“Good night, and Good Luck” to journalism as it once purported to be.
Pray for anyone trying to teach the craft of journalism to undergraduates right now.
I’ve just signed on and need all the help I can get. Some days it feels less like running a classroom and more like apprenticing as an undertaker at the Zombie Apocalypse. The students themselves are eager enough. But I’m walking them through what a heartbeat is supposed to sound like while the world outside insists the dead can vote, the living can’t, and the only trustworthy witness is the guy selling snake oil on a livestream.
In Trump world, truth has become as fluid as a puddle of quicksilver. It won’t hold a shape long enough for anyone to examine it, and if you try to pick it up barehanded it slips through your fingers and leaves you contaminated. Journalists, meanwhile, are treated like captive guests at a S&M convention, not participants in a civic ritual, but props to be heckled, humiliated, and used as proof that the whole enterprise is corrupt.
The cable networks and mega-media managers with their Trump fetish are doing what corporate empires always do when they smell fear: they’re consolidating. They’re merging what’s left of the legacy Big Three and their poor imitators into giant archipelagoes of sycophantic drivel, islands of content linked by bridges of cowardice, built on the assumption that the safest journalism is the kind that never risks angering anyone with power.
And those in power or hungering for it have learned something crucial in the last decade: you don’t have to outlaw speech to strangle it. You just have to make speaking expensive.
Schemers at the Heritage Foundation and other engines of ultra-conservative groupthink keep trying to relitigate Times v. Sullivan, dreaming of a world where any Daddy or Dame Warbucks can sue any newsroom into silence for the crime of embarrassing him or her. Meanwhile the First Amendment itself is being chipped into exceptions, limited legal mini-bites, until free speech becomes the handmaiden of executive whim.
You can see the shape of it in the national-security theater, where the message is never “don’t publish,” exactly. It’s more elegant than that. It’s “sign here,” “accept these conditions,” “agree to pre-clearance,” “and if you don’t, don’t expect access, don’t expect badges, don’t expect protection when the next hammer falls.”
I can’t get out of my head one of the smaller stories recently reported out of Minneapolis: a federal agent, an ICE goon (call him what your conscience allows), grabbing and stomping the smartphone of a bystander whose only sin was recording what he saw in a public space, as officers took a brown-skinned five-year-old into custody.
It used to be a First Amendment right to assemble and bear witness peacefully, with due respect to public order. It used to be that the citizen with the camera was part of the immune system of democracy, not a threat, not contraband.
Kiss that goodbye if the Stephen Miller worldview continues to harden into normal practice.
And now, against the same chaotic backdrop, we’re being told to unsee a second ICE-initiated killing captured on video. We’re being urged to embrace an official counter-narrative that insults law, conscience, and every shred of honest reporting.
Even Orwell would be scandalized.
If you think I’m hyperventilating, look at what’s already happening to journalism and to its shrinking number of dedicated champions even as they’re being surveilled, in spirit if not in fact, by MAGA plants hunting for disqualifying “bias.” The new heresy trial isn’t about whether you got a quote right. It’s about whether you’re insufficiently loyal to the reigning ideology, whether your treatment of DEI, or antisemitism, or Israel and Gaza, or campus protest can be twisted into grounds for defunding the mother ship, be it a newspaper or Columbia’s school of journalism.
By my tally, here’s the ever-expanding litany of woe.
Start with the way this Second-Term pressure works. It’s not just an update of the old Cold War caricature, Big Brother red-penciling an inconvenient article line-by-line. It extends way beyond leak enforcement, access control, and regulatory threat and envisages all of these tools being deployed in tandem with lots of malicious improvisation. It’s what press-freedom groups and civil-liberties lawyers keep describing, with mounting alarm, as viewpoint-based retaliation, a system of coercive pressure that aims to chill advocacy speech and even its simple factual cousin into numbed exhaustion.
If you want a clean specimen in a jar, look at the White House access-retaliation against the Associated Press, a punishment linked to compelled terminology as if language itself were now a loyalty oath. The point isn’t even the specific phrase, Gulf of America. The point is the precedent: adopt the administration’s preferred words or lose the oxygen of access. That’s not persuasion. That’s conditioning a benefit on abject submission.
Then there’s the rollback of protections around journalists’ records and sources, the kind of guardrails that existed precisely because a democracy can’t function when sources believe the government can reach into a reporter’s notebook whenever it feels annoyed or embarrassed.
Pair that rollback with aggressive leak-repression tactics, and you get the escalation we’ve been watching — leak cases that don’t just chase leakers but treat a journalist’s work product as a target-rich environment. When you raid a reporter’s home and seize devices, even under the banner of national security, you don’t just frighten one reporter. You send a message to a thousand potential sources: the government can reach you through him or her.
