How to make journalists disappear

Subtle patterns in America become explicit.

“Le ventre législatif: Aspect des bancs ministériels de la chambre improstituée de 1834,” Honoré Daumier, 1834 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I don’t know Jelani Cobb in his role as an educator but afford him with an unusual (for me) amount of personal respect. I met him as a journalist in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, after an unarmed Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer, and on those streets we both watched something break in America. One of his dispatches from The New Yorker:

Our modern ideals of diversity and inclusion are the more sociable descendants of the [Black Power] movement’s emphasis upon representation in what was once referred to as “the power structure.” Yet it’s more useful to think of Ferguson as a microcosm, or even a precursor, than as an outlier. Defending the city from the onslaught of negative publicity, Brian Fletcher, a former mayor, assured reporters that there was nothing particularly hostile or unique about it. “What happened here could’ve happened anywhere,” he said. Indeed, that is the concern.

More than a decade later, Jelani is now the dean of journalism University of Columbia. It’s a role reversal: no longer the sagacious outsider, but one of those besieged caretakers within an ailing ecosystem that we national journalists parachute in to write about. Accordingly, Jelani appeared as the sensational leading anecdote in a recent New York Times story titled “At Columbia, Tension Over Gaza Protests Hits Breaking Point Under Trump”:

Days after immigration officers arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist, administrators at Columbia University gathered students and faculty from the journalism school and issued a warning.

Students who were not U.S. citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine and protests related to their former classmate’s arrest, urged Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor. With about two months to go before graduation, their academic accomplishments — or even their freedom — could be at risk if they attracted the ire of the Trump administration.

“If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he told the gathering in Pulitzer Hall. When a Palestinian student objected, the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb, was more direct about the school’s inability to defend international students from federal prosecution.

“Nobody can protect you,” Mr. Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”

This blunt assessment of the risks for international student journalists was not received well by some Times readers, including press critic Dan Froomkin, who characterized it as Columbia journalists “being told to obey in advance by their dean.” Froomkin later apologized after Jelani explained the context:

Those words were technically accurate but practically misleading. My words about protection came in response to a question about what the school was doing to protect visa-holding students from potential arrest and deportation. I went on to say that I would do everything in my power to defend our journalists and their right to report but that none of us had the capacity to stop DHS from jeopardizing their safety. It was important to speak directly to the threats journalists were likely to confront in reporting on the situation on campus not to dissuade students but to give them an honest rendering of the risks it entailed.

“These are, in fact, dangerous times,” the dean concluded. “They require as much caution as they do courage. It is my responsibility to lay out this fact as clearly as possible for the journalists in my charge."

This is, of course, the kind of honest guidance an editor or elder gives to journalists operating in authoritarian contexts, where your behavior and choice of words can get you arrested, deported or (god help us) killed.

The novel part is that this advice is now being dispensed to American residents about how to behave while in America. The repressive local policing we witnessed in Ferguson has gone fully and unrelentingly federal; what once could have happened anywhere can now happen everywhere, all at once.

There is an effort afoot to make journalists disappear in the U.S., though not all of the contributing forces know they are in concert. The public tires of consuming or believing straight-ahead reporting. Public figures tire of being subjected to independent depiction or appraisal. Financialized media conglomerates tire of their low cash-flow legacy newsrooms, while billionaire owners tire of journalists’ expectation of editorial independence. Tech platforms tire of any expectation to keep the public informed rather than simply engaged. President Trump’s tiring of questions from the Associated Press or of funding Voice of America could be coldly judged as a plebiscitary expression of the country’s exhaustion with independent journalism.

There are obvious remedies to journalism’s decline. The authoritarian’s threat to journalistic independence can only be fought with unbending assertions of journalistic independence. Monopolistic platforms should either be 1. dismantled by antitrust cops or 2. regulated like public utilities. They should hand out union cards and build strike funds every time another newsroom is acquired by a hedge fund; billionaire dilettantes require all that, plus some extra doses of public humiliation. The growing insularity of public figures and their P.R. facades just makes independent shoe-leather reporting all the more compelling, provided journalists have the skill and resources to do it.

But only the public can save the public. Across the arc of American history, exposé journalism as a practice only historically thrives when strong supply (well funded news producers) meets strong demand (unhappy citizens), as the scholar Mark Feldstein noted in 2006:

• Why was there such little watchdog journalism in the middle nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Because supply was restricted by stagnant technology and constricted media competition, while demand was limited by political stability and public apathy. In such inhospitable times for investigative reporting, the lonely muckraking banner was held aloft mainly by committed ideologues, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass in the 1850s and I. F. Stone and Jessica Mitford in the 1950s.

• Why was there such modest muckraking in the Populist and New Deal eras despite all the economic and political turmoil? Because high demand caused by economic, political, and social turmoil was stymied by the limited supply of the mainstream media. One result: the growth of alternative journalistic outlets like the Farmers Alliance newspapers in the 1880s and socialist periodicals in the 1930s.

• Why the current proliferation of pseudo-muckraking on cable TV and Internet blogs? Because in a period of economic and political calm, the public’s low demand is drowned in a tabloid ocean supplied by lone bloggers and media conglomerates that prefer the entertaining appearance to the expensive reality of genuine watchdog journalism.

Under this rubric, Feldstein concluded in 2006 that for investigative journalism to have another American heyday, there would need to be “public demand, created by some combination of political, economic, and social turmoil; and media supply, most likely the result of new technologies and journalistic competition aided by a tolerant legal climate.”

Journalism’s supply problems are well documented and discussed among journalists at this point, partially because we have some agency there: do better work while asking policymakers to address the infrastructural issues.

But only the public can want what the public wants. If the public wants cultural Putinism (hat tip to John Ganz for the coinage) — pervasive social cynicism under a kind of senile imperialism — the best journalists can expect are minor roles as dissidents, or exiles. Though many fine writers have been both.