A powerful ‘call to duty', 'civic courage'

Major institutions must stand up to Trump’s attacks on First Amendment rights.

Dismayed by the widespread capitulation to Trump by universities, law firms, businesses, and media organizations, the leaders of seven prominent free speech and press freedom organizations have a point to make.

In an open letter made public this morning, they are warning that our First Amendment freedoms “will wither if institutional leaders don’t assert and defend them,” said Jameel Jaffer, who directs the Knight First Amendment Institute. These include the rights to free speech, assembly and freedom of the press.

“This letter,” Jaffer said, “is meant to be a call to duty, and to civic courage.”

It represents a collective, unified response to the punitive bullying that we’ve seen — the Trump administration’s threats against law firms, the lawsuits against news companies, the yanking of research money from universities.

In addition to Knight, here are the others who have signed the letter urging a stiffer spine: the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Pen America, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Amid attacks on the first amendment, journalists this week once again returned to the question of Joe Biden’s decline during his time as president — without adequately reckoning with how they contributed to Trump’s rise / Getty Images

It’s an impressive group and a powerful statement. But you might wonder if a letter — no matter how eloquent or impassioned — can do any good in the kind of environment we find ourselves in. Fair enough. Still, I was happy to see it. It’s an admirable part of an effort to look in a clear-eyed way at what’s happened so far, and chart a path forward.

What’s happened over the past few months needs to change.

Universities, including Columbia — where the Knight Institute is based and where I run a journalism-ethics center — have cowered. Huge law firms have cut deals with Trump to give millions in pro bono work to his pet causes if the administration agrees not to target them; basically they are paying protection money. And some media companies have shown too much willingness to settle lawsuits or change their editorial practices instead of fighting absurd claims about unfair coverage.

That has to stop.

“When one institution ‘bends the knee’ … its peers feel increased pressure to do the same. Each surrender makes the assertion of First Amendment rights more costly and more perilous. We feel that if major institutions continue to submit rather than stand on their rights, the freedoms of speech and the press will be seriously and perhaps irrevocably weakened.”

They’re absolutely right. You can read more about it here.

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I also want to share my Guardian column from this weekend, based in part on the new book about the way President Biden’s staff reportedly hid his physical and cognitive decline from the public, and how the press failed to dig under the surface.

My point is that while it’s useful to have that kind of reckoning, a more important one remains largely missing: the failures of the mainstream press in covering Trump, starting from 2015 and certainly running right through the 2024 campaign with its normalizing and “sane-washing.”

In fact, it’s still going on. Consider this headline from last week’s New York Times: “Trump’s Plan to Accept Luxury Jet From Qatar Strains Bounds of Propriety.” It sounds as if he used the wrong fork at a dinner party. As one Times reader responded in the comments: “Please. Enough with the ‘strains the bounds of propriety’ stuff. Just say it out loud: The corruption, graft and bribery are out there in the open for everyone to see.” (One more example of why I love to read the comments.)

Here’s an excerpt from my column.

At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?

“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.

It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.

What would be the elements of this reckoning?

Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures.

“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”

From 2015 — when Trump first declared his candidacy for president — right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.

Readers, I’d love to know if you feel betrayed by what you’ve learned about how Biden, his staff and the media covering him handled things as he declined during his term in office. Please let me know in the comments. Do you still think he was an effective president? Do you agree that he should have gotten out of the race much earlier? If so, when?

Thank you for all you are doing to fight back against what we’re seeing day to day. It’s hard not to get down about it, as I did after talking to a young Turkish journalist last week who told me how she once looked to the United States as a beacon of press freedom, in contrast to her own country.

“I had hoped that we would someday become like a little United States,” this reporter told me. “But now it seems like America is becoming a big version of Turkey.”

Right now, I urge you to stay engaged, don’t tune out, and don’t give up. Thanks so much for being here, for subscribing and for commenting. And if you can find a way to support any of the organizations mentioned above, they all are worthy.