Shredding public knowledge

[Editor’s note: I (and therefore also the newsletter and podcast) will be on break next week for a book-writing intensive in a cabin in the woods. I’ll send a short Friday roundup this week, but next week there will be no posts. It’s your first break from me since May! I’ll be back on December 23 if I survive my book-wrestling.]

Why does it matter if you know what’s going on in the world, and why do so many people not know these days? Last week a report from the Roosevelt Institute on the state of U.S. journalism was released. I’ll discuss the report itself more later, but for now, I’ll just give you the first sentence of its conclusion: "The crisis facing American journalism and democracy is... the predictable outcome of policy choices that have prioritized corporate profits over democratic needs."

In my opinion, the collapse of journalism is part of a larger trend in which institutions are being annihilated. This annihilation is in some ways an accidental byproduct of democracy-destroying mechanisms that were unleashed a while ago. But more recently, the collapse’s acceleration is a result of deliberate sabotage.

I don’t think that anything approximating democracy can happen without some sustainable form of a free press. In this post, I’ll consider how governments have destroyed journalism and other institutions in the past, what’s happened in the U.S. over time, and what we might to salvage the most important aspects of a free press—and to save ourselves.

Part of a larger pattern

A whole host of institutions are under relentless attack in the U.S. right now. In some cases, it’s been an ongoing battle; in other cases, the fight is newer. But the people who have long wanted to destroy public education are now in power. In addition, universities are being dismantled, even in cases where departments bring in more money than they cost—as happened recently in Nebraska.

The U.S. postal system has been threatened repeatedly by the president, and now Amazon is looking at creating its own delivery network to rival the US Postal System. After years of instability exacerbated by consolidating medical and hospital industry, hospitals and clinics are facing looming massive cuts in social programs.

Even the most sympathetic form of capitalism—small businessowners—are under attack. Massive job losses this fall are happening primarily in small businesses, reflective of the consolidation of power and money in the hands of fewer and fewer people in the country. Meanwhile, U.S. government reports and data that taxpayers paid for—reports that were created to be part of the base of public knowledge—are becoming inaccessible. Access to information is facing dire threats.

So journalism isn’t alone in being a target, but it is getting hammered. And the list of ways that journalism is collapsing and/or under attack right now is a long one.

The current crisis in journalism goes back decades. Tapping Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, Chris Mooney wrote in March about the 80% decline between 1990 and 2024 in journalists working at newspapers. Just to pause over that for a moment, it means that for every five slots at a paper thirty-five years ago, only one job exists now.

In July of this year Nieman Lab wrote about a report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack, which found that more than 1,000 counties—one out of three in the nation — no longer have even one full-time local journalist on the job. What’s worse, a new Pew Research report from last week suggests that a lot of Americans are checking out more and more. As of August 2025, 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time. That is down from 51% in 2016. So in a single decade, the self-reported number of people in the U.S. staying on top of the news has dropped from one half to one third.

Some of these issues are part of what the new report from the Roosevelt Institute looked at. As the report’s authors describe it, the current crisis is the result of the financial savaging of journalism outlets, often by political or corporate actors that have no interest in the public good. In some cases the actions of the political and corporate actors are actually adversarial to the notion of journalism as a public good.

Killing dissent

It’s hardly news that there have been many times in history when journalism has been attacked. Every authoritarian regime targets the press directly. Sometimes that’s via physical attacks directly against reporters. At other times, reprisal comes when leaders try to get journalists fired if they criticize or even report on those in power. And in other cases, wannabe dictators pressure or close whole news outlets.

Antipathy toward free speech and reporting is one of the most consistent features of dictatorships. I could offer literally a thousand examples of this pattern, but here are just three.

Maria Ressa won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 as CEO of Rappler in the Philippines, after being arrested and convicted by the government in 2019, ostensibly over the outlet’s coverage of a businessman. The charges seemed more related to her coverage of the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, than any legitimate legal matter. She’s faced wave after wave of litigation on corporate and tax matters as well.

Turning to Africa, Idi Amin, the dictator who ruled Uganda in the 1970s, intimidated and killed journalists and dissidents alike, all while shaping the Ugandan Broadcasting Corporation into a press agency fluffing his image and reinforcing his rule.

In twenty-first century Russia, one of the most staggering blows to any hypothetical future for democracy in that country has been the slow extinction of independent press and voices over the last thirteen years. Laws have forced organizations to advertise themselves as foreign agents if they are deemed to have any support from outside Russia at all. The foreign-agent law was put in place in 2012 to silence critics of Vladimir Putin. In the years since, it’s has been expanded multiple times to limit the presence, reach, and even existence of reporting independent of the government. In the wake of the launch of all-out conventional war on Ukraine in 2022, even vestigial parts of a free press vanished.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has arrested domestic and international journalists alike, making any reporting on government matters fraught. More than once, those doing that reporting have paid with their lives, most famously Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in 2006.

From skirmish to siege

Assassination of journalists remains off the table at this point in the U.S., though Trump has ignored or condoned such violence overseas, as in the case of Jamal Khashoggi. But we do see an escalating war, as the administration attempts to silence and intimidate the press.

