Journalism Education — Now More Than Ever
“Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.”
That was the phrase spotted on the back of a Trump supporter’s t-shirt Monday in Minnesota — the line touted by former MLB pitcher-turned-doughy fascist ideologue Curt Schilling on Twitter as “so much awesome.” (Schilling has since deleted the tweet and urged critics who can’t take the “joke” to “kiss my ass.”) CNN media commentator Brian Stelter rebuked Schilling and the lynching allusion in a segment on Election Day. “As journalists,” Stelter said, “we’ve got to advocate for what we do, and explain what we do.”
What we do. On Tuesday, I asked my students in Sacramento State’s journalism lab class about this. This is what our discussion turned up:
Here’s the thing: As a journalist, I don’t sense a need to advocate or explain anything about me or my work to some guys who would just as soon advocate hanging me and my peers from a tree. Their pathology isn’t about me or what I do. It is about insecurity and paranoia and grievances stoked without pause over the last six years — first among Tea Party adherents resistant to Barack Obama, then among the genteel Republican establishment that sought (and failed) to temper that pathology with its patrician, Koch-fueled propriety in 2012, then amid the advancing storm of white resentment whose continued accrual in 2014 culminated in the cataclysm of the last 24 hours. You can’t talk sense into an avalanche.
But, yes, you can see it coming. You can show it coming. That’s what journalists do. We show you what’s happening and what is likely next. We achieve this through reporting, through context, through representing the voiceless, through challenging the powerful, the concerted smashing of lies and obfuscation and protests of bias and specious calls for false balance and every other means used by those in power to flout the rules of law and civic engagement. We see it coming, we respond immediately, and we enlighten the public about any relevant acts their leaders — political, business, religious, would-be, beneficent, baleful, and otherwise — are committing both privately and in their name. The idea is that an informed population then applies this knowledge at the ballot box. If/when candidates or campaigns attempt to misinform, misdirect or wholly undermine the process, journalists report this as well. This process is our responsibility to American democracy, a practice entrusted to us via no less of a mandate than the First Amendment.
Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States epitomizes journalists’ near-complete abdication of this responsibility. The most charitable read would be that the institutions of American journalism failed to see this coming. “On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House,” The New Yorker’s editors wrote in an endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the magazine’s Oct. 31 issue. This morning, New Yorker editor David Remnick took stock with disbelief and revulsion. “Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy,” Remnick wrote. Arriving at this conclusion — especially after the spectral terror of reports by Evan Osnos and George Saunders that appeared in Remnick’s own magazine — is like flying in first-class over scorched earth for a year, then landing and asking your cabin mates, “Do you smell smoke?”
Really, though, this aloofness is journalists’ pathology. Notwithstanding the worst t-shirt slogans of Trump Nation, we will hang ourselves, thank you very much. The thing is, it’s learned. And now we have to unlearn it.
To be clear, the aloofness must not be confused with the more abstract, funhouse-warped conception of “the media”; Jeff Zucker, Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves and those responsible for reinforcing the cultural reach and potency of “the media” did unassailably well for their share-holding constituencies. This is a more concrete and diagnosable affliction owing to a number of factors — a few unique to 2016, but mostly reflecting the journalism establishment’s well known, long-cultivated attitudes toward convention, access and entitlement. (Charlie Pierce, for one, had the “courtier press” nailed before the election… of 2012.) These attitudes built a monolith of complacency that one can only hope has now disintegrated — first shaken loose by the Gawker verdict and finally demolished by everything we got wrong before Election Day. A billionaire for whom crushing journalists is an overriding policy priority has been elected president. Another billionaire who has actually crushed journalists has been floated as the first billionaire’s Supreme Court nominee. Don’t say it can’t happen. Don’t say it won’t happen. Not today.
I’ll defer to smarter minds about what this all means for the Media-Industrial Complex reeling from its own myopia and malpractice. But at the educational level — the one where my students ship newspaper pages at noon, digest calls for their lynching at 3 p.m., and watch with their classmates as an openly fascist, racist, sexually assaultive, tax-evading demagogue is named president at 9 p.m. — we do not have time for hand-wringing and postmortems. There is no time for advocating for what we do, or explaining what we do. There is only time for what we do. What we really do: the reporting, the interrogating, the ceaseless digging and curiosity and revelation, the delivery to our audiences of every uncomfortable fact over every strenuous objection of those whom facts would implicate. Everything on the white board, I’ll advise my journalism lab class. They said it themselves. They know it. That’s what we do.
Still, we learn. I learn. My students learn. David Remnick and Brian Stelter and every New York Times campaign reporter with an A1 story from 2015–16 learn. Now more than ever, as an oligarchy of vandals and its army of trolls successfully tweak and recalibrate their formula for plundering American institutions, the value of understanding what journalists do — and who we do it for — is worth learning, relearning, and re-relearning. And if there’s anything journalists have learned in 2016, it’s that our work isn’t good enough.
It’s too late to salvage this year. But 2018 will be here soon, and 2020 beckons. Do not despair in the echo chamber of Twitter. Do not postulate at the bar. Do not assume or speculate from your desk. Just take a breath (and maybe a day off) and get back to doing what American democracy desperately needs more than anything from its journalists: Work.
