Find any gathering of people of color, or liberals, or people of color who are liberals, and in short order the conversation is going to turn to worrying and hand-wringing: Is the U.S. a safe place to be now? Is the nation in a constitutional crisis? Does it still qualify as a democracy under the leadership of President Donald Trump? Is real journalism about what’s happening in this country dead? Shouldn’t somebody do something?
The first Journalism Under Fire: Guarding Against Threats to Democracy event, sponsored by Howard University’s Center for Journalism and Democracy, aimed to answer those questions. The center is the latest big project of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times magazine journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner for “The 1619 Project.” Hannah-Jones, who also teaches at Howard, gathered journalists and a historian together to put questions about America’s status to rest. The Thursday, April 24, event in Howard’s Cramton Auditorium served as balm for worried spirits and a charge to fight on.
The energy in the room that night was, mostly, of relief. Scattered conversations in the audience expressed the sentiment “I’m so glad I’m not the only crazy one” — how happy people were to be around others who think like them and worry like them. When Hannah-Jones acknowledged the front-row presence of Black journalist Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, whispers approvingly cited his work that firmly and soberly addresses the dangers of the current moment. Others noted the presence of students in the room as a sign that Generation Z might begin organized activism against the Trump administration.
But there was one thing that stood out: Much of the audience in the room on the historic hilltop of Howard University — the nation’s preeminent HBCU, the intellectual home of Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, Kamala Harris and Vernon Jordan — was white.
Hannah-Jones acknowledged the elephant in the room as part of her opening remarks.
I’m guessing it’s your first time here, she said. The audience chuckled.
She set the foundation for the event with a reminder that the freedom and resources of America have been available to all adult citizens for only about 60 years. For the other 190 or so years of the nation’s existence, at least some portion of the population existed under a regime that restricted its rights, she explained — a jab at people who think the Trump administration is a historical aberration.
The famous story of Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran murdered by another WWII veteran because Evers worked to help Black people assert their rights, “warns that America has been here before and can be here again,” she said, by way of example.
The “again,” she suggested, is now.
“The America that so many of us warned about is upon us,” she said.
She pointed out that the Trump and his administration are clearly no fans of Black history and have targeted journalists and journalism organizations who write things he doesn’t like. And those facts make America dangerous for people who are trying to report and tell true stories about the nation.
“Even holding this event where we discuss ideas and history requires courage,” Hannah-Jones said.
TIME WILL TELL
The first guest of the evening was Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor who specializes in 19th-century history. Her newsletter, Letters from An American, soothes the souls of more than 1.5 million distressed subscribers daily. She is known for her ability to put America’s current state into historical context.
Some of the context necessary to understand where Americans are is to know, historically, what the playbook for autocratic leadership has been.
“If you’re trying to make sure people make bad decisions, it’s important to make sure they don’t get good information,” Richardson said.
Trump and his administration have worked hard to discredit and otherwise undermine the press, suing them, seeking large settlements and even limiting the access of venerable institutions such as the Associated Press to him and his staff. In his first administration, he used the term “fake news” so much to refer to mainstream media that it became part of the public lexicon, and part of the public consciousness, planting suspicion about media.
Hannah-Jones asked Richardson to explain why that tried-and-true path works so often, and in particular, why it works for Trump.
“Trump is an interesting character because he builds himself through the media. He has managed to use the attention of the press very effectively,” but he is also working to destroy it at the same time, Richardson said.
Ultimately, some large media organizations may fail, leaving room for newer outlets, Richardson said, adding that independent press — newspapers in the time Richardson studies most — rose in large numbers during prior periods of political and economic turmoil.
“I suspect what we will see is larger mainstream outlets that independent journalists have pioneered,” she said. “We will see independent journalists coming together.”
But she cautions that the rise of a smaller, independent, diverse press isn’t 100 percent good.
“The independent press [can be] problematic, it doesn’t give us a shared sense of knowledge,” Richardson said.
She sees a silver lining in people seeking their information from sources that aren’t the ones they traditionally depended on: People are genuinely interested in being informed about the world and American principles, often for the first time.
“Book publishers are madly reprinting the Constitution,” Richardson said. “People are, like, ‘I gotta read that sucker.’”
THE REAL SITUATION
As Richardson exited to rousing applause, Hannah-Jones welcomed Mariel Garza, formerly of the Los Angeles Times editorial board; Robert Kagan of The Brookings Institute and formerly of Washington Post; and Joy-Ann Reid, the former MSNBC host.
Each had a different experience in a mainstream news organization that decided in one way or another to acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, and each experience led them to believe the same thing: America is in real danger.
And critically, corporate media isn’t coming to the rescue, either as an example or in the information it presents to willing audiences and how it presents that information.
Robert Kagan said he resigned from the Washington Post after its owner, Jeffrey Bezos, wrote an essay declaring that the organization would soften its opinion content by focusing on concepts such as the free market and personal liberty instead of some of the hard-hitting issues that it had been known for. Bezos’ stance was perceived as an olive branch to the incoming Trump administration.
But despite agreeing in advance to change to meet Trump’s desires, Bezos hasn’t seen much return for it, Kagan said. His space travel company, Blue Origin, reportedly isn’t winning government contracts the way SpaceX, the company owned by Trump official Elon Musk, is.
Bezos and Musk are just two of the billionaires who have an outsized ability to reach Trump, raising questions about whether America now is existing as an oligarchy, a type of government in which all power lies in the hands of a small, wealthy ruling class.
There are still columnists at the Post who are doing good work, Kagan said, but Bezos made it harder for them.
“I think Bezos sold his soul for nothing,” he said.
Garza has a similar story. She resigned when her company’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, decided the paper wouldn’t publish the endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for president. It was an endorsement the paper’s largely liberal reader base expected, Garza said.
Her resignation, the lack of response to it and the changes that have subsequently been made to the L.A. Times made her rethink a lot about her former career.
Like Richardson, Garza now thinks the fall of so-called mainstream media, now mostly in the hands of billionaires, could be good for the country.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that billionaires lose credibility and their organizations fall apart,” she said.
Reid famously was let go from MSNBC. She said she still hasn’t been told the reason why she and her team were fired. As she looks to the future, she sees several ways that mainstream media failed America.
Importantly, Americans have little knowledge, broadly, about international news. That needs to change, she said.
She said Americans are so siloed that even when they think they’re consuming information outside of their comfort zones, they usually aren’t.
“We were talking to each other, we were preaching to the choir,” she said.
She is also concerned that young journalists are equipped neither to tell the stories of this constitutional crisis nor the stories of the future because they’re still focused on objectivity in news reporting and storytelling. The voice from nowhere is now a fool’s bargain, she said.
“We’re moving in a world of very personalized journalism,” she said. “We need to train our journalists that they need to develop an individual, trustworthy voice.”
GET UP, STAND UP
Yet despite all the doom and gloom, the meat of the event lay in the speakers’ desire for more from the media and the public in general: More protests, more attention to issues that matter, more fight.
“I would like to see more activism, more talk turning into actual action,” Kagan said.
During a Q&A that focused significantly on what role young people and student journalists can play in the fight for democracy, they agreed on three things: be mindful about information sources, become real information sources for the people in your own life and be willing to pay for the news you need.
Know what news sources the people in your lives turn to, Reid said, and where you have the opportunity, “deprogram some folks” if you see they’re falling prey to misinformation.
Also, it’s probably a good idea to take a sabbatical from social media.
“Social media can be a horrible thing, it can be an amazing thing,” Garza said.
The owners of social media platforms have the same incentives to be bad actors as the owners of large corporate media, Reid said.
“Americans need to think about plan B” for information, she said.
