Send the interns.
—Jay Rosen
The idea was to send newsroom interns to Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s spin-session White House briefings to avoid wasting journalism resources. It was first articulated by New York University media professor Jay Rosen, and he expanded upon it in an essay published two days after the inauguration of Donald Trump. “Recognize that the real story is elsewhere, and probably hidden.”1
The proposal perfectly pulled together a line of critique of the dominant mainstream media political coverage that over the last decades has in repeated and glaring instances failed to watchdog and check corporate and government power. America’s major news outlets instead often served up product marked by celebrity-culture insiderness and team-tracking, sports-style reporting that played down citizen protest, legitimized war propaganda, glossed torture and mass-surveillance, demonized whistleblowers, ignored the high crimes of high finance, sustained support for discredited trickle-down economics, muddied the debate around the science of climate change, and fretted and giggled all the way to the bank as Trump tweeted and blustered his way into the presidency. People in the United States and around the world have suffered and will suffer tragic consequences tied to the major public-interest stories bungled by the news media.
The good news is that these failures have fueled reflection among journalists about how they have approached their work, leading to perhaps the most important shift in the culture and practice of news reporting in the last century, where the priority placed on pursuing objectivity is giving way to a form of activism based on conviction that journalism in the United States must reclaim its role as a defender of democracy.
So far, not a single news outlet appears to have taken up the Rosen plan, but it is still early days in the Trump era and, remarkably, anything suddenly seems possible. Major news media figures and outlets have responded to the Trump administration with new-level reflection on the professional mission of news journalism and with what has seemed to be partly instinctive experimentation around the kind of norms and practices that might best produce journalism today that serves the public interest. There is growing sentiment that “normal” rules no longer apply:
“The news media are not built for someone like [Trump],” said James Fallows at the Atlantic after the election.2
“I feel we face an existential crisis, a threat to the very relevance and usefulness of our profession,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told journalists earlier the same week at a press freedom award ceremony.3
In the months since the election, the topic has been taken up in countless articles, essays, advice pieces, open letters, and at forums whose participants include journalists, scholars, technology developers, and constitutional lawyers. Commentary includes rethinking what for decades has been accepted as common practice, explorations about the value of concepts such as neutrality and objectivity. Here’s Amanpour again, from the same speech:
Much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth. We cannot continue the old paradigm—let's say like over global warming, where 99.9 percent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers. I learned long ago … never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence. … I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.4
At the risk of celebrating way too soon, and without articulating a list of legitimate caveats that could fill another essay, it appears that mainstream media figures are embracing an activist approach to their work—an approach in which they see being a reporter above all else as working as an activist on behalf of the facts. That is different than the approach that has prevailed for decades, and such a shift of mentality across the mainstream industry could be enormously significant. Working as an activist of any kind is a whole different kind of work than trying to produce “all the news that’s fit to print,” pretending to be “fair and balanced,” committing to “always taking the lead,” or otherwise attempting to fulfill the news-team slogans that mostly underline the mission confusion that has gripped the industry and that suddenly seem outdated, even as promotional branding. The Washington Post’s new tag, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” has been mocked as overblown, but few would argue against its value as a news media artifact of the era. Where the Times’s slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” signals a commitment to impartiality, the Post’s new tagline signals a commitment to democracy.
Many forces—cultural, economic, political, technological—surely have combined to move mainstream news media to this new place, however temporarily, but it already seems likely that at the center of the story lies the Trump administration’s distinctly “alternative” approach to facts and its related new-level disdain for and attacks on the news media. At the risk of overstating and understating at the same time, Trump has made it personal—and at a time when the fourth estate in the United States might feel more vulnerable to attack than at any time in the nation’s history.
Trump has famously called the news media “the enemy of the American people,” has described the New York Times as “evil.” He has targeted individual reporters for abuse. His administration has excluded CNN, the New York Times, Politico, BuzzFeed, and other outlets from press briefings. He refers to the mainstream media as “fake news.” His reelection campaign (launched in early 2017 for the 2020 election) attempted to run an ad at CNN that included the words “fake news” superimposed over the faces of journalists from most of the nation’s top cable and network stations, including CNN, where the ad was meant to run, and the nation’s Public Broadcasting Service.
