Let’s counter the ceaseless scorn from the right about members of the “liberal news media” by saying something uplifting, perhaps a bit grandiose, about journalists: Many of them, probably most, have been doing a Promethean job, working under greater and greater duress to present the fire of truth to the public.
Yeah, I expect some hate mail for “Promethean,” because it sounds so darned elitist and stupid all at once. But read on before you rush to compose your lovely message.
Nearly a decade ago, the standard Republican negative rhetoric about the press morphed into Donald Trump’s nonstop excoriation of journalists as “enemies of the people,” which, as effective rhetoric, has since devolved into an overarching rant about “enemies within” and the compilation of at least one actual enemies list that we know of.
Did you vote for this? (I don’t know; maybe you did.)
Letr’s back to Prometheus. I was wearing a T-shirt from the journalism school I attended half a lifetime ago, bearing the pretentious motto “Wise Shall Be the Bearers of Light,” which I noticed by reading it backward in a mirror. Then it hit me.
I’d worn that shirt for years before making the connection with Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology who gave fire (as well as the arts and sciences) to humanity and was punished for it by the vengeful Zeus. Prometheus found himself chained to the side of a Scythian mountain for disobeying the gods, who believed their strength depended on keeping people in dumb and servile awe.
Bringing enlightenment to humanity led to Prometheus’ endless torment. I was reminded of the commonplace a friend used to roll out in my workplace, and someone probably does in yours: “No good deed goes unpunished.” Prometheus was the prototype.
The way this works today is that understanding and knowledge lead to further questions that make the billionaire gods of our late-capitalist age uncomfortable. Questions like whether any country can call itself “free” without some faith in the things Prometheus gave to humanity — the arts and sciences, including unfettered journalism?
Although the importance of a free press was paramount to the founders of our republic (it’s right up front in the Bill of Rights!), protecting democracy was allegedly too abstract an issue for millions of voters in the last election who put their future, and the country’s, in the hands of the inveterate liar, grifter, cheat and sexual abuser with multiple felony convictions.
Not long ago, if a politician became known for lying (or even whooping in a disconcerting way) he was toast with the American public. Now, half the electorate voted for a man-child who exhibits a cartoonish mix of hubris, incompetence and maliciousness worthy of a Dickens character, even after being warned by high-level officials from his first administration, senior military officers and hundreds of experts in economics and mental health who signed public statements urging a different outcome.
And the thing is, journalists told you about all that.
But a significant chunk of the public has been trained not to listen to any such “deep-staters” or Nobel Prize–winning eggheads. The much-maligned press reported on all of this, over and over again, but millions of Americans either didn’t trust what they said or simply never heard it.
In November, people who read the news were far more likely to vote Democratic, but fewer people across all demographics are consuming news from traditional sources, which partly reflects a lack of trust and partly reflects understandable news fatigue around our interminable election cycles. Many people — including educated, middle-class voters — are simply tuning out political news, and you can’t entirely blame them.
Right-wing ideologues created a media empire by turning politics into a pugnacious combat sport and ignoring inconvenient facts, following the Rush Limbaugh model. Throw in Elon Musk’s degradation of the once lively discourse on Twitter into the disinformation and conspiracy cesspool of X.
People who actually understood both the proposed policies and demonstrated character of both Trump and Kamala Harris tended to support the one who stood for the basic tenets of democracy, including the right to vote, the right to affordable health care, the right to a more equitable share of national prosperity and, oh yeah, the right to freedom of speech for everyone, including (or especially) real journalists.
There just weren’t enough of those people. All the good reporting in the world makes little difference if a significant portion of the population isn’t interested, doesn’t have time or has been systematically and strategically instructed to despise it. As Timothy Snyder writes in “On Tyranny,” “Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”
Even without right-wing demagogues working to undermine them, journalists swim upstream against a strong current of human nature: Lots of people are happier not knowing the truth. Many adages apply (e.g., Lem’s, Brandolini’s), but here’s one new to me, Benford’s Law of Controversy: “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”
Be the bearer of dry facts or bad news, and you’ll leave me cold. Tempt me with a simplistic promise — lower grocery prices overnight! End the war in a day! Create the best-ever health care plan! — or shoot me up with the rhetorical narcotic of the latest conspiracy theory, racist dog whistle or vaguely disguised call to violence, and you’ve got my vote.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, made that aspect of human nature its business model, and was ultimately willing to pay out $787.5 million as the price of catering to an audience that wanted to believe in Trump’s lies about election fraud. In the world of propagandists, that’s just the price of doing business — at least, until they can fully corrupt the judiciary, threaten everyone else into silence and set about rewriting the history.
