Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy

Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions.

Reporters at announcement of sale of Washington Post, June 1, 1933. (Photo by Arthur Ellis/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

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Back in 2006, I was doing an internship at the International Herald Tribune, in Paris. The work was mostly menial. I would photocopy mock-ups of pages for the next day’s edition and sometimes enter short descriptions of articles into an internal management system. My biggest accomplishment was unscrewing a flickering neon light bulb that was making it hard for editors to concentrate—a simple act which earned me the undying hostility of the French janitor, who had refused to help since his shift was ending in fifteen minutes, and did not believe that anyone else should have the right to ameliorate the situation in his stead.

The other memorable moment was the time I was sent home to change. Without thinking about it, I had put on a T-shirt a friend had given me during the presidential campaign a few years earlier: a depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream bearing the inscription “Bush Again?” I doubt the T-shirt offended anyone at the office. In fact, I imagine that the great majority of staffers at the IHT shared the sentiment. But the leaders of the newsroom took very seriously their duty both to be neutral and to be seen to be neutral. In those days before modern social media, the risk of anyone learning about my questionable sartorial choice may have been low; even so, it was one they were not prepared to take.

This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor. This involved posing tough questions to everyone and about everything. And to accomplish that, they needed to cultivate a strong bullshit detector, starting from the premise that anyone they talk to has their own story to spin. To be sure, journalism, even in its halcyon days, never fully lived up to these aspirations; but the existence of these aspirations did do a lot to curtail the profession’s partisan lean and preserve some modicum of trust in mainstream news outlets.

All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.

I have some sympathy for this new self-conception. Democracy really is embattled around the world. And as citizens, we really do have a civic obligation to do what we can to shore up principles like free speech and the rule of law. Democracies need citizens to be engaged—and if some citizens need to adopt an inflated sense of their likely efficacy to keep them going, then let them enjoy their delusion.

But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.

In light of the last four years, I’d go one step further. The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.

The Cognitive Cost of Partisanship

Over the last months, I have heard from multiple European diplomats that the extent of Joe Biden’s struggles has long been well-known. In meetings with a number of senior statesmen, Biden repeated the same anecdotes, or seemed unsure about his own whereabouts, as early as 2021. Is it really plausible that American journalists were unable to learn something that has been known in capitals across Europe for so long—something that, as it happens, tens of millions of American voters have long cited as a serious concern in opinion polls?

No. The obvious truth of it is that, for the most part, journalists simply did not want to go there. Part of that reluctance may have been rooted in an understandable (if misplaced) sense of propriety. But another part of it was rooted in the unspoken suspicion that open consideration of this topic would somehow wind up helping Donald Trump.

As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor.

This brings us to yet another way in which the consensus in the mainstream press ultimately harmed Democrats. It should long have been obvious that Harris was a weak candidate. Though she entered the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination with a lot of enthusiasm and a large financial war chest, she ran a disastrous campaign, and quickly fell to the single digits in polls. In the end, she was forced to drop out before a single vote had been cast in her favor.

Biden revived Harris’ fortunes by restricting his search for a running mate on demographic grounds, all but guaranteeing her elevation to the vice presidency. But given a golden opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American people, Harris flailed. Despite a relentless and unprecedented rhetorical emphasis on the “Biden-Harris Administration,” she developed little initiative of her own and alienated most of her staff. Charged with helping to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming into the country, she refused to travel to the southern border, likely for fear of upsetting parts of the progressive base. For most of the period until Biden bowed out, Harris was significantly less popular than him.

As long as Harris was merely a potential presidential contender, all of that was sayable in the mainstream media. The moment she was elevated to the Democratic nomination, it suddenly became taboo to point out these facts. And when Harris benefited from an unsurprising (but short-lived) surge in enthusiasm upon becoming the official nominee, the critical faculties of mainstream journalists went out of the window altogether. She was now said to be running a flawless campaign, harnessing a groundswell of enthusiasm unknown since the days of Barack Obama—all of which (despite the polls being so tight) seemed to put her on a sure path towards victory.

By the final stretch of the campaign, this confidence had become widely adopted, especially in progressive circles. Democratic strategists were feeling bullish. On Twitter and MSNBC, on NPR and in The New York Times, they were proclaiming that internal polling showed Kamala Harris well ahead; that early vote tallies favored the party; that all the signs pointed towards massive turnout; and that late-deciding voters were breaking blue.

I suspected that some of these strategists may have been acting, well, strategically. Voters want to pick a winner. It makes sense for campaigns to project confidence on the final stretch. So I texted some trusted friends who are deeply ensconced in the Democratic world. All of them assured me that their public pronouncements were rooted in private conviction. Yes, they conceded, they had proven overly confident in 2016. But no way were they making that same mistake again. Kamala was on a sure path to victory. She might even win Iowa!

In retrospect, the cost of these lies layered upon delusions is painfully clear. If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts. Instead, lulled into a false sense of complacency, they played it “safe.”

The irony is palpable. At each step, the mainstream media was careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump. But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election. The cognitive costs of partisanship in the media are high—in this case, arguably sufficiently high to have gotten Trump reelected.