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said Trump’s war on the media “may be more insidious and dangerous than Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press.”5
Hinting at what makes the Trump administration’s lies different than the spinning “truthiness” and mendacity of administrations past, Vox founder Ezra Klein wrote that the constant petty falsehoods sold and defended so zealously by the Trump administration are part of a larger communications strategy. He argued that the administration has “created a baseline expectation” among supporters that nothing the mainstream media reports can be trusted. “Delegitimizing the institutions that might report inconvenient or damaging facts about the president is strategic for an administration that has made a slew of impossible promises and takes office amid a cloud of ethics concerns and potential scandals.”6
There is awareness among mainstream journalists that something has to change and, for now at least, there seem to be areas of practice that are evolving as a result. Journalists are doing things differently by telling it like it is, unhooking from power, increasing the steps they take to protect their own and their sources’ online privacy, and cooperating with one another. These evolving practices are aimed to protect against the spread of falsehoods and to advocate on behalf of facts. Each are briefly elaborated below.
The New York Times front-page headline printed January 23, 2017, didn’t mince words: “Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers.”7 It says something about shifting journalism norms that, at the time, the word lie tied to the president made a splash. Already, in May 2017, the paper-of-record’s headline seems unsurprising. In a subsequent piece, New York Times writer Dan Barry felt the need to dig into the decision. After initially using the word falsely, the paper switched to lie online, and then it remained that way for the print edition.
Executive Editor Dean Baquet told Barry that he “fully understood the gravity of using the word lie, whether in reference to an average citizen or to the president of the United States.” Baquet added that he thought the word “should be used sparingly” but that, in this case, “we should be letting people know in no uncertain terms that [what the president said] is untrue.”8
In fact, the New York Times began “letting people know” during the last stretch of the campaign. At the end of September 2016, the paper ran a full-page news article entitled “A Week of Whoppers from Trump.”9 Politico that week took the same tack: “Trump has built a cottage industry around stretching the truth,” the Washington-insider outlet reported. “[He] averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks. In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days.”10 US News noted that four mainstream news organizations—the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as well as the New York Times and Politico—condemned Trump that weekend for “playing fast and loose with the facts.” The paper speculated that this kind of reporting “could mark the beginning of a sea change in which mainstream news organizations depart from their traditional goal of even-handed reporting and become truth squads.”11 The US News piece was written by the paper’s White House and Politics reporter Ken Walsh, who unwittingly demonstrated the systemic problem that has plagued mainstream media news. “A sea change,” he wrote, underlining the gravity of the problem, again more profoundly for doing so without knowing he was doing it. It is difficult to imagine how the public interest was being served by a journalism that made it a “traditional goal” to place “even-handed reporting” above doggedly seeking the truth. It is just as easy, however, to imagine how well that arrangement served the interests of politicians, political parties, think tanks, and spin-room pundits.
For what it’s worth as a measure of shifting mentalities, the business side has climbed on board. After the inauguration, the Washington Post brought out its new slogan on democracy and darkness. The New York Times ran an ad campaign that featured full-page, billboard, and television spots on the value of the truth—“now more than ever”—and how it takes hardworking journalists dedicated to facts to get at it. And CNN refused to run the Trump reelection campaign ad with the “fake news” labels stamped over journalists’ faces, spurring the president’s campaign to complain it was the victim of censorship.
Telling it like it is appears to be liberating. Mainstream media reporters seem to be building and strengthening sources away from the celebrity-dominated main stage, working the hallways backstage, and moving more meaningfully among the audience. That is to say, they seem less dependent on and less afraid of losing access to the people at the top who are the subjects of their reporting. Administration leaks are opening at a regular clip among agency workers and civil servants. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his crowd-sourced reporting on Trump’s philanthropy foundation. He invited his Twitter followers to help him report a string of damning stories. As Pablo Boczkowski and Seth Lewis argue in this volume, Fahrenthold’s method of fostering crowd-based relationships yielded factual information in an efficient way and it also worked to build credibility among the public at a time when trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low (see chapter 22).
