The Press Is the Government's Enemy and That Is Good
It's hard to be objective in jail.
The federal government’s decision last week to arrest the journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a protest that took place in a Minnesota church was bad. Very bad. Let’s get that out of the way up front. It was laughably unconstitutional, contemptuous of the First Amendment, a transparent act of illegal harassment. The journalists involved have my total solidarity. I hope that the idiotic charges against them are dismissed and that they are one day able to sue someone for a lot of money over this.
That said: maybe something good can come out of this. This can be a clarifying moment—not just for the public, but for the press itself. It can, with luck, help lay to rest the most tedious and counterproductive debate in American journalism.
Donald Trump believes that if a reporter says something he doesn’t like, they should get the death penalty. You think I’m joking? I’m not joking. This characteristic of his was apparent a full decade ago, when he began pointing to the press pen at every one of his campaign rallies and spewing insults at them in order to, hopefully, rile up his some of his fans enough to take a swing at somebody. Donald Trump is not “hostile to” the First Amendment; he would erase it if he were able to, and the Republicans in Congress would go along with him. In his second and less restrained term as President, the White House press corps has been filled with right wing internet influencers and the entire Defense Department press corps has been replaced with administration sycophants. The courts are the only thing keeping the First Amendment alive today in America. That is where we are.
If you do not work in the media, you may be blessedly ignorant of the fact that there has been an omnipresent internal debate for decades over how and whether the press should be “unbiased.” Old school journalists raised in a time when the media was a prosperous and well-respected social institution believe that reporters should be able to do their jobs without tainting themselves with political beliefs, while younger reporters, who came up in the real world, are less delusional. This debate reached its pinnacle in 2020 at the Washington Post, when the top editors first got in a messy public argument with star reporter Wesley Lowery over whether it is ethical to say things like “racism is racist.” Then, in a true classic of folly, the paper doubled down on its objectivity by banning a reporter who had been sexual assault victim from writing about sexual assault. These examples—along with things like “political reporters who don’t vote in elections because they think it would be biased”—are enough to give you a sense of the relative levels of reasonableness on each side of this philosophical disagreement.
What has happened since then? Well, just about everyone who was involved in that debate has left the paper now because its megabillionaire owner decided to turn its editorial page into an administration-friendly rag in service of Jeff Bezos’s business interests. I don’t have any graduate degrees or anything, but that seems kind of political to me. I guess politics comes for you, whether you’re unbiased or not.
The Trump administration in full fascist mode is doing us all the favor of revealing how silly journalism’s pretension to non-political existence always was. Arrested along with Lemon and Fort were some of the protesters themselves who led the protest against ICE in the church that day. To the government, there is no difference between the protesters and the reporters. They are all enemies. They are all barriers to the government’s ability to carry out its wishes, and therefore they will all be treated the same. The tear gas and rubber bullets that federal agents are firing at the crowds in Minneapolis and Portland and elsewhere do not discriminate according to job. Nor does the US Justice Department now. The executive branch is authoritarian; it wants its wishes to automatically be law; it has declared all of its opponents to be domestic terrorists; reporters, who tend to detract from the government’s power by showing all of the bad stuff it does to the public, are opponents just like anyone else. Any reporters who have spent their careers imagining that they exist on a separate plane from the simplistic partisans who protest in the streets will be able to rethink those assumptions from inside a jail cell. We’ll all be in there together.
Don Lemon used to work at CNN. Now, the company that owns CNN is owned is in the sights of a media mogul who is the son of one of the world’s richest people and who has already disemboweled CBS News as a sacrifice to the Trump administration in exchange for favorable regulatory treatment. I would call that political. Georgia Fort is, like me and a lot of my peers, an independent journalist. Why are we all so damned independent? Because most of the normal newsroom jobs that we all would have had a generation ago have disappeared thanks to the ability of big tech companies to suck all of the profits out of our industry. The profits that used to employ thousands of journalists have instead made the founders of these tech companies very, very rich. And all of those rich men sat right behind Donald Trump on stage when he was inaugurated one year ago.
I hate to say it… but it almost seems… political.
You cannot escape politics. It is like trying to jump off the earth. You can see how children might give it a shot, but it’s kind of embarrassing to be still trying to do it as an adult. The traditional establishment thinkers of the journalism world are similar to the establishment leadership of the Democratic Party, in the sense that they find themselves forced to watch in horror as their long-treasured delusions are now, finally, being exposed by events as things that were never valuable to begin with. You can toss the concept of Reporters Existing In an Otherworldly Nonpolitical Plane on the intellectual trash heap right next to The Highest Value of Statesmanship is Bipartisanship. The honest people who held those beliefs will admit that reality has proven them wrong, and the dishonest ones who cling to them will be like religious zealots fleeing to hillside caves in the face of scientific advancement.
The mistake in the “objectivity above all” side of journalism’s debate is the way that they conceptualize what bias means. To them, it is the job of the press to locate itself at the midpoint of public opinion, secure in the mainstream, flanked comfortably by less reasonable wings on the left and right. In fact, though, the job of journalism is much simpler. Journalism is supposed to tell the truth. The reason why the press finds itself the enemy of the government is that the government is (even more than usual) hostile to the truth. For journalists, there is no triangulating out of this predicament. The only choices are to keep telling the truth or not. As the next few years unfold, it will not be hard to see who is making which choice.
Rely on your objectivity to protect you from the feds if you want but I’m bringing a fucking gas mask.
Reporting Request: Springfield, Ohio
The TPS protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to live in America expire this week, and there is an expectation that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio will be in the crosshairs of ICE. I am going to Springfield later this week to report. Are you a Springfield resident or activist who is thinking about or planning for what may be happening there soon? If so, I would like to be in touch with you. If you are on the ground there and would like to help in my reporting, please drop me an email at Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com. We can also chat on Signal if you prefer.
Also
Related reading: First, Kill the News; We Are All Potentially Dead Journalists; We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now.
Dan McQuade, a fine blogger and journalist who worked at Deadspin, Defector, and elsewhere, passed away last week. Defector is running a selection of his work right now. He was a really great dude. Let’s all do a good job this year in Dan’s honor.
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A quote from the play Inherit the Wind has always stuck with me. "It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted... And afflict the comfortable."
There are many blatant falsehoods and conveniently one-side conventional wisdoms being laid bare as the absolute status quo preserving bollocks it has always been.
Institutions and laws are proven to be arbitrary, capricious and often illusory. Something black, brown, indigenous and poor people have been telling affluent white people for time immemorial.
Where once being able to repeat NYT headlines or WaPo talking points meant you were a liberal in good standing now paints you as the out of touch sycophant for oligarchs you unwittingly always were.
We are in the realm of monsters, ruled by pedophiles and their enablers. There is, however, freedom and opportunity in the ability to leave comforting or at least static fictions behind and deal with the world as it actually exists.
We shall see if humanity is up to the task.