The media becomes an activist for democracy

It’s time for American journalism to rewrite its own job description.

The model used to go like this: Bad things happen. Journalists reveal them. Voters demand change. Politicians respond by reforming institutions. We call this accountability journalism, and it’s the foundation of the fourth estate.

Of course, these linkages were always stronger in theory than in practice. But now they are definitively broken. Voters no longer trust journalists, or institutions — or politicians, if they ever did. Politicians no longer answer to voters, since virtually all votes are guaranteed by tribal loyalty; instead they answer to big donors — or in the case of most Republicans, to Donald Trump alone. Thanks to Trump’s own shamelessness, shaming politicians has become next to impossible. Thanks to the internet, pols no longer need the traditional media to broadcast their views.

It’s not that accountability journalism never works. Witness the reporting that forced Trump to back away from Matt Gaetz as a cabinet pick. But that happened only because Gaetz’s actions were even more outrageous than those of Trump’s other nominees. The bar for outrage is being pushed ever higher.

This environment distorts accountability journalism like a black hole distorts spacetime. Rather than strengthening democracy, it can start to undermine it.

To see how, begin with the fact that, as the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently, “shock is part of the plan.” Trump’s consistent tactic since he first ran for president has been to barrage us with shocks — outrageous statements, ludicrous ideas, horrific policies, wildly unqualified appointments, corruption scandals. The media dutifully reports on each one. Isn’t that our job?

But when the accountability linkages are broken, this deluge produces not change, but instead a kind of stunned apathy in our audiences. The message we are giving them is: “Things just keep getting worse, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it.”

So what is the media’s job? The prevailing doctrine is that it’s simply to report the truth. That’s wrong. Our job is to empower people to hold power to account. Reporting the truth is just a means to that end, and achieves it only when accountability exists. Otherwise, reporting the truth is necessary but not sufficient. Something more is required.

What is that something? I think that’s for individual newsrooms to ask themselves; it will vary by the type of journalism you do and who you do it for. But here are a few questions to consider.

• Reporting on every shock as it happens may be the traditional definition of news, but it numbs the public to outrage. It also leaves them no bandwidth to step back and see the bigger picture. It thus creates both apathy and disempowerment. It’s what the authoritarian leader wants us to do. What would it look like to not play into his tactics?
• The Democrats would have us believe Trump voters don’t care about democracy. I think many do — they just don’t believe the United States is one. And frankly, they’re right, not in the sense that elections are rigged, but that the whole system is an elite power game with a fig leaf of universal suffrage. Which is why warning them that democracy was under threat didn’t work: From their point of view, it never existed in the first place. What would it look like for the media to take that view seriously, to interrogate what democracy should be, instead of taking for granted that it’s what exists now?
• Reporting on threats to democracy does not empower the public unless you also give them ideas about how to counter those threats. What would it look like to provide those ideas, and inspire them to act?
• Bad news and outrage gets more eyeballs than good news and hope — or that’s what we journalists have been conditioned to believe. If it bleeds, it leads. Is that still true? If it is, does it have to be true? What would it look like to focus more on the people building the future than on those destroying the present, to generate hope instead of despair? (That’s what my newsletter is about!)
• If some of this looks to you like crossing the line from journalism into activism, you’re right. We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.

But activism is different from partisanship. Partisanship is defining democracy as that which Democrats want and Republicans don’t. That would be a mistake. Rather, we should use this as an opportunity for a big conversation about what democracy really is, or could be.

And I’m not saying we should stop doing accountability journalism either. If nothing else, future generations will need our first draft of history to understand what went wrong. But it’s no longer enough on its own.