The year we band together and fight back

Teaching a media law and ethics class in America today is to constantly explain to your students that while something may be well-established as illegal in decades of case law, it is nevertheless happening to journalists across the country as we speak.

I want to tell them that in 2026 journalists will band together and fight back with clarity, force, and persistence.

Each week, my Montclair State students and I discuss recent media law and ethics news, and I’m often adding slides to the deck right up until class begins with yet another example of brazen assaults on press freedom and free speech, from high-profile cases like Jimmy Kimmel to two local reporters on trial for doing journalism in Kentucky.

It is hard to explain to students that despite their legal rights to film law enforcement officials in public spaces, 72 journalists covering immigration in Los Angeles alone were physically attacked. That the Associated Press is in court fighting for what executive editor Julie Pace says is “the right of the press and public to speak freely without being targeted by their government based on its preferences.” And so many more examples.

The time has come to take an uncompromising and aggressive stance for press freedom that brings together news organizations of different sizes and missions. We should form some kind of Free Press Consortium (but give it a better name) that includes some of the largest and most powerful news organizations like The New York Times, Reuters, and ProPublica, and also smaller nonprofits, upstart players and independent journalists, as well as all the organizations already doing important work like Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and more.

This consortium would develop a relentless campaign to speak up and stand together. Individual journalists would share their own testimonies on social video platforms about why they care about democracy and the role of the press in it. It would share ideas and resources and strategies and come to the defense of others who face the wrath of the Trump administration and its sycophants.

Yes, the Trump administration, Fox News, Breitbart, et al. would label this the “woke left media” or whatever and go on the attack. Let them. Some journalists will say this is writing off the Fox News audience at our peril. But this audience is already gone, ensconced in its bubble, where suddenly the Epstein files don’t matter so much after all. There is only one way to win any of this audience back, not to mention people in the center and on the left who also increasingly believe that the media stands for the elite and not for them, and that is to fight back.

A tepid insistence that we will do what we always have done is not going to work. People of all parties and ideologies are looking for fighters. Taking an authentic stance for what you really believe is what counts in today’s media ecosystem.

I can easily list a litany of mistakes I think that traditional media has made when it comes to meeting this moment and many moments before it; I have built my career on finding new approaches to journalism that focus on engaging, serving, and listening to communities in ways that challenge the status quo. But the large mainstream news organizations still have the resources, and especially the legal might, that is needed to form the bulwark. The bigger and broader the coalition, the more power we have together, even if we don’t agree on everything about how journalism should be practiced.

This approach is not only a fight against something but a battle for something…trust. The truth is that trust in journalism has been eroding precipitously for a long time and continues to go off the cliff. Gallup recently found trust in the media at a new low of 28%, with Republicans’ trust dropping to its lowest level ever, 8%. But Democrats are losing confidence quickly as well; Pew Research Center recently reported the lowest level of trust in media among Democrats they had ever recorded — down 12 points just since March, to 69%.

What we’re doing is not working, and it hasn’t for a long time. It’s time to go harder than ever on transparency. It is, yes, time to be an advocate (I said it). Give people something they can believe is genuine, even if they may disagree with some of the specific things journalists do.

The call to stop tear-gassing journalists covering protests is a pretty no-brainer one for most of us to make, but I would go further and make a case for the imperfect but critical search for truth itself. Yes, we will listen to everyone and maintain our independence, but no, we will not pretend that both sides are equal if one is demonstrably lying. Just as college professors being harangued about “intellectual diversity” should not need to teach unscientific conspiracy theories about vaccines that aren’t backed by the data, journalists do not have to dutifully give credence to obvious falsehoods in the name of objectivity. In an ideal world, this consortium could even conduct some investigations together, although this form of collaboration is certainly harder (although it doesn’t have to be) due to competitive pressures.

We could take a page from courageous students at Purdue, who published a free press edition of their newspaper and distributed 3,000 copies across Indiana University’s Bloomington campus after administrators fired the Indiana Student Daily’s advisor, ordered it to only publish homecoming news, and abruptly ended print editions. The front page read, “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” and Purdue’s student publisher, Kyle Charters, called the distribution “Operation Clandestine Delivery.” If students with so much to lose can stand together like this, why can’t the rest of us?