What comes after "pro-democracy journalism"
Toward tomorrow's popular press.
What was “pro-democracy journalism”? The newsroom beats created after Donald Trump’s crashing of the electoral gates in 2020 were inspired by the delegitimization of ballot-counting, the fake electors, waves of mendacious litigation, and threats against election workers and officials.
Four years later, these sorts of procedural threats to the popular will didn’t matter so much. The democracy spoke with a clear, crisp voice in handing Trump his cleanest win yet. Illiberal actions Trump takes as president will bear the authorization of a willing plurality of voters.
The journalism community should take this moment to sweep away some of our intellectual cobwebs from 2020 as the work begins to create the popular press of tomorrow.
The term “pro-democracy journalism” isn’t accurate enough to capture the danger of this moment. When some of us in the press talk about threats to democracy, we’re often actually talking about threats to liberalism. Although democracy and liberalism are closely intertwined in many 21st century governments — hence the term liberal democracy — they are distinct ethics. Democracy is governance by the participation and will of popular majorities. Liberalism protects freedoms by constraining what those majorities or other sovereigns can do. Democracy is about power, liberalism about refuge. It’s the refuges, including the free press, that are now under direct attack.
Sometimes democracy is the biggest danger to democracy — as it should be, if democracy is going to mean anything. Many illiberal strongmen enter through open gates: Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were elected in free and fair elections. Although there is a rich intellectual tradition that argues for waging militant democracy against authoritarianism "even at the risk and cost of violating fundamental principles,” we also definitionally don’t live in a true democracy if you can’t eventually vote to end it.
Know yourselves: The free press is a liberal phenomenon before it’s a democratic one. The job is to lead, not follow, and to create the popular press of tomorrow. The sole legal foundation for the practice of journalism in the United States, the First Amendment, only says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of the press. Whether someone actually creates a free press for Americans to enjoy has not been the Bill of Rights’ concern. Today, it's increasingly the case that many communities, especially poorer ones or those from marginalized communities, are not served by any press whatsoever. Most Americans don’t even trust the press we do have, and yet it persists in diminished forms. But even an unpopular free press is a precursor to popular movements, like our abolitionist newspapers of yesteryear, or the Black press driven out of the South for covering lynchings.
Incumbency has nothing to do with it. Creating the popular press of tomorrow requires having a clarity of conscience, knowing the moment, and applying courage accordingly. The names of the journalists who curtsied to the powers that be are never the ones that ring out in the halls of history. And right now we are living through some capital-h History. Our media leaders seem most lost right now when they act like their job is to be more responsive to the mobs of today rather than the public of tomorrow. The labor movement offers us rich history on how to build and rebuild new democratic oases amid hostile, illiberal environments. The first lesson of organizing is that the ethic of freedom and drive for survival starts with you and nowhere else, or else your union — or your country — is just a law firm with colored t-shirts.
We don’t have to overthink this. The purpose of a free press is right there in the name: to serve freedom. Intellectual freedom, freedom of opinion, the freedom of association, the power of the free sciences and free arts to liberate us from our own ignorance. These are the preconditions for achieving and sustaining the final freedom, the one we all have to practice together — liberal democracy. In the storm, be the refuge.
The problem right now is not enough participation, and the strongly held belief, by many, that they're vote doesn't matter. We've had four years of some fairly substantial legislation passed by the Biden Administration that nobody knows about. Those that might benefit most by progressive legislation have been led astray by Trump, their all knowing, and their social media bubbles. Legitimate journalism must somehow, someway, penetrate those bubbles.
I wish our legacy media would report to Americans that any political system comes in shades and gradients: democracy is on a spectrum. I believe Putin calls Russia a democracy. The term has almost become meaningless. Let’s remind Americans that there are different versions of democracy. It’s not binary.