A Little Muckraking, Please

American Journalism Needs a New Dose of Courage and Conscience

In the United States of Donald Trump, American journalism faces a defining test.

Will it be the sleepwalking servant of a propaganda machine? Or will it reclaim its role as public servant, tenacious watchdog, and guardian of democracy?

Because we are not in normal times, these are not rhetorical questions. The coming year may well see the Department of Homeland Security offer journalists stage-managed tours of migrant jails to create a facade of humane treatment. Should the press participate?

The Trump regime will surely sanitize the language it uses to describe these camps, whose legal basis is questionable. Will a compliant press blindly repeat the euphemism “detention centers?” In 1930s Germany, millions of “asocials” were taken into “protective custody” or “preventive custody.” Words matter.

When an angry U.S. President phones the executive editor of The Washington Post or its billionaire owner to complain about “negative” coverage, will the attempt to intimidate be revealed only years later in a book or immediately placed on the front page?

Our alarming situation — we are on a path to American fascism — demands a far more assertive, scrappy, and resolute press. Some news organizations aren’t ready to be aggressive because they don’t accept their broader responsibility in a free society. They have been fact purveyors, always mindful of their own commercial viability. These news companies will continue to be enablers, justifying their behavior by championing strict impartiality, rigorous objectivity, and fast facts.

It sounds reasonable, but it ignores history. The Colonial-era pamphleteers served a crucial role in the founding of the United States with provocative journalism that aroused Americans. In the early 20th century, the Muckrakers dedicated themselves to investigative journalism to lift readers by their lapels and demand change. Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair produced works that targeted corruption and needless human suffering. They exposed corporate and market fraud, monopoly power, government graft, child labor abuses, and unsafe food production. They emboldened Progressives to deliver reforms in working conditions, housing, environmental protection, food and drug protection, and extending voting rights to women. We take these advances for granted today.

The most memorable and admired examples of American journalism later in the century are stories that took months to investigate and landed like bombshells, shocking us into seeing larger truths astride the stream of facts. When two great American newspapers published revelations of government lies and misconduct — the secret Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal — the articles jolted us into a moment of moral and civic clarity.

During World War II, a national Commission on Freedom of the Press, launched by the publisher of Time and Life magazines, determined: “It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”

What drove these investigative journalists to see a wrong and try to right it, to express deeper truths about our society? The finest journalists are idealists, and American journalism is at its best when it takes its public service role seriously, demands public integrity, and is motivated by conscience.

What would a reinvigorated journalism look like? Out of the gate, like-minded editors could form a loose alliance, publicly declaring their intention to deliver fearless coverage and vowing to defend one another from unwarranted government attacks, even in the face of reluctance by their owners. Naive and impractical? I’d be eager to hear other ways to stand up to tyrants.

News teams should immediately refuse to amplify comments by government officials that are known to be false. It’s past time to label lies — and why not? — “lies.”

Former U.S. correspondents in Moscow or Beijing could publish a pamphlet called “How to Pursue Independent Journalism in an Autocratic State.” A reporter might allow himself to be arrested as an undocumented alien to smuggle eyewitness accounts out of a migrant camp. An enterprising journalist could get herself hired by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to report on the replacement of meteorologists by anti-climate-change ideologues.

A few brave news organizations could cooperate to publish groundbreaking updates on the state of justice in America, the state of America’s military, the state of public schools, the state of our democratic institutions, or the health of our environment, complete with annual report cards and expert commentary on how to improve.

I don’t argue that the news status quo has failed the nation. American journalists have produced some superb work in the dark decade of Donald Trump. Now, though, the very viability of a free and independent press is at stake, not to mention a free society. Serious editorial boldness can make a difference.

In 1789, James Madison convinced his fellow founders that the press must be protected in the United States because a robust airing of ideas is required in any society where the citizenry is sovereign. This idea gave birth to the First Amendment. In Madison’s view, tyranny would only be possible in America where the oppressor has an army, the people have none, and the press is enslaved.

The same ennobling principle applies whether the delivery of information consists of ink on paper or a vast, profit-driven network where filters are easily manipulated by algorithms and miscreants. Today, as a would-be autocrat takes power in Washington while vowing to rein in news organs he labels “enemies of the people,” too few news organizations will work fiercely to end the spread of spectacularly corrosive lies, hatred, and cruelty. Too few will see their behavior as complicit.

Is this the best American journalism can do? It needn’t be if thoughtful, courageous editors once again embrace a model based on fearlessness, public service, and conscience

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