Democracy Needs Fearless Journalism

Vox is an American news and opinion platform. Their homepage reads “democracy needs fearless journalism” as a tagline to get more journalists to write for their website. This phrase struck me and I’ve been thinking about it since. Without a free and fearless press, democracy doesn’t just weaken, it crumbles. With Donald Trump returning to the White House this past month, fearless journalism now becomes a matter of survival. 

The Washington Post editorial board holds the slogan “democracy dies in darkness.” More than simply a tagline, it is a warning deriving from our historical reality. When power goes unchecked, when leaders silence criticism, and the public is deprived of the truth, democracy slowly withers away. President Trump has long made his hostility and dislike toward the press clear, repeatedly branding journalists “the enemy of the people.” His attempts to discredit and intimidate journalists are not just personal grievances he holds but part of a broader strategy in his authoritarian playbook – playbooks used by Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Adolf Hitler. 

It’s not a stretch to say that America is on the same path. 

Trump’s rhetoric parallels figures such as Stalin and Hitler, who branded journalists and intellectuals as enemies of the state. President Trump and his administration’s aggressive attacks on journalists and news organizations signal a dangerous shift toward state-controlled narratives and away from democratic accountability. Trump is a President that doesn’t care about protecting the press and on top of that, it wouldn’t bother him if someone shot reporters. He has proudly said, “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.”  Trump is a President who has verbally attacked the media and press more than 100 times in that eight-week period before the election, discluding social media posts. Trump is a president that refers to journalists as “monsters” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people,” ironically. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, in his 2020 Presidency, Trump is a president who has made over 30,000 false or misleading claims. 

Trump is a president who has created a climate where even the best and most fact-checked news is dismissed as “fake news” simply because it doesn’t fit his narrative. Trump is a president who encourages other foreign leaders to discredit and restrict the press in their own countries. Trump is a president who wants writers unable to write, as they are too busy looking over their shoulders worrying about being silenced. 

Authoritarian regimes fear the truth, making the need for fearless journalism so important, as it holds those in power accountable when nothing or no one else can. Investigative journalism by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post exposed President Nixon’s crimes and led to his resignation. Without their work, the American public may have never learned the full extent of his abuses of power and he would have finished his term in office without consequence. More recently, we have seen with the January 6th insurrection, how reporters have risked their safety to document the attack on the U.S. Capital in 2021. In its aftermath, many reporters were attacked through lawsuits, intimidation or outright violence for simply reporting the facts.  

Trump’s continued assault on the press is not just about discrediting critical coverage, it is also about controlling the national narrative. Trump’s goal is to “delegitimize the work of the press as fake news and create confusion in the public mind about what’s real and what isn’t: what can be trusted and what can’t be,” is a similar goal to 20th century dictators such as Stalin, Hitler and Mao. This isn’t just a problem for journalists; it is a problem for all, as he is pulling strings to dictate what the public should believe. 

Who will tell us what’s really happening if journalists are too afraid to speak, silenced or exhausted? When the government dictates what is “true” and what is not, democracy ceases to exist in its true form. The tagline “Democracy needs fearless journalism” is more than just a catchy slogan. It acts as a warning because once we lose fearless journalism, we lose democracy. And if we lose democracy, history suggests we may never get it back.  

We need readers, writers, thinkers and journalists now more than ever.

• #democracy
• #journalism