Why Attempts to Save Democracy Are Likely to Backfire

Even if self-driving cars get to a level of safety which far outpaces that of human drivers, they will at times produce accidents that most human drivers would have been able to avert. And yet, as defenders of the technology will be quick to point out, adopting self-driving cars makes sense if it reduces the overall death toll.

Similarly, the defenders of “moral clarity” in journalism may say that attempts to influence their readers can sometimes go awry, either because mainstream outlets happen to be wrong about something, or because readers are particularly reluctant to accept some specific dose of truth. But that, they may say, is no reason to eschew the self-conscious goal of saving democracy if such an aspiration is likely to do good under most circumstances.

I am deeply skeptical that we should write off the sequence of events that led to Trump’s reelection as such an unfortunate and uncharacteristic mishap, and that’s for two reasons. 

The first is that journalists vastly overestimate their ability to influence their readers. Ordinary people are able to sense when journalists frame every news story in the hopes of leading them to some predetermined conclusion. And rather than falling for that conclusion, many of them take that as a reason to stop trusting—or reading and watching—mainstream journalism.

This has likely always been the case. Even in the halcyon days when The New York Times was (somewhat) trusted across the aisle and Americans got most of their news from CBS and NBC, the views of ordinary citizens differed widely from the consensus among the professional class. Notably, researchers trying to show that conspiracy theories have been on the rise of late have come to the conclusion that Americans have long believed in them at surprisingly steady rates. 

But it is especially true now, in the age of YouTube, podcasts, and social media. Journalists who obsess over whether to say that Trump is lying or whether to call him a fascist—as well as the many commentators on social media who spend their days backseat quarterbacking such decisions—assume that their choices will have a big impact on the views of citizens. Sadly, that assumption is unwarranted.

The second reason why I believe that the self-conscious goal of trying to save democracy is likely to backfire is that it is extremely hard to predict the long-term consequences of telling supposedly noble lies. At the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials stressed that ordinary people could not effectively protect themselves against Covid by wearing simple medical masks, a talking point that was duly and uncritically amplified by mainstream journalists. There is good reason to suspect that both public health officials and journalists took this line in part because many hospitals were running out of personal protective equipment at the time, putting doctors and nurses at risk, and impeding their ability to care for patients.

Like defending democracy, the goal of making sure that medical workers don’t run out of masks in the midst of a pandemic is perfectly sensible in and of itself. But as in the case of defending democracy, it turns out that prioritizing that goal over speaking the plain truth can easily backfire. 

In the case of Covid-era masking, the noble lie had three unintended consequences. First, public health officials were too focused on making sure that existing masks got into the right hands and insufficiently focused on producing more masks. Rather than telling people that masks didn’t work, they should have called upon businesses to find ingenious ways to produce more masks—something that started happening once public health guidelines were reversed, and it became clear that the demand for masks would remain high for the foreseeable future. Second, the initial guidance according to which masks did not work made it much harder for public health officials to convince people to mask up once access to the equipment was no longer a problem. And finally, this highly salient case of flip-flopping in the early stages of the pandemic lastingly undermined public trust in the health authorities, likely impeding the uptake of vaccines once those became available.

With a little empathy, it’s easy to see how public health officials could have gotten this call so disastrously wrong. In the early stages of a pandemic, information is limited and the stakes are high. The perceived need to lead the public to the right course of action, even if it means being less than forthright, must be immense. But politics is no less complicated and unpredictable than a pandemic. And as in public health, so too in a functioning democracy one of the most important preconditions for long-run success is giving the public good grounds to trust the information they are given. The reason why it’s so important to prioritize the plain truth over activist goals isn’t that I don’t share those goals or believe them to be nefarious; it’s that, unless we are on guard against our own self-aggrandizing tendencies, the very fact that these goals are so appealing will keep seducing us into screwing up.

The Wider Epistemological Crisis of the American Mainstream

Over the past years, mainstream newspapers have written endless articles about the threat posed by “misinformation.” There can be no doubt that lots of false or frivolous claims now gain enormous traction on social media. Countering these falsehoods is an important and legitimate goal of responsible journalists.

But the truth of it is that the American mainstream itself now suffers from a serious epistemological crisis. If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election. You were also less likely to recognize that school closures would exact a big toll on students’ educational outcomes and mental health or to realize that a lot of Latinos were embracing the Republican Party. And you would, even now, be less likely than most voters to recognize how utterly simplistic it is to believe that America can meaningfully be divided into two opposing blocks of “whites” and “people of color.” 

Americans have lost trust in many of their institutions in good part because, despite their assurances to be the arbiters of truth and science, legacy news outlets and establishment institutions fundamentally misconstrue and misunderstand basic aspects of American life. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs go well beyond the decision by many journalists to flatter themselves into thinking that their task was to save democracy. But the first step towards fixing the problem is for journalists to re-embrace the humdrum conception of their own work that served them comparatively well in the past: to cultivate a healthy distrust of everyone, including those you may secretly believe to be on the right side of history, and report the news without fear or favor.