What Now for the Press?

We must again be at work, but also preparing for war if Trump chooses that.

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

This week’s edition is being co-published in partnership with the Columbia Journalism Review.

We held a free and fair election, and the candidate who hates the press, who makes sport of threatening it physically and with censorship and muzzling, won. The campaign was fought across seven states and he won them all. He got more votes than his opponent.

In this, his second victory, that opponent was not inept or widely disliked. She fought valiantly, and to many millions inspiringly. She was amply and better funded.

The press itself, despite the anguished hand-wringing of some, did a generally decent job of describing both the stakes and the odds. This time, everyone knew he might win, and what many worry it may ultimately cost us, and he won anyway.

The tasks ahead

Now the press must do three things, and must do them with determination and skill if we are to give this Republic its best chance to endure.

First, it must continue to do its workaday job of reporting the news, of holding power to account, of describing the changes that are being made and proposed, Most of all it must do this work with restraint and proportion, not saying the sky is falling when the winner of an election fairly won is making choices he is entitled to make.

But at the same time, it must prepare to defend the Constitution that makes its existence as the world’s freest and most powerful press possible. Until and unless that Constitution is threatened, it must not claim that it is. But if such a threat eventuates, through extra-legal means or a perversion of the law itself, it must step up. I fear that may occur in the next two years (before the voters can weigh in again). If it does, the press must fight, if necessary to the point of being silenced, with a courage, even a physical courage, the press has rarely had to muster in this heretofore blessed country.

In 2017, Marty Baron, then the editor of the Washington Post, famously said, “we’re not at war; we’re at work.” This time, we must be at work, but also preparing, if an errant leader chooses so, to be at war.

The Bill of Rights. (The First Amendment was originally third.)

Finally, the press must display judgment and discernment about the difference between the first two tasks, between what may be merely unwise or even dangerous, noxious or offensive, and that which would threaten our fundamental liberties. Reckless foreign policies, unwise tax legislation, duly confirmed appointments are firmly in the category of “elections have consequences.” Martial law, suspending the Constitution, subordinating the prosecutorial power of the Justice Department to the personal whim of the President or illegal orders to the military are not. They are beyond what the people have placed in Donald Trump’s gift. And those things are true no matter what the Supreme Court holds— judicial supremacy was not the Framers’ plan. Discerning and drawing this line will require steely prudence and calm determination.

How did we get here?

Along with covering the President-Elect and his second transition, the work ahead begins with explaining why this happened. We need to avoid the temptations of answers that spare us the hardest questions about our society. Was it misogyny? Without doubt, in part. But most of the voters were women, as they have been for decades, and tens of millions voted for him. Was it race? Again, likely so in part, but we are all old enough to recall that that factor can be overcome, as it was not this time, even over the pleas of the man who twice overcame it. Was it the first significant US inflation in four decades, even though that was the result of a global pandemic, and occurred globally? At the smallest level of causation, surely so, but that explanation misses a much larger one.

At a larger level, here is why I believe it has come to this:

For more than forty years, we have become an ever-more winner-take-all society, one in which the gap between the winners and losers has widened, particularly with respect to income, wealth, education and the advantages that accrue to all three. The Republican Party promoted this; the Democratic Party largely tolerated it. Now tens of millions of those who feel the sting of lower incomes, lesser wealth, inferior education have rebelled.

They have, in one of history’s great ironies, put their faith in, and channeled their rage through one of the winners, one who did almost nothing for them the first time he held power, but who gives voice to their grievances, both legitimate and not, and adroitly vilifies those they most resent.

Our job now

It will be critical in the days ahead, for the press to look this situation hard in the face. And it will be tempting not to do so, to look away, to find other explanations, from political tactics to surface phenomena to unworthy prejudices. The temptation will be especially great because most journalists are among the winners of the last 40-plus years, among the people against whom the rebellion has been mounted. It was during this same period that journalism went from a working class to a middle class profession, that it came to be dominated by people with elite education, that it came in some very important respects (gender and race) to look more like America while in others to look like it far less.

It has been a bitter and disappointing week for me, and I know for many of you as well. Now, we have big things to do, with the stakes higher than they have ever been for things we hold dear, perhaps including our very freedom to pursue our craft. Lick your wounds if you must, but indulge in that for just a moment. There is work ahead, maybe the most important of our lives.