Dear Journalists, The War on What You Do Is Escalating

To fight back, work together

Photo by Philip Strong on Unsplash

When the most powerful person in the world declares war on journalism, you can respond in one of two ways. The first adds up to surrender. I’m sorry to say that some of you appear to have done so, by normalizing what is grossly abnormal and letting your enemies take advantage of the craft of journalism’s inherent weaknesses.

The other is to find allies, inside and outside the business, and go on the offensive — together.

The glimmerings of that second option may be appearing. Dozens of newspaper editorial boards (update: more than 300 as of Wednesday) plan to use their platforms this week to call out Donald Trump’s escalating war on a free press — to “educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable,” Marjorie Pritchard, a deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe, told the Associated Press late last week.

This is a welcome development. It’s also not nearly enough.

So here’s a plea to my friends who work in journalism’s non-commentary operations: If you don’t follow up on this collective complaining with real muscle, your organizations will have demonstrated the kind of weakness that Trump and his supporters are convinced — maybe correctly — rests at the core of the craft.

You — and probably free speech — can’t play constant defense. You can’t win if you rise to Trump’s bait and start calling him an enemy. And as my friend Jay Rosen said the other day, you need to go way, way beyond Washington Post Editor Marty Baron’s famous but too-facile admonition: “We’re not at war. We’re at work.”

The Post is doing mostly excellent work. It’s not enough.

Instead, I’m begging journalists to declare a sweeping mission. You need to fight, not against Trump, but for a free press and freedom of expression, in every possible way. Most of all, you have to do more journalism, with renewed passion, skill, relentlessness, and — this is essential — collective action.

That means breaking with customs, and some traditions — changing the journalism, and some of the ways you practice it, to cope with the onslaught of willful misinformation aimed at undermining public belief in basic reality. You can start by looking at the public’s information needs from the public’s point of view, not just your own.

The collaboration needs to be broad, and deep, across organizations and platforms. It can be immediate — such as an agreement among White House reporters to resist the marginalizing, or banning outright, of journalists who displease the president. If a legitimate reporter is banned from an event, or verbally dismissed in a briefing or press conference, other journalists should either boycott the event or, at the very least, ask and re-ask his or her question until it’s answered. In the briefing room, show some spine, and do it together.

Much more important — and something that should become a standard practice — is to collaborate on the fundamental journalism itself. One vital element of this should be providing the context that is so often missing. Today’s short-attention-span breaking news coverage amounts to mini-scoops followed by maxi-repetition and, typically, zero explanation of where the latest bit of news fits in the larger picture — the classic focus on trees while missing the forest. As Todd Gitlin put it recently, ignoring context is like “reporting a baseball game as if people in uniforms are running around a diamond and chasing a ball for no apparent reason at all.”