By Samuel G. Freedman
Eight months into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, POLITICO broke an explosive story about the president’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel. The scoop by reporter Daniel Lippman revealed that, in a chain of text messages, Paul Ingrassia had described himself as having a “Nazi streak.” As if to underscore his own point, Ingrassia invoked a racial slur for African Americans as he called for the federal holidays on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr Day, as well as the annual commemoration of Black History Month, to be “eviscerated.”
Just one day after Lippman’s article dropped, on October 21, Ingrassia pulled out of a pending confirmation hearing in the Senate. POLITICO’s disclosure clearly had changed the mind of at least four Republican senators, leaving the nominee short of majority support.
For much of the half-century I have worked as a journalist, as well as the 35 years I spent as a journalism professor, the impact of a story like POLITICO’s would have been welcome but hardly unique. Journalists considered part of their mission to be holding those in power to public account. As the cherished aphorism put it, we would “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
The work of journalists such as Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Gloria Emerson and Edward R. Murrow contributed to the national response to Watergate, the Vietnam War and McCarthyism. The news film and still photographs of the attacks on freedom marchers in Selma and Birmingham helped persuade a recalcitrant Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. A headline in the New York Daily News – “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” – compounded the political pressure on then-President Gerald Ford to reverse his opposition to a federal financial rescue of the city in 1975.
In the America that has evolved over the past decade, however, the impact of POLITICO’s investigative reporting serves much more as an exception that proves the rule. And the prevailing rule these days is that even the most tenacious digging by journalists makes very little difference in public policy and the workings of government.
That comparative impotence should not come as any sort of surprise. Last November, the American electorate returned to office the man who had urged on an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 – an event exhaustively covered by journalists at the time. The investigation into it by a special committee in the House of Representatives was broadcast live on television. If provoking an insurrection is politically survivable, then why should we expect that journalistic revelations about such lesser sins as corruption, substance abuse, domestic violence or conflict of interest would disqualify any figure from public office or public service?
To say all this is not to assert a partisan or ideological stance, unless a commitment to representative democracy is now a controversial, contested position to take. A recent survey by more than seven hundred political scientists by the organization Bright Light Watch ranked the political condition of the United States at 55 on a 100-point scale, meaning that it is sliding toward illiberal democracy of the sort practiced by Viktor Orban in Hungary: a veneer of elections being used to justify the control of state institutions and civil society by a strongman leader and his obedient followers.
The erosion of journalism’s role in American public life also owes to economic and technological factors. As is well-known by anyone in the profession, the migration of both classified and display advertising to the Internet undermined the financial model of newspapers. The waves of newspaper shutdowns and newsroom layoffs since 2005, as tracked by Northwestern University’s annual “State of Local News” report, translate into 50 million Americans living in counties with no newspaper or only a weekly, three-quarters of newspaper jobs having disappeared, and cumulative circulation down by 70 percent.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of what we might call pseudo-journalism online and through social media – some of it innocently amateurish, some of it deliberately slinging disinformation and propaganda – has allowed a politically polarized nation to withdraw into entirely separate factions in terms of media consumption.
I don’t want to romanticize the era when legacy media reigned unchallenged. But when three networks provided the evening news to tens of millions of Americans and general-interest magazines like LIFE, Time, and the Saturday Review racked up seven-figure numbers of subscribers, there was a broadly agreed-upon national narrative of major events. Back then, Daniel Patrick Moynihan could plausibly assert that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts.
In our present time, when anyone can cherry-pick air-quote “facts” to suit their existing opinions, trust in mainstream media has plummeted. Incredibly enough, the practice of fact-checking has been disparaged as a form of liberal bias. Even the weather forecasts for hurricanes have been discredited for a supposed political slant.
The cynicism runs far deeper on the political right than in the center or left. But progressives, too, have assailed legacy media for “sanewashing” and other failures to adapt to a political landscape in which democracy itself is at risk.
