Saving Journalism’s Soul in the Age of Trump
Note: This (minus the introduction) is the full text of a speech delivered at the Drexel Writing Festival on the Philadelphia campus of Drexel University on April 18, 2019.
More than two years after Donald Trump became 45th president of the United States, talking about saving America’s free press seems both an urgent matter and, to some people, something of a red herring. As the nattering nabobs of online commentary remind me every day over at Philly.com, where I am the national opinion columnist, I can write columns and give speeches like this one — criticizing the president, even calling for his removal from office — without worrying about getting arrested and thrown in jail. That’s a good thing — but should we really set the bar for press freedom that low?
The reality is that the Trump era is the most perilous time to be a journalist in my lifetime and probably in American history. The leader of this country has proclaimed journalists — citizens like me and probably your neighbors, regular folks who see their job as simply keeping your community or your nation informed — as “the enemies of the people,” a phrase with grim historical echoes dating back to Joseph Stalin. At mass rallies of cheering acolytes, Trump points to a fenced-in pen of journalists as zoo-like objects of derision. The U.S. government has stopped mostly holding briefings for the press and when it does give out information, it frequently lies; Trump himself has been documented telling more than 9,000 falsehoods in just 27 months as president. Reporters must do their jobs in an unprecedented climate of fear. In Annapolis, Maryland, a man with a grievance and a gun walked into a newsroom and slaughtered 5 people. Others are bullied or harassed — online or in real life. I’ve seen it personally. For the first time in nearly 40 years as a journalist, I’ve had to call police because a death threat was mailed to my home.
The world is noticing. In 2018, our nation — founded as beacon of democracy and constitutionally protected civil rights — was ranked a weak 45th in the world for press freedom by the group Reporters Without Border, behind a diverse group of nations such as Romania, Chile and Namibia. (Update: The new 2019 report dropped the U.S. to 48th.) Reporters Without Borders specifically faulted Trump as a “media-bashing enthusiast…The U.S.’ decline in press freedom is not simply bad news for journalists working inside the country; the downward trend has drastic consequences at the international level,” the report noted. “ ‘Fake news’ is now a trademark excuse for media repression, in both democratic and authoritarian regimes.”
If you’re interested enough in the state of journalism in America to come to a speech like this, then you probably know a lot of what I just told you. But the battle for news professionals to be able to do their job in an open society where they feel their rights are protected, and where they are respected and not harassed is only half of the story — and arguably even not the most important half. The battle for press freedom is taking place within a much wider war for the truth.
In July 2018, President Trump addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Missouri. “Stick with us,” he told the gathering. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He was referring to a slew of negative headlines — but he could have been offering a mantra for his entire presidency. Trump was simply doing what any aspiring autocrat might do. The goal is not merely bending the truth, but obliterating the very notion of objective reality. According to various fact checkers like the Washington Post, the president has lied to the American people at least 9,000 times since taking office. I’d give you an exact number but it’s probably changed since I started this speech.
When the president and his minions lied in his very first weekend — about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, no less — it was a big deal. But somewhere between lie No. 6000 and lie No. 7000 — OK, I’m guesstimating — folks were just too numbed and exhausted to care. Which actually is the whole point — to overwhelm the public is past the point of caring. As for journalism, this is the point where reporting the news stops to matter, because half the nation has been convinced that the news is fake and the other half is too depressed to get out of bed.
Working as a journalist in America wasn’t supposed to be like this. The great writer Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” When I was a teenager in the 1970s — the formative years for so many of the late-stage baby boomers who now run America’s newsrooms — the story that we told ourselves in order to live was Watergate.
Actually, let me take a step even further back, to the decade that continues to fascinate me and the rest of us who are roughly my age and who watched it pressed against the windows of a yellow, grade-school bus, the 1960s. Young people who were just a tad older than us were idealistic — raised in the shadow of post-World War II American triumphalism — and believed they could expose and fight the hypocrisy they’d seen in Vietnam and the segregated South and change the world. But by 1973, after Kent State and Richard Nixon’s landslide over anti-war candidate George McGovern, changing the world through protest and politics seemed hopelessly naive.
