Reflections on Journalism and Societal Decline

The following was written before we bombed Iran. This development is cataclysmic for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of this newsletter — which chronicles the frontlines of America’s wars against itself, waged on behalf of right-wing authoritarianism — last night’s military incursion into Iran presents more opportunities for Trump and the authoritarian right to strengthen their grip on power and control. The future threat of Islamic extremism in response to last night’s attack will be used as pretext to further erode our civil liberties and stifle dissent. Things are almost sure to get worse, I hate to say.

***

This first paragraph is where I would set up what is known in journalism as the anecdotal lede. I would describe something that is seemingly unrelated to the rest of what you’re about to read, but in a very clever way I would tie it all together. The anecdotal lede would become part of a metaphor for the subject matter of this piece, maybe even a lesson I’ve learned or a discovery I’ve made.

Wrapping it all up, the end of this column — “the kicker,” as we call it — would harken back to the lede, completing a circular path that was taught to me by the star columnist at my hometown newspaper, which is now mostly dead. If I were interested in doing this, I might talk about the house projects I’ve completed in the last month, or re-reading Moby Dick, or playing and writing a lot of music — all of which has consumed my time since I’ve been away from the day-to-day business of this newsletter. I would certainly find a clever way to reach a profound conclusion about modern American life from the inglorious work of replacing faucets and cleaning bathroom tile. But I’m not interested in that because it doesn’t feel honest. That’s because for the first time in my journalism career, I am truly questioning whether all of this is worth it. In a bigger sense, I’m questioning not just the merits of journalism as I’ve practiced it over the last two decades but also how I — and we — spend our time and energy.

This is not directly about Trump or the forces of authoritarianism that threaten us. This is about the exhaustion of modern life — the hustle, the noise, the polarization, the addiction and distraction of social media and the Internet, the dumbing down of discourse, the victories of the stupid and evil, the volume of it all, and the general feeling of decline that I just can’t shake.

All of this makes me want to focus more on what I can control and less on what is well beyond that. I can help out my neighbors and friends with daily tasks. I can make a nice dinner for my wife and take my dogs for a walk because they need to get out of the house. I cannot change the forces of a society that seems bent on its own destruction, and a people that seem to have largely abandoned everything from good taste in music to a societal foundation of reason and intellect.

Part of this is because I’m 41-years-old, and have been at my job of being a journalist for most of the last 20 years. Before heading to Los Angeles, I saw a few new faces on cable news describing the situation on the ground there — another piece of evidence that there are generations coming behind me who both see the world differently than I do, and were not around to experience things like the past unrest that I’ve spent much of my career documenting. “Amateur hour,” I muttered to myself as I watched on Fox News as they interviewed an independent (and, I’m assuming, right-wing) journalist wearing a painting respirator and what looked like a batting helmet.

Let me add to the feeling of dystopia by asking for your money in the middle of a post about how stuff like that feels strange. Thank you for your support!

By the time I got to LA, I watched one of Fox’s correspondents scurry behind the police line for her live shot. She joined other members of the press in staying behind a line of police as they swept down a street, clearing protesters out of downtown ahead of an 8 p.m. curfew. I never attended journalism school so I don’t know if they teach this, but if you are behind the men with the guns who are shooting at unarmed civilians, you are on the wrong side to do your job as a journalist.

Later, I watched a clip of the Fox correspondent explaining to the anchors in New York what was happening there. They asked her questions as if she were embedded with American soldiers storming Omaha Beach. The correspondent expressed much sympathy for the police who were, by then, indiscriminately firing on protesters who were mostly walking away, claiming that they had been throwing “boulders” at the cops. She assured Fox’s patriotic viewers that, even if protesters had their faces covered, that they would be found thanks to the surveillance cameras throughout the area.

Don’t worry, folks at home, the agents of the state who are marching on the citizens will find those citizens and punish them.

