Thinking About Collective Action As Threats Mount

What more can we, each and all, do to protect a free press?

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

You may well have read this postwar reflection from a Lutheran pastor who spent eight years as a prisoner of the Nazis, but read it again if you would:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

This week I want to talk about how I am thinking about the need for collective action in a time of increasing threats to the press (among, I realize, many other institutions, interests and groups).

The simplest thing to say is that the insight of 1946 retains its power in 2025. If we see particular threats in isolation, or convince ourselves that we need to “keep our powder dry,” or even just feel that it’s too soon to make a fuss, the chances that we will come to regret such an approach seem to me unacceptably high.

But when you turn to what should be done, and by whom, things get a lot more complicated. My own thinking on this is very much a work in progress, but here are a few tentative conclusions I’ve reached:

Look for the helpers

A lot of resources to address current threats already exist, and deserve our support. Organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (an occasional consulting client of mine), the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have long done great work, and are stepping up in response to new threats. The Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Newmark Journalism School has been smart and early in sounding alarms, and urging newsrooms and others to comprehensively assess the risks they face. Contributing to or otherwise supporting such endeavors would be great if you’re in a position to do that.

Many newsrooms have been doing a very good job in charting the instability, recklessness and pervasive corruption that have become the instant themes of the second Trump presidency. You can reward them with your readership, listening and viewing, with your subscriptions or membership, and by sharing their key coverage with friends and family, as well as by defending them when they are derided, whether by those in power who seek to evade accountability or by people you know who don’t know what’s happening, or don’t yet want to acknowledge it.

This is the spirit we are going to need. photo:RFE/RL, 1981

Unfortunately, even all of that is not going to be enough, I am afraid, to get us through this period. So here are some other thoughts that I hope can help make the necessary difference.

The limits of “expertise”

Don’t reflexively defer to others. Now is not the time to assume that the usual suspects, or even those closest to particular situations, have all the answers about what to do.

For instance, I think a significant error has been made by the leading newsrooms which cover the White House in response to Trump’s banning the Associated Press from venues like the Oval Office and Air Force One. The AP (also an occasional client, although they had nothing to do with my writing this or any other column) is being punished because they refuse to slavishly fall in line with Trump’s infantile renaming of the Gulf of Mexico—an idea first suggested as a joke 15 years ago by Stephen Colbert in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill. (I kid you not.)

I have thought, since Trump had his first tantrum on this subject, that others covering the White House should decline to go where the AP is barred. I believe, from a lifetime of studying White House-press relations, after early service working in the White House press office, that if outlets like the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters took such steps, readers would compel many others to follow as a demonstration of the independence they value, and that Trump would be left on his airplane and behind his big desk with an amen choir of outlets thus branded as the quasi-state media—the American Pravda, Izvestia and lesser lights— that places like Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit and the Blaze have become.

Beyond this, Trump would miss sparring with reporters like the Times’s Maggie Haberman, which he seems to both need and enjoy. And over time, as reporters tend to focus their reporting on that which they can observe, Trump would find that he was having increasing trouble conveying his message beyond his base, perhaps contributing to his already-sliding approval, while reporting on the White House would generally become a more enterprising and less spoon-fed beat, which would be a public service.

This hasn’t happened, at least yet, because the people ostensibly closest to the situation convinced themselves that it could be resolved quietly and consensually. Their judgment was entitled to a respectful hearing, but it should not have been determinative. It will be important to remember in future cases that reporters, like other humans, often convince themselves that giving up perks they enjoy, and access on which they think they depend, would be wrong, and not just personally inconvenient. Sometimes such reasoning is actually less reason than rationalization. And executives at places like the television networks, similarly, can conclude that the course of (in)action that saves them money in the short-term is noble, when it may actually be merely craven.

Surely, the would-be authoritarian receives a clear message when the press declares in letters and statements than it “stands with” an organization being singled out for abuse but doesn’t actually choose to stand where the victim is forced to sit.

Tuesday’s government takeover of White House pool assignments offered a second wake up call, while the AP matter is now in the courts, where I hope the newswire prevails. Let’s also hope other newsrooms will now undertake an active response (i.e. beyond public hand-wringing and rhetoric), rather than letting Trump pick them off one by one, as began with yesterday’s revocation of pool assignments to Reuters and HuffPost.

Other sorts of support

More resources need to be mobilized. As the inevitable crackdown unfolds, we are going to need more resources than the existing actors, at least as currently constituted, can likely provide. These will include increased commitments of pro bono legal services, and perhaps the employment of other tools, such as public service advertising, crisis communications support and pop-up advocacy. What will ultimately be needed, I think, is no less than a broad-based movement committed to preserving the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press.

Getting our act together

Umbrella organizations aren’t the answer, but coordination is a virtue. Regular readers of this column will know that I have been deeply skeptical of the prevalence of intermediaries, and I remain so. I am not advocating here for the creation of some umbrella free press organization, nor for the diversion of philanthropic and other resources away from those advocates, newsrooms and others doing the work on the ground that we so urgently require.

What I do hope for is greater coordination of efforts, greater willingness in practice for disparate entities to work occasionally in common cause. For instance, we shouldn’t last week have had two separate letters, with many common signatories, in support of AP. Again, to the recipients of the letters in the White House, that surely signaled division and thus weakness.

Keeping watch everywhere

As threats proliferate, mere awareness of them will be an advantage. Not all of the attacks on the press will enjoy the profile of the President of the United States seeking to control the stylebook of the country’s leading newswire. Trump is already spawning would-be Mini-Me’s across the country, and there will surely be more.

Just last week as well, a judge in Clarksdale, Mississippi signed a blatantly unconstitutional order requiring a local newspaper to remove from its website an editorial criticizing the mayor and city officials and questioning if they had received kickbacks. Late last month on New York’s Long Island, the long-dominant local paper, Newsday, was deprived of the lucrative contract for legal notice advertising by an elected country executive who saw in the contract a bludgeon he could employ to get more favorable press coverage, and punish an outlet that had revealed too many problems in his regime. He awarded the plum to Murdoch’s Manhattan paper. One of the most important things we can do across this big country is to make sure power plays like these are exposed, and challenged by whatever means possible.

A final thought

Most important, we all need to do what we can. That brings us to my last and, I think, most critical point for this week, and for each of you. What we can do about any or all of this varies with our circumstances. Those with institutional affiliations may face greater practical constraints. Those not in leadership roles, or not yet there, or past that, may have less influence than those responsible for leadership in this crucial time of choosing.

Nor is it for me or anyone else to say for sure what you can do. But you can surely do something. Do what you can, do it now, and keep at it. Whether or not our children or grandchildren will live in a society that enjoys the blessings and benefits of a free press may depend on it.