Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
I don’t go to as many journalism conferences these days as I did when I had a real job, but three of the four or five I expect to attend this year happen to have been in the last month, and I saw a common emotion at them that I want to address this week. That emotion is fear.
I wrote at the outset of the year, before Trump returned to office, about how important Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address was for our own time, but I think I understated then the critical significance of FDR’s warning against “fear itself-- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” In 1933, by naming and confronting the paralysis, Roosevelt began to ease it.
We don’t have such a singular national leader now, and it will be very difficult for one to emerge at least until the presidential campaign begins in earnest in 18 months, but there are reasons for hope amid the causes of the rampant fear, and it may be helpful to name a few of them.
Earth Day hysteria?
Before that, however, I want to pause and elaborate on what Roosevelt called “unreasoning” fear. Two examples may help. First was the Earth Day Scare. If you haven’t heard about this, you likely aren’t in or around the environmental community, including environmental journalism. There, a swarm of private texts, emails and conference calls left leaders convinced that a very specific set of Trump executive orders—one, two, or five, ostensibly set out in detail—were going to drop on April 22 and threaten funding for and the tax status of nonprofit groups, including newsrooms. That didn’t happen.
When I have asked smart, usually well-informed people who believed the rumors whether they now believe that the White House sprang a huge and unusual leak with respect to the executive orders after which Trump was somehow uniquely dissuaded by the preparation and resolution of the environmental community, or whether mass hysteria was involved, they don’t know, but not a few are inclined to the latter explanation.
In public radio, similarly I think, boards and executives have been agonizing about the very real (and entirely legal) threat of possible congressional defunding, but also, simultaneously, about the much more remote (and just as illegal) possibility of the FCC revoking their licenses based on the content of their broadcasts. Every bit of attention to the more remote of these threats, of course, has detracted from focus on the real one. That is precisely what FDR warned about.
I don’t want to just decry fear, though; I also want to offer signs of hope that I see. Here are four:
We are doing our job of informing citizens. The recent Pulitzer Prizes were a reminder that the best journalism being produced today remains the best ever done. It is richer in sources, media, reach and impact. A related sign, it seems to me, can be seen in Trump’s approval ratings. These reflect that at least one of 10 of Trump’s voters from last Fall already do not approve of his performance in office—an unprecedented result this early in a presidential term (unless you count Trump’s first). Why is this happening? Inflation has not subsided, but it also hasn’t (yet) increased. Unemployment also hasn’t (again yet) risen. Consumer interest rates are flat and the stock market was only down a bit before Trump retreated on his trade war with China. I would argue that it’s what voters are seeing in generally very strong press coverage of Trump’s performative cruelty, administrative chaos, policy incoherence, crony capitalism and straight up grift that has turned them off, not only overall, but on almost every major issue.
Readers are engaged—and supportive. Reports indicate that those newsrooms most seen as on the front lines in this moment are being rewarded in terms of both readership and financial support. By the same token, the few scattered signs of retreat seem to be encountering pushback, not just on social media (where it’s easy), but again in terms of engagement, subscriptions and donations and employee resistance.
Views on the need for collective action may be shifting. This one is harder to prove, but my sense from those conferences is that the failure of nerve among the White House press corps when Trump came for the Associated Press is coming to be seen as having been a mistake. Better to be Harvard than Columbia, WilmerHale rather than Paul Weiss. Public broadcasters, for instance, have been quite disciplined in mounting a campaign against a congressional rescission of their funding. They may still lose, but Trump’s recent toothless executive order attacking them could be a sign that the White House worries it lacks the votes in Congress. It’s now been a month since the rescission was first mooted publicly, and it hasn’t yet materialized. George W. Bush’s kinetic war in Iraq began with “shock and awe.” Three years later, he dismissed its architect and began a long retreat. The shock and awe of Trump’s first weeks is already fading, and his potential targets are better organized and responding to new initiatives more quickly and effectively. Should there be a move against privately-funded journalism, I expect that trend would continue.
The courts are largely holding the line. While this point isn’t particular to issues around journalism, it’s particularly important to journalists, who enjoy in the US the most press-friendly laws in the world. The interplay between these two facts may go some way to explaining why Trump has actually done so little to attack the privately-funded press directly, compared, for instance, with public health, universities, the arts and government transparency (which has implications for the press, to be sure).
Not since the Civil War
None of this is to deny that ours remains a peculiarly perilous time in this country. President Kennedy referred in his inaugural address to freedom’s “hour of maximum danger,” and the domestic threat to our freedoms is now unquestionably greater than it has been since the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox 160 years ago. The press, as the Framers envisioned, has a critical role to play in embodying and defending those freedoms. I do not pretend to know how this moment will be seen by history, but I do see reasons for hope—and hope that you do too.
Let it be so.
I think that a lot of people are getting the hang of the pattern. He's bluster, outrage and fury. He's good at triggering the collective amygdala. Often he retreats ("it's just a bargaining position"is the trope). Once its amygdala calms down, the other side realizes it has claws and teeth too and the fight is on. Trump and his ilk are not all powerful. They ARE powerful and they can do lots of damage (they've already done damage), but it's not a walkover. Dick does an important service to the news world by pointing this out. I think we're living in a challenging time, but there's a lot of great work being done in journalism. Trump hit hard in the first round. But this is a 15 round fight.