Watergate changed everything. President Richard Nixon and his obsession with quashing youthful protests was brought down not by masses flooding the streets, but with a slow, relentless quest for the truth by professionals. This happened in many places — a judge’s chambers, a congressional hearing room — but no place more dramatically than the newsroom of the Washington Post.
When the film “All the President’s Men” — dramatizing the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — came out in 1976, the last wave of baby boomers who wanted to change the world were told the absolute best and coolest way to do that was to become a news person. Applications to journalism school soared, and with newspapers still the only way to get in-depth news, there were still many decent jobs to be had.
Make no mistake, this generation of media pros — my generation — has produced some remarkable, difference-making journalism. But over time, journalists of the post-Watergate world didn’t change the world so much as the world changed us. And that happened for a couple of different reasons.
For one thing, the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s had inspired a brand of journalism that was more inclined than ever to root out corruption, expose the nexus of big money and politics, and fight for the oppressed in America society. To essentially question authority. You didn’t think authority was going to take that lying down, did you?
From the time of Richard Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew — who famously attacked the mainstream media as “nattering nabobs of negativism” — conservatives intent on sustaining that status quo saw that their path toward retaining power and influence depended on both delegitimizing the mainstream media and creating an alternative network to promulgate their own worldview. Agnew was the point man on the first mission, rallying the GOP base in 1970 against “impudent snobs” in the Establishment media.
On another front, a young Nixon aide named Roger Ailes imagined a politically right-wing TV news network that he’d bring to fruition a quarter-century later, as the Fox News Channel. A conservative attorney named Lewis Powell — who in a matter of months would be named by Nixon to the Supreme Court — drafted the infamous Powell Memo for business leaders, envisioning an array of new media and think tanks that would protect capitalism from the rampaging hippies. Powell’s dream really took off in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who killed the FCC’s equal time rules, thus allowing Rush Limbaugh and a thousand other right-wing radio shows to bloom. It was a marriage made in heaven — a ready-made audience of middle-class citizens riled up over the culture wars launched in the ’60s and the disappearance of their jobs, wedded to business elites and their political allies riding the crest of what they’d stirred up, and laughing all the way to the bank.
And so you’re probably wondering — what happened to all those earnest young journalism school graduates, stoked on caffeine and their tattered copies of “All the President’s Men”? The sequel is never as good as the original. The story of Watergate, remember, was that journalists with a nose for unearthing facts saved democracy. But over time — and maybe partly in response to the withering critique from the likes of Agnew, Powell and Ailes — the lesson got garbled. By the end of the last millennium, journalists grew more obsessed with the “we’re unearthing facts” part of that story line than the “saving democracy” part.
Journalism by the 1990s became something of a religion, if not a cult, with strange rituals. Its gods were called Objectivity and Balance. Journalists were expected to be dispassionate about the society they chronicled; a few prominent editors believed it was impure to even vote. On contentious issues, it became gospel that every story must have two sides. On one hand, on the other hand. By the dawn of our 21st Century, there was a boxing match for the truth between a right-wing movement that was armed with brass knuckles and a mainstream media with one tattered glove tied behind its back.
Objective journalism sounds like a lovely idea — who is against fairness, after all? — but how it was practiced in this bloody arena presented a couple of problems. For one thing, the new universe of conservative storytellers created in the wake of the Powell memo found that some of industry’s exploitive, billion-dollar profits could be spent on creating a bogus “on the other hand” that didn’t actually exist in nature. When climate change threatened America’s fossil-fuel oligarchy, oil companies simply created a new infrastructure of think-tanks and paid-for experts — demanding “balance” in mainstream venues like the New York Times while making climate denial the default position on right-wing talk radio and Fox News.
Meanwhile, investigative reporting during these years turned away from the massive abuses of power that had been exposed in Watergate and toward what you could call “the objective scandal” — acts of hypocrisy that could be proved without any blurred lines, with a binary “yes” or “no.” The kind of late-night sleuthing that brought down Richard Nixon over the shredding of the Constitution in 1974 was now turned against Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987 to prove he was cheating on his wife. (Would a philandering Gary Hart still have been a good president of a bad one? I guess we’ll never know!)