Now layer on the Pentagon’s press restrictions, the kind that multiple outlets refused to sign, the kind that led journalists to surrender badges and workspace rather than accept rules that threatened to treat routine reporting as a “security risk.”
Again, none of Hegseth’s lackeys had to say, “You may not publish.” They just had to make reporting operationally hazardous. They just had to create a minefield around the building and call it “policy.”
Now add the regulator’s wink-and-nod intimidation, the classic “informal censorship” play, where a licensing authority needn’t issue a formal ban because its mere suggestion carries the weight of consequences. When a regulator implies “there will be additional work for us” unless a broadcaster pulls a comedian, that is not harmless banter. It’s a throat-clearing at the microphone of power.
Now add the campaign to dismantle or hobble publicly funded journalism institutions — Voice of America, RFE/RL, the whole USAGM constellation — and the pressure on public media funding that press-freedom trackers have flagged as punishment-oriented.
You can dress it up as “efficiency” or “anti-woke modernization” or “budget discipline.” But the smell is familiar: starve the independent organs and then claim the patient died of natural causes.
And don’t overlook what’s happening in the place we used to treat as the last refuge of argument: the university in all its permutations, research as well as instruction. The crackdown on campus speech isn’t a side story. It’s the domestic lab where tomorrow’s censorship techniques get beta-tested.
The oppressors have already been phenomenally successful. They’ve taken anti-discrimination language — DEI in one hand, antisemitism in the other — and turned it into a club to discipline institutions that once defended debate as a civic virtue. They’ve monitored protests, equated political dissent with hate speech, built dossiers, threatened visas. They’ve branded universities as enemies of the supposedly disenfranchised “common man,” the one who lives in white skin.
The result is not simply that students watch what they say. It’s that administrators learn to pre-comply, professors learn to self-censor, and the classroom becomes a room with the curtains drawn.
That’s the key. The system doesn’t need to win every lawsuit. It doesn’t even need to win most of them. It only needs to make resistance costly enough, exhausting enough, risky enough, that institutions begin to bargain with themselves in advance.
This is where I circle back to my own first-hand journalistic experience, thirty-five years on now, because the decline in virtuous media isn’t just Trump’s fault. He didn’t invent the vacuum. He walked into it like a man entering a room already emptied of furniture.
In my own time, Bill Paley, Roone Arledge, and other TV news tycoons looking to boost on-screen ratings began overpaying star anchors and underpaying beat reporters who actually knew what they were talking about. The beat gave way to general assignment, and then to “content producers” and one-man bands, reporters doubling as cameramen, soundmen, writers, and producers, with no time left to do any real digging.
You can’t build a cathedral of verification when you’re paying your masons by the tweet.
On the print side, USA Today proved the profitability of reducing every news story to a pea-brain niblet, and magazines drove themselves into irrelevance by devoting more and more space to postage-stamp updates for extravagant consumer bargains.
Think pieces migrated online, but digital competition quickly became algorithmized, and the average consumer lost any sense of relevance or value hierarchy amid the ever-swelling information super-flood.
Then AI arrived, promising a dream of wisdom without education, a hallucinated oracle with no trained editorial mediation, no discipline of verification, no human being paid to say: slow down, check, weigh, contextualize. AI is fast becoming the answer to every individual id, a magic mirror that reflects back not what’s true, but what you already wanted to believe.
Add to this the COVID-induced years of isolation and quarantine that wrecked our capacity for socialization, and you have the perfect recipe for the deafening din in which every gigabyte is “equal,” and information overload tells us nothing about life-saving priority — what we should worry about first — because nobody is doing the moral labor of editorial valuation anymore.
Since everybody is now a potential influencer, it’s no wonder a megalomaniac certifiably off his rocker has been able to elbow his way to the top of the heap and hold us in thrall, even as journalism dumbs itself down to sane-wash him.
Which brings me back to the classroom. Because in the end, this doesn’t just come down to bad actors in Washington, or cynical executives in Manhattan, or billionaire vanity projects disguised as “platforms.” It comes back to human-mediated instruction — in journalism and in disciplines far beyond it — disappearing because it has been mocked, marginalized, politicized, defunded, and intimidated out of existence.
When you remove the teachers, you don’t just lose the lesson plan. You lose the last remaining place where young citizens are supposed to learn the difference between assertion and evidence, persuasion and coercion, dissent and hate, a free press and a press that has learned to flinch before it’s hit.
That is the Zombie Apocalypse threatening us. And you, if you’re still reading, are one of the few mourners who hasn’t left the cemetery.