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Professor Samuel G. Freedman at the Columbia Journalism School's alumni weekend in 2023. (Chris Taggart)

Another Letter to a Young Journalist

We’ve entered a dark age. We need your generation not to despair, but instead to recommit to the fight for democracy.

November 6, 2024
Professor Samuel G. Freedman at the Columbia Journalism School's alumni weekend in 2023. (Chris Taggart)

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Dear ________,

Like many of you, I spent a very fitful night trying to force myself into sleep against the crushing reality of Donald Trump’s election. By the time I gave up the futile effort, I had three messages on my phone. The first was from my adult daughter, saying simply, “It’s so bad.” The second was from one of my oldest friends, an ancestral Republican who had disavowed the party during Trump’s first campaign, distressed by the sounds of a wannabe dictator. He sent an emoji of slapping himself in the head. The third came from a decades-ago student of mine at Columbia Journalism School who has had an illustrious career as a journalist and author committed to progressive politics. “I feel everything I have ever worked for and written about,” his text lamented, “is utterly pointless.”

At your age, and as a relative newcomer to professional journalism, you may be experiencing feelings of despair and impotence that are even more enveloping. And I am the last person to offer you any empty bromides. When I wrote “Letters to a Young Journalist” in 2006, and updated it in 2011, I myself still believed in the modern American tradition of nonpartisan journalism. As a lifelong liberal, I had awakened grimly on other post–Election Days to see conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich voted into the White House and congressional leadership, but I never thought the fate of democracy itself had been put at risk.

I no longer entertain such a fantasy. When Trump was elected the first time, eight years ago, I wrote an op-ed essay declaring that I had lost my faith in American exceptionalism. Then the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, taught me the frightening fragility of our national institutions and constitutional norms. Now, with the return to power of a Trump who has openly declared his authoritarian goals, relentlessly attacked the press, and been described as a fascist by his own former chief of staff, not only my trust in my fellow citizens but my long-held beliefs in journalism itself have been shattered. 

Saying so, however, is not an argument for you, or even for aging me, to give up. The antidemocratic counterrevolution would enjoy nothing more than our surrender. Recognizing the existential threat around us is the most piercing alarm to change how we do what we do, to redefine our profession and indeed our mission for the technological, commercial, and political challenges we face as both journalists and citizens. That old toolbox of mine belongs in the rubbish heap.

Very often during the Trump era, I’ve thought back to a speech that Jorge Ramos, the journalist best known as an anchor on the Spanish-language network Univision, delivered at Columbia Journalism School’s student awards ceremony in May 2016. At that moment, when Trump was just one aspirant to the Republican nomination, Ramos spoke with what now strikes me as clairvoyance. From his experience in his native Mexico and elsewhere covering the kind of strongman leader known in Spanish as a caudillo, he warned all of us in the audience that our cherished model—the so-called “view from thirty thousand feet”: just do the reporting, lay out the facts, and “let the chips fall where they may”—was completely ill-suited to such a political figure. Just this morning, I read back over some of what Ramos urged:

“In Spanish there is a great word to describe our place as journalists. We have to be contrapoder. In other words, we have to be on the other side of power. That’s where we belong. And from that place is where you can challenge authority. But here is the tricky, controversial part. To challenge authority, you have to take a stand.

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“I know this goes against everything that we have learned in journalism school. We were taught to be objective and neutral in our reporting. But here’s what I’ve found. Objectivity is almost impossible and neutrality is not desirable on many occasions.”

The sense of worthlessness you and I and so many other journalists are experiencing today is not because our collective work failed to help elect a Democrat. It is because our work failed to make a persuasive case for democracy. Donald Trump and Project 2025 have made no secret whatsoever of their extreme, authoritarian agenda. As journalists, we very likely will come in for our direct share of the attack, in forms that go way beyond the first-term Trump’s denunciations of “fake news” and the media being the “enemy of the people.” In his next four years, Trump can be expected to pressure the Federal Communications Commission to delicense or otherwise punish broadcast outlets and change libel laws so they can be used to intimidate, muzzle, and bankrupt independent, accurate news organizations. Right-wing control of both Congress and the Supreme Court, plus the Project 2025 plan to replace tens of thousands of federal civil servants with Trump loyalists, ensures that there will be no checks or balances against the Trump agenda.

This kind of unprecedented assault on journalism demands that we reposition ourselves in the way Ramos advised. We learned some hard, bitter truths about legacy media during this campaign. First, it is sheer folly to rely on the concept of a supposedly public-spirited mogul to be the kind of fearless publisher we need now more than ever. Even at its best, that model would have been unsustainable. Katharine Graham isn’t being reincarnated. And, frankly, just in the past two weeks of the presidential campaign we saw the limitations of newspaper owners. Three of the major news organizations with ultra-wealthy owners—the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the Los Angeles Times under Patrick Soon-Shiong, and the Minnesota Star Tribune under Glen Taylor—chose not to even make an endorsement in the presidential race. 

