What the press needs to do to meet this historic moment
As Jem Bartholomew takes over as one of the writers of the Columbia Journalism Review’s daily newsletter, “The Media Today,” he writes about what the press needs to do to provide the necessary context in this moment of “danger and peril.”
“The ambition for journalists covering the Trump administration’s whirlwind of policy changes now, I think, should be to connect the granular impact on the ground, the poverty and disease and layoffs, with well-sourced reporting on what might be driving a policy behind the scenes,” Bartholomew says. “Is it a firmly held policy belief? A loyalty test? Retribution against opponents? The result of dark-money lobbying? Just plain old stupidity?”
He says what needs to be stressed in coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities is its historically unprecedented nature — and not just covered as a feud between political personalities such as Newsom vs. Trump.
On Gaza, he writes: “I predict the journalists of tomorrow will look back on our time with disbelief at the benefit of the doubt afforded to claims made by Israeli military spokespeople, justifying air strikes on hospitals, ambulances, refugee camps, schools, apartment complexes, ‘safe zones,’ and journalist hangouts.”
Bartholomew says: “Trump’s assault on press freedom reached a new summit on Friday with the deportation of Mario Guevara. Guevara is an Emmy-winning journalist covering immigration, who had been in the U.S. for more than twenty years and held a valid work permit. He was detained for one hundred and eleven days after being arrested on June 14 for reporting on a protest against the administration in Atlanta. His removal to El Salvador is believed to be the first instance of someone deported from the U.S. in retaliation for reporting activity.
“We’ve arrived at a place, in my view, where the protection of journalists in the U.S. is increasingly contingent on what they’re reporting on, and how critical they are of the levers of power,” Bartholomew says. “The First Amendment no longer offers blanket protection. When covering stories of legal warfare, violence, harassment, detention, and deportation against journalists, news organizations need to be contextualizing them in this wider attack on the independence of the press.”
Meanwhile, media analyst Margaret Sullivan writes in her Substack newsletter that “The government shutdown is producing an all-too-familiar barrage of performative neutrality.”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world for the media to present a story as just another case of Democrats and Republicans not being able to get along,” she says.
“Not only is this framing easy but it’s also safe. Who can argue with or criticize that kind of even-handedness, even if it doesn’t really tell the story?”
Yet the larger story, she says, is that “Democrats are determined to prevent huge increases in Americans’ health care costs by standing firm.”
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