Not surprisingly, the media’s weakness in investigating high level abuses of power meant that the powers that be felt carte blanche to… abuse power. In 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration seized on the public’s post 9/11 fears and desires for revenge to foment a war against a country that had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks, journalism was blindsided. All the sources it traditionally looked to in order to provide any “on the other hand” against the case for war with Iraq — congressional Democrats, for example — were cowed into silence.
It was around this time that a Bush aide — widely reported as top political advisor, Karl Rove (who issued a denial years later) — told the writer Ron Suskind that journalists like him were part of a “reality-based world” that was being left in the dust. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” Suskind was told. “And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
There was just one problem with Team Bush’s assessment. The mad spin doctors had lost control of their diabolical experiment. By the time that Bush’s aide uttered those words in the mid-2000s, the internet had been a fixture in the life of everyday Americans for roughly a decade. And over the next couple of years, the invention of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter created both a world where mainstream reporters using journalistic news judgment no longer controlled the flow of information, and where networks of hundreds of millions of people were ready to share and spread their own information — or misinformation — in a matter of nanoseconds.
The rise of talk radio and the Fox News Channel had been ripe for control by the manipulative elites of the Republican Party and Big Business. But this new frontier of creating “other new realities” was ripe for a demagogue. And then Donald Trump descended from an escalator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015.
Suddenly, a half-century of resentments whipped up by the Agnews and Limbaughs of the world had a leader who knew no boundaries in channeling that anger to suit his own egotistical purposes. And yet it’s striking the degree that graduates of the nation’s best political science and journalism programs still don’t get what just happened. They continue to ask how millions of working-class whites can vote against their interests, for a president who’d take away their health care and pollute their streams. They don’t understand how the burning flame of resentment against the elites who they feel look down on them so easily trumps — pun intended — whether you can afford to see a doctor or breathe the air in your hometown.
In December 2016, or about six weeks after Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, I traveled to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for his victory rally in the large hockey arena there. About 8,000 people attended, and I got there early on a frigid day to talk to some of them. It was striking how few wanted to discuss “issues” like jobs, even though central Pennsylvania has been plagued by chronic unemployment and under-employment. Instead, everyone wanted to talk about their loathing of the media, including — for a few of them, anyway — me. For them, it mattered little if Trump ever followed up on his promise to replace Obamacare with “something really great.” Their hopes and dreams were plastered on signs and shouted in an occasional chant that had just two words: “CNN sucks.” The medium truly had become the message.
But if resentment and even outright hatred of the media is a driving force of the Trump presidency, how does this play out in actual governing? Many have argued that the president’s talk about actual retribution against journalists is little more than just talk — that there’s no policy component. As a candidate in 2016 and since his election, Trump has frequently said that he wants to “open up” libel laws which would make it easier for public figures — such as himself — to sue journalists for unflattering stories. But this still hasn’t resulted in actual legislation, nor is such a bill likely now that Democrats control the House of Representatives.
Likewise, the White House has made various threats against journalists or news organizations that for now seem to be mostly threats. Trump has asked the Post Office, for example, to raise the rates it charges to giant retailer Amazon, which happens to be led by Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own the Washington Post, which happens to be highly critical of the Trump administration. But it’s unclear where the rate hikes affecting Amazon are dramatically worse than the higher rates that all postal customers are always paying.
Before Trump fired Jim Comey in 2017, he met with the FBI director and both men made gross jokes and laughed about ending news leaks by throwing a journalist or two in jail. In the aftermath of the Barr Letter claiming that the Mueller Report offers the president some measure of exoneration on whether his campaign colluded with Russian election interference, Trump’s reelection campaign took the alarming step of asking networks to stop booking certain officials who’d make allegations of such collusion. But these officials still keep popping up on my TV screen. So is the fact that the legal framework for a free press still exists, and that — unlike many of those countries ranked much lower than No. 45 for press freedom — reporters aren’t being tossed in jail or routinely murdered a cause for celebration?
Yes and no, but mainly no.