In places other than California, Republicans are trying to criminalize wearing masks at protests. At Savannah’s No Kings march, a woman was briefly detained by police for wearing a medical mask. Meanwhile, Republicans apparently see no issue with the masked ICE agents black-bagging undocumented immigrants and detaining U.S. citizens during their raids on American streets.

As the corps of American journalism has been depleted, we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge. That includes everything from the simple fact that overly-aggressive law enforcement has been present not just for a very long time, but got a relatively recent moment in the spotlight when we learned of the militarization of American law enforcement in the wake of Ferguson just 11 years ago. If the institutional knowledge of newsrooms were more intact, there would be people around to tell younger reporters things like this, and that a painting respirator is not an effective way to avoid becoming incapacitated by tear gas. (For that, you’ll need something from the excellent line of Mira gas masks, which I swear by. And Mira, if you’re reading this, because I am 41-years-old and need money to fix things around my house, I will happily become a paid spokesperson and/or accept your advertising dollars.)

The institutional knowledge of newsrooms has been depleted thanks to the degradation of the industry. Folks have also simply died. I recently lost two people who played a major role in my journalism career: Chuck Haga, the longtime columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Grand Forks Herald, and Bill Kotsatos, the New York-based photojournalist. Chuck was there when I was fired from the Herald in 2013 and went into freelancing. He read and supported my work over the ensuing years. I met Bill in Ferguson the next year, and we spent much of the next few years together on the road covering police shootings and unrest.

As the unrest in Los Angeles unfolded, Bill was not there for me to text to see what he thought about it — and whether he would meet me there, so we could once again do what we did best together.

Bill and I had been in touch quite a bit in the last year as he was diagnosed with and quickly succumbed to pancreatic cancer. At the same time, he was reading the first draft of my book — in which he plays a large role — and looking through photos I wanted him to include in it. I flew to New York to attend his memorial, where his son and ex-wife put on an exhibition of his work. Just inside the door of the room where the exhibition was held was Bill’s bulletproof vest and helmet, which I hadn’t seen since they were on his body as we navigated a riot in 2016.

Strangely, it was not at Bill’s memorial where my faith in journalism was restored — and that’s not anyone’s fault but my own. Bill would have understood the strangeness of what I and many other people are feeling. Still, in the middle of the unrest in downtown LA, which a more just world would have allowed Bill to join me for, I did consider that there is a path out of the troubling place we’ve found ourselves.

But my work in LA is a very specific type of journalism, and not one that can be practiced all the time. That’s because, at least for now, this country is not experiencing street-level, violent upheaval all the time. Riots are relatively rare. So, I have to find a way to spend the rest of my time, and that work has left me wondering how effective traditional journalism can be in a country that seems to be bent on decline — and the path toward something better.

***

The failure of journalism

I think it used to take much longer for a reporter to reach the point at which I’ve arrived, where I’m questioning whether journalism is not just a productive use of my time but whether it can achieve the ideological goals that lie at its core. Even completely objective journalism, which I have never really practiced but was the kind that Bill and many others pursue, is based in idealism. By seeking that “closest attainable version of the truth” there is an inherent belief that it will lead toward justice. I set out to nail bad guys not just because it feels good but because I hope that it will result in change. Over the years, my work has changed some things for the better, but that progress has begun to feel insufficient compared to the exhausting march of the American right and the decline it seems to be hastening. This is the part that is directly about Trump.

He has given up the game in a way. That someone so obviously stupid and corrupt can achieve the heights of power that Trump has speaks to this sense of societal decline. Half of Americans who actually voted for Trump looked at his clear ignorance, heard his childish and abusive words, and witnessed his obvious disdain for everyone other than himself and chose to give him the power he now wields against the very people that voted for him. The many Americans who didn’t even bother to vote prove our decline is not just based on poor decision-making, but in self-obsessed laziness and a flawed or non-existent understanding of how the world works.

All the journalism in the world couldn’t stop this country from continuing down the path of self-destruction. Seeing this firsthand, what evidence do I have that we can somehow turn this doomed ship around? When I look back on the positive changes that my journalism has made, each instance of progress is counteracted by regression.

