News organizations wake up to the threat to their existence

The death of media freedom and independence, once you have seen it, hardly ever unfolds in new or surprising ways. From the majority world to the minority world, media freedom and independence do not disappear in ways that makes one surprised at the novelty of disappearance. They die in very path-dependent and boring ways, more often than not with the help of news organizations and actors. Knowingly or unknowingly — but still with their help. For example, every time news organizations have talked about a potential third term this year, they seed the idea of violating the Constitution among their audience. An idea that should shock the conscience is talked about every which way, to the point where it has been normalized.

The thing about normalization is that it unfolds in an environment where abnormal things are talked about to such an extent that an individual eventually finds them less abhorrent. They begin to operate as water does to fish, there but not really there. With a wink and a nod, actors talk about a third term as something that can and should be debated, and they know that the more they talk about it, the more it will be treated as legitimate news and thus open room for ambiguity. This moves the Overton window towards them. They treat journalism and their audience like an orchestra playing to passengers who believe the ship cannot sink since it is unsinkable, even though the ship is actively sinking. Media freedom and independence do not simply disappear like a magician’s rabbit. They erode slowly, while well-meaning people normalize conversations about Constitutional abrogation. These debates unfold on Sunday shows, newspaper pages, and op-eds.

The thing is, take a look at all the conversations around the world about term extensions and pay attention: These debates typically allow permissiveness with regard to a constriction of media freedoms and independence. Here, the last 11 months have seen one satirical show pulled off air because an organization’s affiliate stations threatened not to show it since they did not like the jokes. Another had its contract not renewed because the parent organization was in the middle of a multi-billion-dollar deal that needed government approval. A well-respected editor of a newspaper’s global opinion section was fired because they published, on their own personal website, a reprint of someone else’s musings about the place of Black women and other non-white populations in the country. All of this has happened with the underlying threat of license revocation and investigation of specific journalists by government agencies. When this happens anywhere in the majority world, it is typically covered as that country’s march into the abyss. Media coverage is often vociferous, urgent, and nonstop. What have we gotten instead here in the U.S.? Mostly shrugs.

To this end, it is my hope that news organizations wake up to the threat to their existence. It is my hope that as they cover moments that threaten their independence and freedoms, they do the work of telling their audiences how this connects to threats to democracy. That they do this not in opinion pages, or in talking heads shows where all people do is shout and threaten fellow guest members. That they do this as part of the news, and that they engage in a type of news construction anchored on a civil function rather than one seeking to make a splash. That editors leverage their editorial privileges to eschew episodic stories that fail to inform and largely work to shock. The firings, non-renewals, etc. remind us that we have taken for granted hard-fought independence and freedoms, assuming that they will always be there whether they are jealously guarded or not.

This is not to say that they should cover that state in ways that may be misleading. Rather, they should trust that their audience has the mental acuity to understand and engage with complicated realities. Unfair and misleading coverage only works to further erode trust, opening the door further for democratic ideals to be eroded completely.