For one thing, the Trump administration is successfully demolishing the idea that our government should be accessible and available to the people. Full-blown presidential press conferences are rare, and briefings by the White House press secretary Sarah Sanders have devolved from an every-weekday occurrence to an average of little more than one every month. Even worse, this attitude has filtered down toward essential agencies like the State Department and the Pentagon, which hasn’t had a press briefing in — and I swear I’m not making this up — more than 300 days. I mean, it’s lot like the Defense Department and its annual $750 billion budget does anything important, right?
Other impacts of Trump’s war on the press are both intangible yet very real. One is the increasing climate of fear in which journalists must do our jobs. Much of this I know anecdotally — the stories I hear from friends and colleagues about the constant online harassment, the threatening emails, and occasionally worse. This was punctuated by tragedy in the summer of 2018, when a deranged reader with a longstanding grievance walked into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and fatally gunned down five journalists. In the aftermath of that tragedy and in this awful new climate, my own newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, was forced to invest in an elaborate new security set-up just to enter our newsroom. Stop and think about that. Money that could have been spent on hiring more reporters to hold government accountable is instead spent to keep reporters from getting killed.
And yet too many newsroom leaders are pretending isn’t happening — that the war on objective reality that was amped up by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and that all our current president’s men now seem determined to finish off, doesn’t even exist. At the end of Trump’s first year in office, then-Arizona Senator Jeff Flake — a Republican, from the president’s own party — rose up to declare: “2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine ‘alternative facts’ into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods.”
Two years later, things have only gotten worse. Several thousand lies later, a demonstrably provable falsehood uttered by the president of the United States on a public stage is no longer a news story. Spin doctors like Kellyanne Conway are still invited on national TV to offer “alternative facts.” All of it geared toward the same end — so that the president’s hardcore base of 65 million people who only get their news from Fox or right-wing internet websites can nod their heads to their leader’s mantra: That “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
The question posed by this unprecedented assault on the American free press is: How does journalism fight back. At least, that should be the question, but often it comes out more like: Will journalism fight back? There’s too many in my profession who continue to call for a quaint return to civility — to pretend that none of what I’ve just described is happening in the United States right now.
One of the more dumbfounding moments for me as a journalist in the last 27 months came when the White House Correspondents Association freaked out not over the group’s chronic abuse from Team Trump but over a humorous takedown of the president at its annual dinner by the comedian Michelle Wolf. The head of the journalists’ association wrote that the dinner is supposed to be “a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility…” This sounded like a hostage note, disguised as an apologia.
Other critics have a more clear-eyed view of the threat to press freedom, and have been engaged in a long-running dialogue about how best to respond. One of these has been my longtime friend Jay Rosen, the journalism professor at New York University. Jay has a knack for turning a phrase, and one of his rallying cries is “send the interns.” What that means is that the spin exercises like those increasingly rare White House press briefings should be covered by the most junior reporters with a tape recorder — freeing up the most skilled and experienced journalists for investigative. This feels right to me, but it also feels like one step in a much longer journey.
The problem is that too many journalists — including some of the biggest names in the business — think the only real response to Trump is to bury our heads and keep doing our jobs, to simply work even harder and somehow produce better stories. This strikes me like responding to a strange foreign land by continuing to speak English, but a lot louder. The epigraph for this attitude was uttered by Marty Baron of the Washington Post, the journalist who were better or worse will be remembered as Liev Schreiber in the movie “Spotlight.” Asked how the Post is responding to Trump, Baron said: “We’re not at war… We’re at work.”
I could not disagree more. True, we’re not in a declared war with Donald Trump — that would be both counter-productive and on some level antithetical to the fundamental practice of journalism. But we are in a war for the truth, for objective reality — and if we don’t grab our weapons and start fighting back we’re about to get flattened by a blitzkrieg of tanks. Another wise thing that Jay Rosen wrote recently is this:
“If you do your job, then you’re playing the role of hate object and participating in Trump’s political style. If you don’t want to be a hate object, sorry — then you cannot do your job. Detachment loses its meaning in this system, which incorporates journalists whether they like it or not.” The real question is not whether we’re in a war, but who’s going to win?
The problem with mainstream journalism in the Trump era is the broader problem of journalism in the post-Watergate era generally: Too much focus on the process, of checking off the boxes of objectivity and balance and making sure that every one hand has an other hand, even when those five digits in the other hand are clutching a dagger. Meanwhile, there’s much less thought about the end result — about what journalism is actually for. We need to rediscover the soul buried deep inside of the keyboard of that objectivity machine. And that begins, I believe, with the simple acknowledgement that a free press has an agenda: A functional democracy.