While I consider those criticisms well-founded, and personally believe that the former toolbox of journalistic objectivity is ill-suited to the current challenges, I also feel that some of the exasperation with the mainstream media arises from the yearning for a Murrow or Woodward and Bernstein to somehow land the journalistic blow that will have meaningful and lasting effect. For all the reasons I have already laid out in this essay, I see the odds of such a breakthrough as somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
In such a climate, then, what is the point of practicing journalism? Is there any point at all? Those are not rhetorical questions. I heard them from otherwise idealistic students during my last several years of teaching journalism at Columbia University. I am sure such questions pervade the Slack channels – today’s version of the water-cooler conversation – of many news organizations.
My answer begins with one of the mantras of journalism: that it supplies the first, rough draft of history. The earliest version of the phrase apparently came from a Washington Post editorial writer named Alan Barth in the mid-1940s, and it was more enduringly uttered by the Post’s then-publisher Philip Graham in the 1960s and early 1970s.
During those decades, Barth and Graham may well have meant the words quite literally. The articles, photos, audio and video footage that daily journalists produced would provide a starting point for the later research of historians. Any author who has squinted at old newspapers on microfiche, clicked on them on newspapers.com or ProQuest, or listened and watched in the news archives maintained by universities such as UCLA and Vanderbilt knows this drill all too well. And, to be honest, historians quite often wind up correcting the under-deadline-pressure factual errors of that first, rough draft.
Today, the phrase has a different, even more essential, connotation. The words, sounds and images that journalists set down at a time of the greatest stress test for American democracy since the Civil War ensure that, if true democracy does survive, no credible person will be able to deny what happened. No honest person will be able to say if I’d only known about all the threats and assaults to our democracy. Journalists will have compiled the irrefutable evidence. And it was all there at the time, for anyone who would have bothered to check it out and believe it.
Bearing history’s weight is a huge responsibility, all the more so amid the economic travails of the news industry, the capitulation to Trump’s pressure by such news organizations as CBS, ABC and the Washington Post, and the just plain relentless deadlines of the 24/7 news cycle. But it is a responsibility more than worth the effort, even if in the present moment so much urgently important journalistic work – think of ProPublica’s exposes about the free travel that wealthy right-wing activists gave to Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – seemed to just vanish into the ether.
History itself is endangered when the vice president insists on cleansing the Smithsonian museums of “improper ideology,” a term with distinctly Stalinist shadings. Such pressure has led national parks to remove markers and other didactics referring to such historical realities as Black enslavement and Native American forced removal. Research grants given to authors and scholars by the National Endowment of the Humanities are now, for the first time, subject to being “aligned” with presidential policies.
Enter that humble, reviled creature, the journalist. Increasingly, that journalist will be working for one of the growing number of non-profit newsrooms rather than in the beleaguered, outdated for-profit portion of the news industry. Or that journalist might be publishing or broadcasting independently through platforms like Substack, YouTube or a podcast app, all of which are largely supported by subscriptions from readers, listeners and viewers rather than fickle advertisers.
Whatever form such journalism takes, this much is true. From the neighborhood level of the local library being purged of books about racism or LGBTQ life to the national level of the American military being deployed against dissident citizens, every single day journalists are recording the episodes that some people would now rather ignore and others might in the future pretend not to have cheered on.
It is worth dwelling upon the examples of entire nations like Spain and Austria, which chose to construct a dubious version of unity and innocence based on willful forgetting – in Spain of the brutal civil war of the 1930s, in Austria of eager collaboration with the Nazis.
America itself, for that matter, has suffered from intentional amnesia once before, in the decades between the overthrow of Reconstruction and the coalescence of the modern Civil Rights Movement. During that interregnum, the portrayal of the Confederacy as an honorable “Lost Cause” became pervasive, and not just in the South or on the political Right. Just consider the subtext every time you hear a classic rock playlist featuring The Band doing “The Night They Drove Dixie Down.”
The work that journalists produce in our current, parlous moment may turn out to be the closest thing the United States will ever have to a truth and reconciliation commission, a way of taking stock, not just in the political arena or even in the criminal justice system, but most importantly in the moral sphere. Can there be any better, purer reason to take up this calling?
Samuel G. Freedman, a professor emeritus at Columbia Journalism School, is the author of ten books. He serves on the advisory board of the Center for Journalism Ethics.
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