At one of my first newspaper jobs, in Northern Minnesota, a series of stories I wrote about Native American homeless people resulted in the creation of a 24-hour homeless shelter to help get people off the streets — and freezing to death, as my reporting revealed. Since then, with the relative exception of that small town, I have watched homelessness be largely criminalized, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s crackdown on programs that fund social services like those that help the unhoused.

Around 2018, my reporting likely also played a role in pressuring ICE to release an Iraqi asylum-seeker. Do I need to explain how this has been counteracted in the ensuing years? Also around the same time, my reporting on former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins resulted in the House closing a loophole in the STOCK Act that allowed elected officials to invest in foreign IPOs. This was important because lawmakers could simultaneously pass laws that helped those companies, as Collins did. Now, insider trading among members of Congress and the Trump administration is a regular occurrence that barely elicits controversy.

These are just a few examples of how I’ve reached the point, in less than 20 years in journalism, that used to take much longer to reach. The speed of the news cycle, the proliferation of social media, and the firehose of content have all quickened my path toward this feeling of defeat and exhaustion. But it’s more than just the feeling that my work — and the work of all American journalists — has largely failed to propel this country toward justice, peace and a better way of life than past generations.

In this country, it seems that the social progress of my lifetime has been outpaced — even if only by a little bit and for the most part in the last 10 years — by regression and decline. Whether it’s the investigations that constantly reveal the corruption and ineptitude of Trump and everyone around him, or the day-to-day soundbite coverage that gives him and his people the airtime to expose themselves as the strange and hateful people that they are, all the journalism in the world couldn’t stop the past decade of regression and decline from taking place.

***

An overwhelming sense of being overwhelmed

At a time when it’s perhaps most necessary to be informed about all the bad shit that goes on each day in order to make a living, I find myself simply wanting to check out — and I know I’m not alone. In a world that values the quantity of creative content over its quality, am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to say that I want you to pay me money to read what I’m writing about but that I don’t care to convince you to do so, and that I can’t guarantee whether you’ll get something to read in your inbox all the time? Am I allowed to also say that I don’t care to promote some of my work on social media because it’s simply exhausting and feels pointless? Because at this moment, that’s how I feel. It seems disingenuous to write this, then hop on over to all the social media platforms to say, “Here’s this thing I wrote about how everything is exhausting and I don’t care to put up a front anymore.”

It seems insane to continue fighting in an ecosystem that prioritizes the churn over the thought, knowing that to participate in the churn often means having to be aware of all the things all the time. This apparent utter lack of presence seems like the opposite of what brings a sense of serenity to people. I often wonder what it would be like to live in a time and a place that’s just in that time and place. I wonder what it would be like to go back to a time in which I wasn’t able to know exactly what’s happening in another city because I don’t live in that city. Instead, we are everywhere at once, looking through what increasingly feels like the parlor wall in Fahrenheit 451, except that the escape mechanism that allows us to look at a beach in Tahiti while sitting at our desks somewhere else is in our hands all the time, not just in our living rooms.

Understanding that no one is ever truly where they are anymore, powerful forces have abused the freedom and democratization that the Internet initially promised and have instead flattened modern life. This “tyranny of the algorithm” has led to a homogenization of even our physical spaces. The exploitation of the internet and social media algorithms naturally infiltrated our politics, which is why all politics is now national, not local, as the old adage went. Now, everything is culture war, from the cars we drive to clothes we wear and the coffee we drink.

Simply living in our cities and towns and mostly only knowing about what’s going on where we live seems both very pleasant and impossible to achieve. Instead, the abusers of our modern information ecosystems have created a system that, for the most part, only allows the most extreme voices or those who participate in the firehose of content production to rise to the top. Inundated with this noise, we have all increased our tolerance to the point where the old amount of drugs don’t work anymore. We need more drugs — and stronger doses of them. This is how you get people voting for Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. They are the shiny objects that stick out from the masses of reasonable, thoughtful, kind and hopeful people who don’t wake up each day thinking only of how they can get more of what they want.