So when democracy is under attack — as it is in the Trump era — then saving journalism and saving democracy become the same job. The issue isn’t that the media needs to be relentlessly anti-Trump. The issue is that the media needs to fight relentlessly for the fundamental human principles that Trump has so consistently aligned his government against.
You can’t have democracy — or a free press — unless every citizen has the right to vote. In an era of shrinking voting rights and out-and-out ballot-box suppression, newsrooms need to ask themselves — what am I doing to expose and get rid of the laws that make it harder for a citizen to cast her or his ballot? Have we enlisted our resources not only to help our readers register to vote and get to their polling place, but to help them make informed choices when they get there?
You can’t have democracy — or a free press — when the human rights of people inside our borders are under assault, whether those people are the refugees who show up at our southern border seeking the freedom of asylum and not a concentration camp masquerading as a tent city, or whether it’s the black and brown kids who want to want down their own streets without being stopped and frisked and occasionally shot by cops who act like an army of occupation. It’s not simply a matter of how do we expose these wrongs, but how do we use our power as a news organization to help America reconnect with its humanity.
You can’t have democracy — or a free press — without a planet. And we’re not going to have much of a planet in a few decades unless we help our readers to have faith in science. That means no more “on one hand, on the other hand” when it comes to climate change and the consensus of the world’s leading climatologists. It means giving our readers the truth, making that truth so engaging that they’ll pay attention — and tossing the oil-soaked money changers out of the temple.
And here’s one more thing. You can’t have a democracy — or a free press — without…a free press. Rather than hide behind the 1st Amendment and pray that no one notices us while we’re at work and not at war, we need to be much louder about proclaiming who we are, the role we play in every city and town across America, and the ways that this function that the Founding Fathers understood was so important for a functioning republic is now under assault.
Yes, this is about fending off the president’s attacks, but it’s about so much more. The disappearance of local news in the 21st Century has now been studied by academics and they’ve found that towns without journalists as watchdogs see voter participation drop and spending on bond issues or other measures of waste or corruption increase. Most news orgs won’t survive unless they win back local dollars, but that won’t happen unless we win back hearts and minds.
But readers won’t fight for us unless we fight for ourselves! Remember what I said earlier about why so many young people decided forty years ago to become journalists in the first place — because they thought it was the best way to change the world for the better. It would be easy to look back now, knowing everything that has happened since 1974 — the beginnings of Facebook and Twitter and the looming end of newspapers, the culture wars and the political wars and the rise of authoritarianism here and elsewhere — and laugh at that idea as hopelessly naïve.
But it wasn’t. It was the right and moral idea then, and it’s the right and moral idea now. Every journalist should wake up in the morning and ask herself or himself, am I working on something that will make my town, my state and my country a better place to live? And how am I using my talents — my ability to ferret out facts, track down the right officials or the right documents, to analyze, interpret and write — to get us there. That doesn’t mean ditching certain basic tenets — fairness, listening to differing sides on an issue, or a willingness to accept truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. But it also doesn’t mean treating journalism like an ossified religion where the daily rituals of access to the powerful outweighs the spiritual quest for the very soul of what we do.
I have enormous optimism for the future. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been blessed to have spent a couple of semesters working with college journalists at a campus very much like this one, over at nearby Temple University. Those students have restored my faith — in journalism and in humanity, which to me are pretty much the same thing. They came from such diverse communities — the children immigrants from places like the Philippines or the Dominican Republic, or they were the bedrock of Philadelphia’s historically black neighborhoods. They weren’t afraid of either the dismal business prospects for journalism or the bullying from a government and its goons calling them “enemies of the people.” They want to tell the stories of their families, their communities, and the other Americans who look like them. Like every generation — the hippies of the ’60s and the geeks of the ’70s and all those who came before them — they see the pen and the keyboard and the iPhone as their tools for making America and the world better. In the Trump era, those tools are also weapons of a conflict — a war for the truth. And I believe that we will win.
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