The White House has launched a “Media Bias Portal” as the latest strike in its ongoing war against any criticism of it. The Pentagon Press Corps has been reduced to a clown car of journalistic coverage. Trump has long threatened to personally sue or brought actual nonsense suits against outlet after outlet. Now he has a subservient Department of Justice that he’s been using to cow networks and media companies, or reward those who will muzzle themselves.

It’s an American tradition for presidents to loathe the press, and even some of your favorite presidents have been bad actors on this front, limiting access and avoiding transparency when they felt like it. But under Trump, these attacks have become an open season of insulting individual journalists and threatening the existence of their employers.

Modes of attack

These attacks function in at least three ways. First, they silence individuals who are publicly questioning what the authoritarian is doing, aiming to erase any possibility of criticism in the public sector and any threat to the power of the small cadre of people actually running a given country. Secondly, attacks on journalism expand the opportunity for corruption, from mundane scandals to massive ones, by eliminating oversight. Thirdly, assaults on the press fragment any common understanding of events taking place.

In the case of the U.S., Trump and his allies aren’t just destroying our common understanding of what’s happening today. They’re trying to eliminate any framework that might later be able to establish a reality other than the one Trump chooses.

This issue is even (and maybe especially) a question of what matters enough for people to pay attention to it. With a healthy journalistic sector, monitoring is always happening. In the current one, it’s not—on every level, but especially at the local level.

Decades ago, of course not everyone would read a story about any random city council meeting. But if something went wrong, if coverage revealed news or a scandal related to or revealed at a meeting, people knew where to look for the story and had a trusted source to outline the issue or crisis for them. If they needed to know something, it was understood, they could often find a story about it in their local paper and get the details there. They had outsourced some of their social monitoring and faith in democracy to journalists.

Now the truth is that in many cases, the system of U.S. journalism didn’t fulfill this role as well as it should have. The interests and welfare of whole communities were often ignored and underrepresented—or worse, misrepresented. Even in its best eras, the news in this country has tended to tilt toward reinforcing the status quo and giving corporate interests and the extremely wealthy good-faith readings that were frequently not accurate and didn’t meet the self-declared principles of the field.

So even before Trump’s arrival on the national political scene, the pre-Trump journalism ecosystem wasn’t always fair or just. There’s plenty of room for criticism of how it functioned and ways it could be improved. But the answer is not to have less journalism, to spend less time monitoring the powerful, or to reduce freedom of the speech in the United States. In fact, all those things are incredibly dangerous to democracy and to individual Americans.

The big picture

The Roosevelt institute, which published the report on the state of U.S. journalism last week, is among other things, a nonprofit think tank affiliated the with Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. The report’s authors—Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard—suggest that public-interest obligations have been ignored, along with the competitive markets and independent journalism that democracy requires. Media institutions have been made vulnerable to capture in ways that leave them unable to withstand authoritarian pressure from government. But they argue that these failures have opened the possibility for new models that integrate journalism into basic democratic infrastructure, treating it as a public good rather than a business commodity.

Building the media that democracy needs to thrive will require a range of policy interventions, they say, including breaking up media conglomerates, making public investments toward local journalism and a robust public media system, and reining in Big Tech firms.  

What can you do?

Fixing the crisis of journalism is not going to be an arena in which we can just band-aid our way to a healthy society. Big national initiatives will be required to revive the field. But there’s still a lot you can do to triage the current damage, particularly close to home.

I firmly believe we have the bones of a functional journalism system that could be used to spark something better. For now, keep that going. Support big outlets that are doing good reporting. Of late, I’ve been particularly impressed with WIRED, the Philly Inquirer, and the Boston Globe.

You can support independent outlets and journalists. In several past Tuesday posts, I’ve mentioned great work from independent journalists; they’re doing some of the most exciting and critical reporting around the country right now. Marisa Kabas put together a list of several good ones over at the Handbasket. But you can also look closer to home to find additional ones that could use your support.

That includes local public radio. It might seem harmless and anodyne sometimes when you hear a segment on something that doesn’t matter to you. But local radio often provides tremendous public service when it comes to information and independent reporting. If there’s an issue near you that they’re not covering, tell them. They’re often really motivated to respond to their audience.

DIY monitoring and more

You can also find and share public-interest outlets that are trying to address the damage being done to agencies that used to play a key role in informing the public. The Evidence Collective, for instance, fact-checks government statements, as well as meetings, hearings, and reports about public health. When we’re all being deluged with propaganda, expert voices can keep you informed on what an agency is really up to.

You can do the same kind of project locally, even if you’re not experts. Set up a committee of people who can go to and report on what happens at city council meetings, board of education sessions, or similar meetings of the library.

If your group is one that can’t get people to attend regularly (due to long work hours, family responsibilities, or disability), press to have meetings livestreamed and recorded as part of an official record. Summarize them for public outlets. Send the key points to a network of interested people and have a plan for how to raise attention for problems that come to light. Demand your local news (radio, TV, digital, and print) cover any issues that arise. Decide together with a group of people what should be attended to locally, in your own neighborhood, ward, town, or city.

And if your region of the country is one that’s become a news desert, demand that candidates for office have a plan for how to deal with the lack of information and accountability. You personally can’t fix every part of what ails the news. That’s going to require a societal shift. But you can support those who are in the trenches right now, you can work to protect your own community, and you can demand better from our leaders, whose responsibility it also is to protect democracy.

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