I remember ‘resistance journalism’ and don’t want a mainstream revival
The president-elect already is jolting my former profession. Election week cracks appear in journalism’s bedrock principle of even-handed reporting rather than advocacy.
“News organizations . . . must regard themselves as part of a principled resistance,” a Columbia University journalism professor, Samuel G. Freedman, wrote a day after Donald Trump’s re-election.
The 69-year-old educator is old enough to remember the underground press of the counter-culture movement back when he studied the news craft at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1973–77. That’s not long after I got a journalism degree at Syracuse University, where the student daily added a raised fist to its front-page nameplate in May 1970 to show solidarity with protests after guardsmen killed four students at Kent State.
I later embraced point-of-view reporting and writing at an alternative weekly (the Syracuse New Times, still alive) before turning from advocacy journalism to the straight news approach of daily papers.
Now there are calls for mainstream media to counter an incoming administration that casts news gatherers as “enemies of the people.” Freedman, writing at Columbia Journalism Review, sees stark parallels for why U.S. journalism should embrace its colonial era revolutionary roots, in effect:
News organizations . . . must be explicitly deployed in opposition to authoritarianism, the way journalists in countries from Mexico to the Philippines to Russia have been operating all along.
In an open letter to young journalists, he suggests they’ll stand at the barricades of press freedom:
You will endure risks that I never did. You will also experience a sense of purpose exponentially greater than any I ever knew.
When resistance was revolutionary
A sense of purpose has propelled journalists since Ben Franklin published and wrote for The Pennsylvania Gazette, the most-read paper before and during the War of Independence. His weekly and others colonial papers spread anti-British sentiment and revolutionary fervor. They connected resistance groups along the Atlantic coast.
Similarly, a crusading spirit in the late 1960s and following decade kindled counter-culture media and alternative weeklies that opposed the Vietnam War, heavyhanded policing and the political-business establishment. This print journalism niche included radical publications in such as The Berkeley Barb (1965–80) in California, The Black Panther (1967–80) and the Los Angeles Free Press (1964–78). They and fringe media in campus communuties and big cities nationwide shared content through the Underground Press Syndicate and Liberation News Service.
Those upstarts abandoned traditions that took hold after Franklin’s wartime era of revolutionary newspapering. The new generation of resistance journalists rejected objectivity, balanced reporting and lines between news and opinion.
A half-century later, we could see the pendulum swing back. That’d be unwise.
It’s true that journalism will be a government target. “Next year, Trump’s assault on the press will become a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic,” author Kyle Paoletta predicts at Columbia Journalism Review. Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones agrees: “Trump is now emboldened to continue his assault on the media.”
The president-elect wants to weaken libel protections and repeal protections against surveillance of journalists. He may resitrict White House access and challenge local broadcast licenses held by TV networks. Federal prosecutors could seek espionage indictments and subpoena journalists to reveal sources as part of leak investigations. Publishers and station owners might face antitrust litigation.
‘I’m worried,’ news site CEO says
So media press freedom must be defended in courts and on editorial pages. But thumb-on-the-scale coverage of the hostile administration would undercut the profession’s role, credibility and impact.
Some newsgatherers are uneasy about calls for media activism. “I’m worried,” Jessica Lessin, chief executive of The Information news site, posted on social media Nov. 6. In a paywalled commentary, “The Media Faces a Test — and Is Already Failing,” she wrote:
Editors should be sending a clear message that they will choose accountability over resistance. That’s how we show the critics of the press why the press is so important. . . . It’s not our job to tell our readers what to think.
An echo comes from Stephen Engelberg, the editor of ProPublica:
We are journalists, not leaders of the resistance.
Three months after Trump’s first inauguration, Washington Post Editor Marty Baron famously told a media conference in Dana Point, Calif.:
“We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work. We’re doing our jobs.”
He left the paper in 2021, but that compass setting remains a sound course for the industry to navigate.