The right-wing attack on journalism is standard operating procedure for wealthy elites masquerading as populists (Snyder calls them “sadopopulists”). They tirelessly work the refs, describing honest media reporting “liberal indoctrination,” projecting their determination to have not only a fully brainwashed right-wing media but a brainwashed culture.
Republicans have tried to kill NPR and PBS, our best sources for free in-depth news, for decades. Now they want to further intimidate and silence journalists, by jailing them or suing them into submission.
As reported by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, such harassment is nothing new, even in this country. The State of Local News Project reports that more than 3,200 newspapers have shut down in the last 20 years, and many more are reducing their coverage. Some 55 million Americans have limited access to local news or none at all. Journalists who can find jobs are often poorly paid and enjoy little job security, thanks to constant mergers and takeovers and also to the chilling technological advance of AI, which can almost immediately produce a professional-sounding (but not necessarily accurate) account of a basketball game or town council meeting.
On top of all that dismal news for those who gather the news, journalists who haven’t fled the embattled industry are threatened with recriminations by Trump.
As New Yorker editor David Remnick reminds us, presidents hating on the press is nothing new. But once upon a time, journalists actively wanted to be on Richard Nixon’s enemies list (alongside Daniel Schorr and Paul Newman). The feeling is rather different with Trump, who panders to his violence-loving cult in a way Nixon never did.
As for the right’s argument about most journalists being of a liberal bent, that almost goes without saying — curiosity and human sympathy are at the heart of nearly all forms of writing, whether in poetry, fiction, drama, philosophy, comedy or, yes, journalism. As Heather Cox Richardson recently noted, America was founded on Enlightenment principles that aimed at protecting the rights of all individuals, and Republicans are doing their utmost to undo that. That’s why their goal is sometimes described, with admirable accuracy, as the “Dark Enlightenment,” a metaphorical return to the Dark Ages, with billionaire tech bros like Musk and Peter Thiel in charge of personal fiefdoms.
A second inscription at the Missouri School of Journalism, my alma mater, is also on the mark, though it’s even more mockable and highfalutin: “The Schoolmaster to the People.” OK, I cringed a bit, writing that. But the ideal is sound, and I don’t refute it: Teachers work to enlighten students not just so they can become productive citizens but also so they can become citizens, fully engaged in society, culture and democracy. And education is supposed to continue beyond high school and college.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Journalists work in good faith to provide the public with insight into political issues, the character of those who want to lead us, and every imaginable question in the arts and sciences. Are we sometimes, or often, overly superficial? Oh, absolutely. Do we always ask the right questions? Definitely not. When it comes to political coverage, does corporate media focus way too much on “horserace journalism” rather than exploring the issues most important to citizens? Yes, and that can be deeply frustrating.
But unlike propagandists, legitimate journalists never deliberately set out to provide bad information. They may provide misleading or poorly digested information, or information that people don’t want to hear. They may offer commentary or analysis with which you vehemently disagree — but the ethics of the trade demand correct factual information, even in an opinion piece.
A journalist who reports and writes a straight news story is something like a scientist delivering an experimental study that will be tested by other scientists — except the journalist almost always has a deadline, which is typically right now. Journalism is sometimes called the first draft of history because the story is likely to change as more and better information becomes uncovered by other journalists and then by historians.
Like the muckrakers of an earlier age, investigative journalists bring to light what the powerful often want to keep in darkness. They expose what conservatives stand for — “the preservation and popularization of privilege.” Like the power-mongering and philandering Zeus of mythology, they are unhappy when their bad deeds are pointed out.
Journalists told us, in great detail, about Donald Trump’s lifelong pattern of abusive behavior toward women, but millions of so-called Christians who claim to believe in “family values” simply didn’t care. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has pointed out many times, they want women to submit to men’s desires in every way.
Working as a journalist in America has never been easy, but it is now truly a Promethean task, thanks in part to our wannabe dictator and amid a splintering media environment, meddling owners and capitulating corporate overlords who cling to outdated practices in the face of the massive right-wing disinformation machine. In the face of all of that, journalists still do what they can to bring — yes, I’ll say it! — the fire of truth to the people. They are definitely not your enemies.
Read more
about the crisis of journalism
