Days into the new year, as stuffed suit Tony Dokoupil was readying to take the helm as the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, the network rolled out a much-mocked set of five guiding principles that went heavy on the sort of pseudo-intellectual fluff that’s long been a calling card of new editor in chief Bari Weiss.
Of this set of milquetoast slogans, what most drew public attention was the fourth pronouncement, which began with “We love America.” But what caught my eye was point three, which noted, “It’s our job to present you with the fullest picture—and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue. We trust you to make up your own minds.”
This seems like an explicit embrace of the so-called “view from nowhere” approach to journalism, a once-dominant strain that has lost cachet as it’s become clearer that it primarily serves powerful interests. I found this particularly telling in the context of the broader story of the right-wing billionaire David Ellison’s takeover of CBS News and the consolidation and cowing of this and other storied journalistic institutions. What was probably intended to sound like a bold statement instead had the distinct ring of capitulation.
In-depth reporting is difficult work. It’s not easy to unearth hidden information on the one hand and parse avalanches of it on the other—much of it offered in bad faith—on deadline, especially as newsrooms have shrunk in tandem with the growth and entrenchment of PR and spin. There are real dangers to hubris, too, and I think there’s good reason to approach most political actors and perspectives with some level of openness, if not exactly good faith, barring some obvious examples (e.g., open racists, though that seems like a lesson the media has to periodically relearn). I want to add one more caveat here, a point I think to be obvious but which seems to need explicit stating: The news media has a right to self defense.
There’s the matter of physical and digital security, which journalistic organizations seem to intuitively understand, including in-house security teams at the largest publishers. I think our duty here extends beyond that, to understanding that we have a responsibility to our audience to safeguard our ability to do journalism, meaning that we must understand explicit efforts and policies to undermine that ability and destabilize journalistic practice as attacks, and those perpetrating those attacks as enemies, and I don’t just mean in the opinion pages.
We are under no professional obligation to treat with even-handedness the would-be architects of our demise. I suspect that a lot of people were not aware that Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for the second Trump administration, laid out a plethora of ideas geared specifically toward destroying the news media; many, like the destruction of the Voice Of America system and making it easier for the DOJ to subpoena journalists, have already been put into effect. This was right alongside planks to target academia and the administrative state, but while many news organizations covered the latter, I suspect that they focused less on their own targeting out of the sense that this would be somehow improper, making themselves part of the story, a deep fear of a lot of institutional journalism.
Unfortunately, putting your hands down in a fight doesn’t make you the referee. As increasingly emboldened interests amp up efforts to buy, sue, steal from, and use official power to coerce the news media into submission, we have to embrace a self-defense posture that won’t interfere with our news gathering but will acknowledge that we can’t continue news gathering if we’ve been knocked over by the powers we’re meant to hold accountable.
We are going to have to punch back, and that will mean refusing, when possible, to provide an unchecked platform to the people involved in these efforts. It also means adopting a position of reflexive hostility and open opposition against them, and maintaining a consistent, forceful, and unified message in favor of our ability to do our jobs. Don’t let an on-the-record conversation with, say, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr end without a forceful denunciation of his efforts. Don’t leave audiences to forget these specific threats. Instead, allow them to understand how each would threaten their own ability—their right—to learn more about the world around them via a robust news media. Don’t treat our responsibilities as self-evident; convey to audiences why we do what we do and how it affects their lives. If we’re “making ourselves the story” in this instance, well, it’s because hostile entities are intent on making us a cautionary tale. If it is biased to be instinctively in favor of the First Amendment and news gathering as a principle and practice that must be actively fought for, then it is our duty to be biased.
A bit of antipathy between the press and the political, business, and religious elites of the world is to be expected, and in fact desirable. The consequences of excessive coziness (see: the Iraq War) or veneration (see: the 2000s tech press) are unfortunately well documented and widely understood. Still, there’s a distinction between rhetorical jousting or throwing barbs and active efforts to constrain what reporters can cover, as the Pentagon tried to dictate to its press corps, or weaponizing official entities like the FCC to actively shift the fundamental missions of news organizations.
I’ll acknowledge that there’s bound to be some discomfort with this realization. Industry conversations around the correct approach to things like intent have simmered continuously since journalism really professionalized around the turn of the twentieth century (before which it was more of an openly partisan and factional affair). The last decade has marked a shift, largely a generational one, through which institutional journalism educators like me tend to no longer teach a balance model but a fairness one, with the latter holding that while a journalist should give a full and fair hearing to all views, our job isn’t to just repeat them. We have a crucial additional role, a curatorial one, where we, as something like an agent of our audiences, use all our reporting and expertise to parse which position, if any, is closest to the actual truth and which will best help audiences make decisions. To rise in our own defense against a force motivated to destroy our institutions is only an extension of the impulses that guide our best work and compel us to keep the public thoroughly and thoughtfully informed.
There’s really no other profession that I can think of where it is considered a professional mandate to passively engage with direct threats to long-term viability of the job, and it makes even less sense when that job is fundamental to a democratic system. Editorial leaders, tasked among other things with ensuring the survival of their newsrooms, should start getting comfortable with a vision that includes self-defense as a specific and intrinsic plank of our work.