Their cowardice, or cravenness, at the top of the news organization reflects a troubling duality within much of the legacy media. It is the contradiction between brave reporting that relentlessly showed Trump’s peril to democracy and the default setting among top editors that a news organization should not take sides, even a side between fallible democracy and the genuine prospect of dictatorship. Every accurate critique of legacy media in this election cycle—for its obsession with poll-driven “horserace” coverage and “sane-washing” of Trump’s hateful, deranged rants on the campaign trail, just to cite two examples—points to the inevitable result of that untenable contradiction.

Your generation needs to put an end to it. In the America we will now be living in, even legacy journalism must overtly stake out its position. My group of old-timers has trouble letting go of the venerable ways, as if they were as benign as still using a flip phone or a CD player. Your cohort, having come of age among #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, has already been forcefully questioning those ways, pushing for advocacy journalism to be the center rather than the alternative. I’ve heard that case made passionately by my Columbia students increasingly over the past dozen years.

Let’s face it. For technological reasons, in the digital era, there isn’t a national media anymore, in the way one existed with the major TV networks and mass-circulation newsmagazines of my formative decades in the 1960s and 1970s. There aren’t widely accepted national facts, as was the case even during the turmoil of the Vietnam War years. The internet has blasted apart such consensus, and you, as a digital native, know that far better than I do.

Faced with the intended demolition of democracy, the news organizations that you will be populating and perhaps leading must regard themselves as part of a principled resistance. The weapons will still be truth and facts, but they must be explicitly deployed in opposition to authoritarianism, the way journalists in countries from Mexico to the Philippines to Russia have been operating all along. You will endure risks that I never did. You will also experience a sense of purpose exponentially greater than any I ever knew. The risk and the purpose will be inextricably bound, the way they have been for journalists like Maria Ressa and Vladimir Kara-Murza

My second big admonition to you will seem very different, though I believe it’s part of a greater whole. The gap that has opened within America between the more and less educated, between urban centers and rural or small-town regions, is a reality. A demagogue like Trump can cynically expand the divide, but he didn’t invent it. And, from my own career, I am convinced that the divide has cracked as deep and wide as it has partly because of the evisceration of local journalism. One part of your mission is to rebuild it.

As with legacy media, local media shows us the inadequacy of the traditional business model of private ownership. Before Craigslist sucked up the classified advertising, before aggregators and then social media vacuumed up the display advertising, before you could click on just about any article for free, that private-market system functioned well enough. When I started my reporting career on a local daily in central New Jersey in the mid-1970s, there was a competing newspaper for ten or fifteen miles in any direction. All of them, like my home at the Bridgewater Courier-News, had a newsroom staff of about fifty and a circulation of about fifty thousand. That world is not coming back, and its demise has been hastened by the vultures of venture capital, buying and then stripping for short-term profit what’s left of local newspapers.

What’s lost in their absence cuts two ways. There haven’t been enough reporters and editors in these communities—suburbs, small towns, midsize cities—to chronicle for us coastal elites the depredations that deindustrialization, agribusiness, and global free trade have brought. To focus on the opioid epidemic in Appalachia, to mention one favored topic these days, is to look at the symptom rather than the disease. The sense of being unseen, unheard, and unfelt surely has helped propel the votes of so many people in Red America for a candidate promising to be their retribution. Hopelessness loves revenge.

In the other direction, the people in these news deserts rarely get to know any journalists as people, as friends and neighbors. When local journalism was a viable industry, you would run into a reporter or editor or photographer coaching a Little League team or playing in a bar band or standing next to you in the supermarket checkout line. You can’t so easily demonize journalism and journalists after such intimate, everyday contact. You might think more than twice about rooting for reporters to be tossed in jail.

It will be up to you to significantly expand the number of nonprofit news organizations. The trend toward the nonprofit model has already been a huge plus for American journalism, giving us news organizations such as ProPublica, Chalkbeat, and the Marshall Project. The next goal must be to seed the deserts, to restore the journalistic landscape that has been so savagely starved. You will tell the stories the whole country needs to know, and your presence will be its own kind of safeguard against Trump’s enemy-of-the-people narrative. The best of these local nonprofit news organizations will develop their own local donors and subscribers rather than assuming a limitless lifeline from major philanthropists and foundations. The best NPR member stations are already doing so; it is more than possible for print as well.

Well, I’ve written more than I intended, and I fear that I’ll come off to you as just another AARP gasbag. I suppose I wrote partly to reassure myself, as I near age seventy, that my half-century as a working journalist and my thirty-five years as a journalism educator have not been an utter waste, a grand act of self-important self-delusion. 

But, you know, the daughter whom I mentioned at the start of this letter happened to call me as I was writing. She’s in her early thirties, about your age, and she’s been through this sort of catastrophe before. Eight years ago, she had a ticket to the Hillary Clinton victory party at the Javits Center in Manhattan. She’s clear-eyed about the danger descending upon us, but she also knew how to get out of bed this morning. I ask the same of you. You’ve got a full to-do list. And it’s for the sake not only of journalism but of democracy.

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Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia and the author of ten books, including Letters to a Young Journalist and, most recently, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.