Doing journalism away from the pressroom gives mainstream and often well-known reporters greater freedom, even if it’s semiconsciously felt, to call a spade a spade and pursue fraught storylines. Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and activist, wrote a widely circulated New York Review of Books piece the day after the election, warning against cooperation with Trump. “Those who argue for cooperation will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected,” she wrote.12 Days later, Reuters editor-in-chief Steve Adler circulated a memo to his staff comparing the challenges faced by US journalists to those faced by journalists working under authoritarian regimes. The memo reads like a rallying cry. “Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example.”13 The same week, Time’s Middle East bureau chief, Jared Malsin, wrote a piece on “How to Report under Authoritarianism,” based on experience reporting in Egypt and Turkey.14 “Everything changes … the battles, the risks, the rules. All of that is at stake in a kind of struggle and negotiation between the government and the press,” he wrote. “Encrypt your data. Get burner phones. Lawyer up. … Don’t give in to intimidation.”
Maslin was working territory that has expanded in a world shaped in part by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Even state and local political journalists have started taking measures to defend against intimidation by protecting themselves and their sources against digital surveillance. Technology teams are developing privacy tools and training resources for journalists. In fact, since 2016, Snowden has been president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation based in San Francisco, an organization dedicated to arming journalists with privacy practices and tools. As Snowden told Wired magazine, “Newsrooms don’t have the budget, the sophistication, or the skills to defend themselves in the current environment. … We’re trying to provide a few niche tools to make the game a little more fair.”15 The organization’s most widely used tool is SecureDrop, a Tor-based system for uploading news tips and leaked materials now being used by major news outlets that include the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Kate Krauss, a director for the Tor Project, argued that privacy is about more than any one reporter or source. “An independent press corps cannot stay independent for long if reporters can’t investigate, communicate with sources, and write without worrying that someone is looking over their shoulder. Even the fear of surveillance triggers self-censorship and influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing.” She points out that Google recently notified reporters at CNN, the New York Times, and the Atlantic that “a government actor” had attempted to hack their email systems.16
The collaborative spirit that drives the work of many of the technologists involved in creating tools and advocating for the adoption of increased security is increasingly reflected in the work of reporting. As also discussed by Boczkowski and Lewis in chapter 22 of this volume, Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, the journalists at Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany who broke the Panama Papers story, wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian calling on American journalists to collaborate rather than to compete with one another. The Panama Papers story was investigated and reported on by 400 journalists, they pointed out. “American journalists should stop Trump from dividing their ranks. However hard their professional competition may be, they should do the opposite: unite, share, and collaborate.”17 Journalists seem to be heeding the advice. Muckrock, an organization that promotes investigative journalism, created a channel on the group-messaging service Slack for reporters who want to share information about making Freedom of Information Act requests. Muckrock expected to win over a few dozen people but drew more than 3,000 participants. Media Matters launched a Moveon.org petition in January calling on news organizations to stand up to Trump’s attempts to blacklist or ban critical news outlets:
If Trump blacklists or bans one of you, the rest of you need to stand up. Instead of ignoring Trump's bad behavior and going about your business, close ranks and stand up for journalism. Don't keep talking about what Trump wants to talk about. Stand up and fight back. Amplify your colleague’s inquiry or refuse to engage until he removes that person/outlet from the blacklist.18
As of May 10, 2017, the petition contained more than 330,000 signatures.
At the end of May 2017, President Trump fired Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, who was busy expanding the Bureau’s investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. Mainstream news reporters swarmed the story and White House accounts shifted by the hour in response. The Washington Post wrote a tick-tock story that officials refused to comment on but that more than 30 backstage sources filled out, effectively putting the paper’s reporters next to the President over the course of the entire tumultuous weekend leading up the firing.19 Trump’s response to the damning coverage was to threaten to cancel all future White House press briefings.20 “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at a podium with perfect accuracy!” he tweeted. The battle between Trump and the media continues to heat up, and the fact-chasing press seems for today to be winning the battle. Every fact-filled piece fuels more of the same. Even-handed reporting as a goal is giving way to truth squadding. It’s journalism that feels like activism—the kind that can topple a political leader, and has done so, on and off throughout history.