Journalism Can't Save America

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story from reporter Michael Gold about a Trump rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which omitted the fairly prominent fact that the former president opened his comments by riffing on the size of dead golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. The omission led reader Branden McEuen to write to Gold and criticize what looked like glossing over a very weird reality.

Gold’s emailed reply to McEuen seemed to imply that an editor had cut part of his summary before publication—the very part the reader had identified as missing. McEuen posted a screenshot of their exchange on social media.

Later that evening, the Times ran a second story by Gold, clearly addressing the strange vulgarity of Trump’s comments.

I wrote last week about how several of our biggest news outlets have stumbled repeatedly while covering this year’s presidential race. If Gold’s editor at the Times removed his accurate coverage, that seems like yet one more unfortunate example.

But it’s important to note the impossible task assigned to reporters and journalism as a whole today. I quoted public intellectual Walter Lippmann in my critique of the press last week, but here’s another point on all this that’s worth weighing, from his seminal book Public Opinion: “The press is no substitute for institutions.”

Much of what’s wrong with journalism today isn’t the fault of journalism—or at least not journalists. The industry has been hollowed out by calcified management, private equity, whimsical billionaire investors who get bored, the collapse of advertising, and the diminishment of local news.

What’s wrong with America today is likewise largely not the fault of journalism or journalists. Income inequality, a backlash to growing diversity over the demographics of the country, a failure to protect the most vulnerable among us and attend to the current climate crisis, and many other woes have roots far from journalism, even if readers might wish that these topics would get more accurate or more frequent coverage.

In states that deteriorated into authoritarian societies, active campaigns to suppress a free press have been typical: Demagogues create new laws or use existing ones to threaten crusading reporters with arrest. They pressure or shut down the outlets that are most critical of the government. And they create propaganda channels to flood the public with the regime’s talking points.

In the U.S. case, billionaire investors have created propaganda channels in the private sector, which abet the interests of authoritarian types. (Recall that Fox News was created as an antidote to the successful removal of Richard Nixon from the presidency.) Other non-Murdoch national media may lack overt complicity but tilt heavily corporate and are not inclined to unsettle advertisers. Meanwhile, journalism is starving—especially at state and local levels—shedding workers in ways that begin to echo the kind of silence and blackouts that arise due to repression in police states.

The central problem with the U.S. right now is its institutions have been neglected or actively degraded to the point the entire system is at risk. Policies supported by a clear majority of Americans on a consistent basis over time cannot be put in place. Courts and lawmakers have collaborated to strip longstanding rights from more than half the population. Jurisprudence has been thrown out the window on precedents from Chevron to Roe.

Under threat, key institutions that might have buttressed our democratic traditions seem to be complying in advance to limit their risk, from universities to hospitals. It often feels as if every organization is taking for granted that someone else will hold the line, that the system will survive on its own.

There are counterexamples. Over the weekend, The Washington Post profiled the CIA analyst who saw himself as an institutionalist but turned whistleblower due an alarming telephone call between then-President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What caught my attention in the story was not just the anonymous government employee who took action, but also Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed intelligence community inspector general, who received the report from the whistleblower and did his job. There was a formal process already in place for how to handle a whistleblower’s complaint, and he followed it. These were signs of a healthy system in operation.

It worked as it should have, to a point. But then Atkinson was fired, and the Senate failed to carry out its own responsibilities, twice, despite obvious malfeasance in both impeachment cases. Elected officials in Trump’s own party took away the guardrails, so that the checks built into the system could not be used. The analyst himself wondered why so many more senior colleagues had the same information he did yet failed to act.

Even if such whistleblowers are willing to step forward at times, it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect heroic behavior from individuals. It should not fall to everyday people to save the country from disintegration and demagogues. We have to have better laws, leaders, and greater institutional accountability to secure our future.

The Senate Watergate hearings, not The Washington Post, brought Nixon down. Journalism can be a canary in the coal mine or a band-aid when systems malfunction, but it cannot replace those systems. It can be continuing education for the public, but it cannot provide the full background knowledge to be a citizen in a functioning democracy. It can investigate income inequality, but it cannot change the laws that have made inequality so dangerous to Americans today.

More crucially, if the social setting is one that provides fertile ground for propaganda campaigns that bring people to live inside a delusion, once a significant portion of the population has embraced that delusion—and there are news outlets that encourage them to stay uninformed and isolated—there’s only so much deprogramming that good reporting can do.

The trap in which journalism still finds itself today was obvious a century ago:

I have issues with the solutions Lippmann proposed, but I think he identifies the problem clearly enough. As I see it, not only is the press by nature an incomplete educator of the public, it can only point out when institutions or individuals fail to hew to a society’s political system or legal codes. And in fact, due in part to the U.S. return to more of a robber-baron society, we are once again facing all the dangers that Lippmann identified a century ago. The press has followed suit—it has regressed.

If laws are passed to benefit primarily the powerful, or if the courts become servants to oligarchs, journalism can highlight the corruption but cannot make repairs. And journalism will tend to become blind to social norms—it reports what is unusual in society more often than it does what is common. If corruption reigns, journalism, too, will become corrupt over time, in both its corporate structure and its editorial myopia.

Whatever the outcome of the election in November, it’s our public institutions that are at immediate and long-term risk. Journalism cannot set the agenda or carry out the work we have to do to shore up those institutions in ways that will be more difficult to dismantle going forward. This process begins with grass-roots institutions and civic engagement, with helping people feel they have a stake in their own communities and that the reality of their communities matters in concrete ways in national elections, too.

It’s up to all of us to build better institutions at every level, whether that means expanding early voting, keeping school boards from becoming engines of book banning, working to address immigration as a policy issue rather than a moral panic, or reforming the U.S. Supreme Court.

Though voting in the upcoming elections may be the most imminent and most dramatic action many of us can take for now—and please do vote!—there are longer-term goals and paths to securing the country, too, many of which are in critical need of support. Journalism can be a finger stuck in a leaky dike, but it will not do in the face of a flood.