The Media and Our Autocratic Presidency

Don't look away, my friends

In the mainstream/corporate/legacy news media where I spent almost 28 years, there is a fiction that is practiced every single day. It remains the foundation of political coverage at these networks and institutions, and it is premised on (mostly) honorable beliefs about how news media can best serve the needs of the American people. The fiction is this: The Trumpist Republican Party and the Democratic Party are fundamentally the same.

For most of my long career in mainstream media, this approach made sense to me; it worked, it roughly matched the reality of American politics in those years. Democrats and pre-Trump Republicans believed different things and fought fiercely about them. They both pursued their goals with hardball tactics, dark money, and an often distant relationship with the truth. But they shared a general commitment to constitutional boundaries, though they did try to push and bend them from time to time. Yes, George W. Bush asserted maximal presidential powers in the War on Terror and the Iraq War. Yes, Barack Obama exceeded what he himself had repeatedly declared were the limits of presidential power when he established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy by way of an executive memorandum. But in general, on most days, presidents of both political parties respected constitutional boundaries, and abided by the judicial enforcement of them.

We no longer live in that America.

To deny that Donald Trump is tearing down many of the old constitutional boundaries that marked the limits of presidential power; to refuse to see that Trump is establishing a supercharged presidency and an autocratic executive branch to refashion our government into an instrument of his personal will, his personal prejudices, and his personal demons; and to pretend that the Trumpist GOP in Washington is not complicit in this effort, despite decades of protestations that they represent the party of limited government—is to blind yourself to reality. And it is also to rob the American people of the truth they need to understand the actual facts of this moment and to exercise their will, which remains the final and supreme arbiter of what happens in this nation.

But to describe that reality, to stand up and name the grim truth that is rising before us, feels like a betrayal for many in mainstream media. The old code—the commitment to what is called objectivity in journalism—grows out of a hope. It feels noble. The hope is that there is a way to rise above and beyond it all. Of course, that was never really true. There is no Mount Olympus of Objectivity, far removed from the hurly-burly of national life. There are no civic eunuchs who have no tangible involvement in that life, no evaporated citizens without personal interests at stake in our great debates. There is no mandarin class possessing sacred knowledge in America. We are all in this together.

As a journalist, I’ve always believed that the goal is not to be “objective,” but to be fair. We can all do that. It requires the spiritual discipline of trying your best to open your mind and your heart to the story you are reporting and to the people involved in it. You listen. You render yourself vulnerable listening to people speak their experiences, their truths. There is, or there ought to be, a risk every time you go out on a story. The risk is that you will come back changed. In fact, that is the goal. That is the job.

On the morning of April 16th, 2007, ABC News sent me to cover the mass shooting at Virginia Tech University that day. Thirty-two people were killed; the gunman took his own life. For several days, I spoke with survivors and loved ones of some of those who were killed. I remember how quiet the campus was in those days; a horrid silence hung in the air. It wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last, mass shooting I covered, nor the last atrocity, terror attack, natural disaster, war, or other tragedy. When I got home a few days after the Virginia Tech shooting, my daughter Madeleine, then ten years old, looked at me. She’d heard what happened. And she asked, “Daddy, does it make you sad to cover sad stories?” I told her, “Darling, the day it doesn’t is the day I should quit.”

All good reporters—and their numbers are legion—go through the same thing. You know a good reporter when you sense their genuine witness. The good ones aren’t braggarts; they are humble before the reality they chronicle, and silent about the price they may have paid to bring it to you.

Fairness in journalism is simply the honest accounting of what you have seen and heard and understood. You tell the truth. And in this moment, if you are a political reporter, the truth—what you are seeing in the United States—is clear as day. Donald Trump is trying to change the nature of our political system. He wants to rule, not govern. And he is motivated by mad hatreds and boiling resentments that erupt in public and then become policy. There has never been a president anywhere near as dangerous to constitutional governance.

This is what is in front of our faces. These are the facts. The truth. But mainstream media cannot say it. That is a problem.

There are two reasons for this paralysis in the fourth estate. One is silly, the other is sad.

Silly: Mainstream news organizations are paranoid about being accused of bias by right-wingers. The Trumpist media and its allied politicos have developed an industry of outrage at what they constantly claim is bias in the mainstream media. There is, indeed, some to be found. As I said here recently, the lack of viewpoint diversity in the old media has led to missed stories, unheard voices. But the Trumpist bias police are laughably one-sided. Newsmax is a billion times more biased than anything mainstream media ever did. Fox News, too. And the ONAN network or whatever it is. The right-wing media critics aren’t serious. They don’t want unbiased news. They want news that flatters their biases. Period.

Sad: Telling the truth about Trump has been determined by corporate America to be bad for business. The enormous powers of the presidency and executive branch in the hands of Trump can wreak havoc on even the most powerful American corporations. This has led to abject corporate surrender. The lesson Americans have learned in the the last few months: the corporations will always knuckle under.

Our country has never faced a challenge like this. The only way out of it is the way of truth. Tell it. First to yourself. Then to others. Truth-telling can be contagious. Who knows, one day you might hear it on TV.