Suggestions for the News Agenda in 2024

Suggestions for filling those empty new notebooks, from Press Forward to a revolutionary temper

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

The holidays are over—enough of looking backward. Here are some stories I hope reporters and their editors will find the time and resources to bring us in 2024, an annual tradition for this column.

Accountability for Press Forward

Philanthropy is a difficult beat. There are few reporters on general publications covering it regularly, and even fewer with the time and experience to bring an accountability angle to their work. But the field ought to be too large to ignore. At roughly half a trillion dollars annually, private giving in this country is about the same size overall as petroleum refining.

Of course, looked at with that perspective, the Press Forward initiative, at $500 million over five years, is just one five-thousandth of US philanthropy. But I still hope it will benefit from greater scrutiny in the year ahead than it did in the year of its announcement just past.

One place to start would be separating those parts of it that are incremental from those that represent re-packaging of commitments that had been or would have been made anyway. There has been almost none of this in the excessively credulous coverage. Next would be questioning why the pace of an effort that claims to be responding to an emergency has been less than, well, emergent. Thus, for instance, we still have no grant guidelines for Press Forward, a year after its private conception and four months after its splashy debut. Along the way, it would be great to see more on how the balance between supporting newsrooms and industry infrastructure (what I have called intermediaries) is being struck.

The intramural struggles of the left

The Israel-Hamas war has laid bare a number of tensions that had been rising to the surface even earlier, and which might be broadly described as debates within the American left on everything from tactics to values. I think we could benefit from more hard-headed coverage here.

This means greater nuance, but also more rigor and a stronger sense of proportionality. Having spent eight weeks on a campus in the Fall, I can say with confidence that tensions there, no matter what you may have read, are nowhere near at the level they were at the height of Vietnam protests. At the same time, things are often substantively not as conveyed. As one example, many, probably most students at Harvard think its now-former president had been too sympathetic to Israel, which is hardly the impression you may have gotten from press coverage.

I worry that too many reporters (and editors), seeing these disputes as within their own families, figuratively if not literally, have been tempted to report them out of their heads, or call a few friends of friends, rather than by doing the hard reportorial work of distinguishing anecdotes from trends. This temptation is only strengthened when one faction or another on the left responds to arguments not by engaging but by advocating for those with whom they disagree to be silenced. Likely more on this next week.

Not unrelatedly, if larger numbers (if still fairly small proportions) of people of color are moving to the right politically, as a number of surveys indicate, we need more and better reporting on the perspective of these voters, and to elevate voices who articulate this viewpoint.

And, yeah, the elephant in the room

I actually think the 2023 coverage of Donald Trump by the nation’s best news organizations was, on balance, pretty good. Any reasonable person reading it would understand that he is a criminal, an already-adjudged fraudster and rapist, soon likely a federal felon, surely an insurrectionist and would-be fascist strongman. I agree with Jay Rosen’s formulation that coverage of the campaign needs to focus more on “not the odds but the stakes,” and I see that increasingly happening.

They do understand: “What one word describes Trump’s plans for a second term?” (J.L. Partners survey of 984 likely voters via The Daily Mail, 12/23)

Yet, of course, evidence abounds that Trump could win again. (I personally don’t think he will, but my wife and kids remind me often that I felt that way eight years ago as well.)

For now, what I think we need more reporting about is why so many Americans, including the leadership of one of the two political parties that have dominated our politics for 170 years, are prepared to consider effectively overthrowing the constitutional scheme that has governed the country for more than two and quarter centuries. Put another way, even if we all agreed on the stakes, I think the election could go either way. Why is that?

We take too much refuge from this question, I think, in our reflections on misinformation and disinformation. A lot of what is characterized as “misinformation” is, I am afraid, just rationalization for revolutionary impulses. Better that we focus our inquiry on the source of those impulses. Not just the stakes for voters, but also their motivations.

Why do so many Americans seem willing to support a revolution here?

My own hunch is we are now witnessing a boiling-over of 35-plus years of resentment of widening inequality, from which those who populate our leading universities, large corporations (especially tech), financial firms, entertainment industry, social sector, residential enclaves—and newsrooms!—are seen to have gained much more than most Americans.

During these years, Democrats have held power just as often as Republicans; neither have done much to alleviate inequality, even when Democratic control was at its zenith, as in 1993-94, 2009-10 and 2021-22. The fact that Trump’s first term version of populism did not seek to redress the economic aspects of this imbalance may have blinded us as reporters to reporting out the full extent of the resulting revolutionary temper. We should remedy that, as quickly as possible.

Linked closely to this, I think, is the subject of race, but in a manner also more complicated than much of our reporting would indicate. There is a widespread sense that the running of the country for the benefit of its non-Hispanic white majority is fundamentally challenged by the fact that the majority is itself fading. The population under 18 is majority nonwhite; that below 45 is very closely split.

Stirring up passions about allegedly unchecked immigration and supposedly rising crime are both racial dog-whistles and time-honored short-term ways to build a reactionary coalition, including from some of those whose group interests might seem to lie elsewhere. It is time to ask how that reaction, too, may be becoming revolutionary.

(Meanwhile, I’d still like to see a thoroughly reported piece on whether the current President of the United States is still physically and mentally up to the job.)

As many have said, this new year seems on track, at least right now, to being a truly defining one in our history. There will be tons of breaking news to cover, and that is a big part of the job of journalism. But I hope we will take time, as well, to look more deeply and more closely at the larger forces at play, in our industry and in our nation as a whole.