America has tragically changed, but journalism is still stuck in old ways

The swift slide into authoritarianism should have been a five-alarm fire for the media

Three prominent academics released a study last week whose findings are both shocking and unsurprising.

Their article, published in Foreign Affairs, is titled “The Price of American Authoritarianism.”

The takeaway is that in less than a year — this very year — the United States has moved swiftly from democracy to a form of authoritarianism.

Donald Trump speaks at a victory rally the day before his inauguration. In the year since, he has degraded American democracy / Getty Images

“In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies.” It is what they call a “competitive authoritarian” system now, they write, following the path of countries like Hungary.

“In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into … a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition.”

Hard to argue, isn’t it?

You can read the full article here; it is worth your time, and does offer a redemptive path. (The authors are Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt. Here’s a New Yorker podcast in which they discuss the situation.)

“Many Americans still do not view the Trump administration’s behavior as a major departure from the practices of previous U.S. administrations,” they wrote. That’s dangerous in itself; and one reason for it is a media that’s been determinedly mired in its old ways.

Amid America’s fall, the news media has largely failed to meet the moment.

Journalists (with a few exceptions) are mostly documenting what’s happening and applying the same old journalistic techniques and traditions to the vastly different situation. There are minor adjustments but very little sense of the five-alarm fire.

Trump is covered, for the most part, like all those other presidents — the ones who, despite their flaws, were not busy dismantling our democracy. Trump is covered with deference; with headlines and stories that often take him at face value.

When he insults and disparages the press, the members of the press corps simply take it — because they’re professionals who stick to business, which is too often the business of stenography.

And the most respected leadership of the most respected news organizations — such as top editor Joseph Kahn of the New York Times and his boss, A.G. Sulzberger — are on record saying, in essence, that they don’t see it as their role to do anything very different. Traditional impartiality is of utmost importance.

“To say that the threats (to) democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote … that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm,” Kahn told Ben Smith of Semafor last year. And in a Washington Post opinion piece last year that warned of threats to press freedom in America, Sulzberger said, “I disagree with those who have suggested that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.” Of utmost importance is journalistic independence, he has frequently said.

And you’ll hear the same from others in establishment journalism — which is no surprise because, even in a radically changed media landscape, the Times is still a major thought leader on appropriate behavior for the media.

So, if this is flawed thinking, a fair question is what should happen differently? I don’t have the whole answer. But:

• Certainly, at minimum, we should see much more collective action on the part of news organizations when Trump attacks journalists or disparages the truth.

• Certainly, at minimum, there should be public statements of mission that acknowledge that things have changed, and that the news media has a role in addressing it.

• And certainly, there should be an absolute end to the “both sides” coverage that equates truth and falsehood in the name of fairness. The excellent James Fallows sees progress along these lines; too bad that progress took so darn long and is far from complete.

I was talking to a veteran editor the other day — someone who has worked at a high level in two of America’s most prestigious newsrooms. This journalist noted that, after 9/11, there was a shift in tone and substance in the media. Something monumental had changed, and the media responded. The Times’s groundbreaking “portraits of grief” was one example. Some changes weren’t so good. All those flag pins on journalistic lapels were a dubious choice. As public editor at the Times, I looked back at how the paper held back (for 13 months!) an important piece of reporting, at the urging of the George W. Bush administration.

That was partly because of an acceptance that national security was different now. I quoted former Times executive editor Bill Keller saying so.

“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper were not immune,” Keller told me. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

For better or worse, after 9/11, there was a change. We’re at a dangerous place now, too, but where’s the change?

There are some inklings of doing it right. When the Associated Press sued over Trump’s punitive measures and their top editor Julie Pace explained to the public why, that was leadership. Also when the Times sued over the Pentagon’s journalistic gag order, that was the right idea, and necessary. As I’ve said before, I was also impressed with newsroom lawyer David McCraw’s remarks recently to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

But is there a clear and well-articulated sense of mission about the fact that America is no longer a true democracy and that maybe the media needs to meet the moment differently?

No. The GuardianUS (where I’m on contract as a columnist) seems to get this more than most, as you can tell from the statements of top editor Betsy Reed about how her organization is trying to meet this perilous moment.

Individual columnists get it, too, like Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer (a paper that, overall, seems to be taking this more seriously than most). Jamelle Bouie at the Times gave a glimpse into his own moral compass this week when he publicly took issue with Nate Silver’s criticism of Heather Cox Richardson. Silver had called her “the Democratic equivalent of the Tea Party,” and criticized her writing as “a kind of purity politics.” Bouie shot back (on Bluesky) that what seems to annoy Silver “is the existence of people with principles … his complaint is literally that there are people who believe in things, believe those things are right, and believe in those things regardless of whether they are popular.”

Smaller news organizations (Mother Jones, led by Clara Jeffery, and The New Republic, led by Michael Tomasky) do seem to have that sense of mission and purpose. The Bulwark gets it, too. They obviously aren’t alone.

But it’s paradoxical that while the biggest and most influential news organizations are doing great reporting — like the excellent New York Times investigation into the Tate brothers — their politics and government coverage often feels like business as usual.

Journalism should be communicating the still-raging five-alarm fire that’s burning up our nation’s purpose and history. How can they do that? Maybe it’s too late, but I’m going to redouble my efforts, in this newsletter, to say how. My initial question here was “Can Journalism Save Democracy?” We have our early answer: No. Not when journalists, under the clear direction of their bosses, continue to do things in the same old way.

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One of the encouraging things about the Foreign Affairs article is that the writers show a path forward for the nation.

I’m going to devote myself here, on American Crisis, to pressing for the journalism aspect of that. Readers, I would value your thoughts on the “how” of it.

We’ve been failing to cover Trump properly — realistically — for a more than a decade. In my last major piece for the Washington Post and in my memoir/manifesto, Newsroom Confidential — both of which published well before Trump’s all-too-consequential second term — I urged a journalistic sea change. That didn’t happen. You can see more on this topic in a recent Columbia Journalism School round table that I participated in.

Maybe it’s too late. But it seems to me we still ought to try.

What are your thoughts? Thank you, readers, for being here and for your support, in whatever form is workable for you. It means a lot, and it matters, perhaps more than you know.

My background: I am a Lackawanna, NY native who started my career as a summer intern at the Buffalo News, my hometown daily. After years as a reporter and editor, I was named the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999, and ran the 200-person newsroom for almost 13 years. Starting in 2012, I served as the first woman “public editor” of the New York Times — an internal media critic and reader representative — and later was the media columnist for the Washington Post. These days, I write here on Substack, as well as for the Guardian US, and teach an ethics course at Columbia Journalism School. I’ve also written two books and won a few awards, including three for defending First Amendment principles.

The purpose of ‘American Crisis’: My aim is to use this newsletter (it started as a podcast in 2023) to push for the kind of journalism we need for our democracy to function — journalism that is accurate, fair, mission-driven and public-spirited. That means that I point out the media’s flaws and failures when necessary.

What I ask of you: Last fall, I removed the paywall so that everyone could read and comment. I thought it was important in this dire moment and might be helpful. If you are able to subscribe at $50 a year or $8 a month, or upgrade your unpaid subscription, that will help to support this venture — and keep it going for all. Thank you!