor of
Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, and later became senior editor of
All Things Considered. Gladstone describes the book as "a treatise on the relationship between us and the news media,"
The Influencing Machine was listed seventh among the ten Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction by
The Atlantic, and listed among the top books of 2011 by
The New Yorker,
Library Journal,
Kirkus Reviews, and
Publishers Weekly. Academic journals called her book an illustration of the history of media's influence on culture. In 2015, Gladstone was part of the cast of the historical documentary
Best of Enemies, directed by
Robert Gordon and
Morgan Neville. In 2017, Gladstone wrote
The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, a nonfiction book in which she talks about how people's filtered reality in a constantly changing media landscape threatens democracy, published by Workman Publishing Company. In 2019, Gladstone joined NPR Detroit to host a one-month-long series on the house-evictions crisis on Detroit today with
Stephen Henderson. In 2022, she was a Critic in Residence at the
American Academy in Rome. Gladstone gives lectures as a guest at universities including
Princeton and the
University of Texas at Austin. ==Personal life==