They, along with the endless promise of infinite social media scrolling, have rewired many people’s brains to consume in a way that was previously only understood by addicts and alcoholics in recovery, like myself. Except it doesn’t appear that most of us are seeking recovery.

The irony of this lack of presence — where we’re all anywhere we want to be no matter where we actually are, or are getting sucked into things that the powerful abusers of the algorithm want us to — is that everything actually is about right now. Things that happened five days ago, let alone five years ago, are demolished by the unending flow of content that demands we look at what’s happening in this very moment. This is both the definition of news and one of the problems with journalism that has led us to this point: by bombarding the public with context-free content about what’s happening in the current moment, journalism often fails to explain that much of what we’re seeing has happened before. We know where the path that Trump and the American right are trying to lead us ends up, and it’s objectively not good for anyone who is not at the top of that power structure. (Like many authoritarian power structures, our current one is brittle and based on the whims of one man. This means that the structure is constantly shifting. People are in it and then they’re not. Because of this survival-of-the-fittest mentality within authoritarian politics, only the most craven and extreme can rise to the top, exacerbating the extremism of the policies that the regime seeks.)

If all this feels brain-breaking, it probably is.

***

Dystopian blips

While navigating clouds of tear gas in Los Angeles, I was looking at my Google maps to see whether I was getting any closer to my hotel. (In a random stroke of luck, the police were pushing the crowds in just that direction. My long day of walking with protesters and fleeing police volleys had led me right back to where I began!) I closed the app to concentrate on the scene in front of me before getting a notification: “Check out top spots to eat near you.”

This is what I call a dystopian blip. It’s a moment when technology’s invasion of convenience collides with the reality of the physical world. It’s ordering a Waymo in order to set it on fire during a protest, or thousands of phones buzzing at the same time with a notification to leave downtown LA because a riot is taking hold — a notification sent by the same government apparatus whose police largely initiated the riot itself. It’s all of us watching scenes of masked ICE agents scooping people up on our phones only to keep scrolling to see targeted content for whatever our personal algorithm has decided we should see.

Combined with the obvious hypocrisy of our politics — the anti-government right supporting masked, secret police; police in Democratic cities doing the work of an authoritarian White House by clearing out protesters with a heavy hand — it can be difficult to separate reality from works of dystopian fiction. In an environment where reality can seem like fiction and even the most out-there fiction seems like it can’t adequately describe the absurdity of modern life, much of traditional journalism feels equally inadequate to protect us from what’s happening, and what’s coming next.

I don’t know where this is all headed and that’s the point. What you’ve read here — if you’ve read it, and if you have, my god, thank you — would never be published in any of the publications that we think of as institutions of American journalism and public intellectualism. That’s because it doesn’t have a tight angle, a concise thesis. It’s also because those publications are still mostly playing by the same rules that got us into this mess. As institutions, they’re part of the mess themselves.

So, it’s time for something new. I think that looks something like a popular uprising against technology overlords, corporate America, monied politics, traditional law enforcement, and media that is either ineffective or directly in cahoots with authoritarianism. It’s about supporting voices, organizations and movements not simply because they are the loudest and produce the most content, but because they have good ideas. The way out of everything that’s wrong with right now, and everything that’s wrong with where we’re headed, is to slow down and think.

Imagine a world based on thought instead of reaction. Imagine a world where we simply create and don’t worry about whether or not the algorithm will pick it up — where things don’t have to fit in the neat little boxes that massive tech companies decide they should in order for us to simply make a living by doing what we love. Imagine having technology, media, and content work for us instead of the other way around. It won’t be easy but it will be worth it.

The circular path of the old-school newspaper column works because it’s a bookend, and it cleverly and neatly wraps things up in a satisfying way. But it requires you to read until the end of the piece, which seems quaint in a world where we’ve trained our brains to only pay attention to something for a few seconds at a time. Maybe if more of us read things all the way through, we’d learn a lesson about where we’ve been, and make a discovery about where we can go.

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