On February 25, the White House decreed it would decide which journalists have access to President Donald Trump in the press pool, a responsibility which for a century has been handled by the White House Correspondents Association.
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It was the latest front in a war the current administration has waged upon the allegedly free press in the United States. This battle began in earnest with the White House banning the Associated Press from entering the Oval Office because the AP style book—unlike Google—has continued to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico.
In the days after the AP was first banned, something repulsive occurred, even if it was also utterly precedented and predictable: other news outlets kept going to press briefings at the White House and entering the Oval Office and generally going about business as usual. They did not protest en masse. They did not refuse to deal with an administration which had expelled one of their colleagues. They did not work collectively to address a crisis which was obviously brewing and which, within a matter of days, would snare all of them personally.
They just kept going along with power to get along with power.
They tried to maintain their access.
Of course, most of them would similarly lose the same access, just like the AP.
But a long and cultivated absence of solidarity among journalists—the shunning of journalism as a collective practice in favor of individual scooop-based horse race reporting—has led to this crisis faced by mainstream American journalism. It’s a crisis rooted in careerism and faux-objectivity, and a crisis manufactured by journalism schools and most press outlets—including, yes, by the AP itself.
First, we must address that press conferences—like those held in the White House briefing room, or staged report-outs of meetings between world leaders in the Oval Office—have limited news use. They are mostly propaganda. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman write in Manufacturing Consent, these are media events, and offer very little, if any, news people can actually use. They are cheap to cover, give a lot of bang-for-the-visual-buck, and keep news organizations physically and politically close to power. Whether it’s a corporate spokesperson or a president or a king, whenever someone calls a press conference, they are calling the press to heel in a feudal manner and shaping the narrative of what will become news.
My beloved editor at the Voice, the late, great Ward Harkavy (he died of Covid in March 2020 in the first wave of American pandemic deaths) hated press conferences for a simple reason. Ward believed that the only way a press conference could have any real news values was if a reporter asked a tough question and the flack ignored it, then the next reporter had to ask the same question; and if they couldn’t get the question answered, the following reporter had to ask the same question—and so on.
They will not speak out when a colleague is yanked from a press conference in a blatantly illegal, unconstitutional violation of free speech.
But this almost never happens; it is rare for even one reporter to follow up on another at nationally televised press conferences. (Hell, reporter Sam Husseini was violently removed by government agents from a State Department press conference simply for rigorously questioning Secretary Anthony Blinken—and his colleagues pretended nothing was happening and just kept asking questions as if everything was fine.)
This happens because, largely, the practice of journalism is socialized as an individual pursuit, undertaken by objective journalists (people who subjectively are just fine with the social order and the status quo) trying to beat out other journalists. We are largely socialized in the United States to not see journalism as a collective practice—one in which journalists are not competing against each other for the good of their individual careers, but where they are working together to get news-people-can-use to the public. Beyond personal pride, it shouldn’t really matter who gets news to the public—it just needs to get to them.
One way this dangerous, self-centered, careerist ideology (which works against the public interest) is enacted is through what Chomsky and Herman identify as flack in their Propaganda Model: the punishment and expulsion of any journalist who speaks out against injustice. This makes it so that most people with actual journalism “jobs” are the kinds of people who believe society is fine as is and will not speak up about injustice. They will not speak out about injustice, even when confronted with how it is plaguing their peers (i.e., how attendees of the 2024 White House Correspondents Dinner merely stepped over demonstrators depicting the 143 murdered Palestinian journalists who’d been killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza—a number which eventually topped 200). They will not speak out when a colleague is yanked from a press conference in a blatantly illegal, unconstitutional violation of free speech. And they will say nothing when an AP reporter is banned from the Oval.
Of course, as an organization, the AP is as guilty of this as anyone. As I wrote about in my first essay for Lit Hub a year ago, the AP fired Emily Wilder, a news associate covering state politics in Arizona. This happened in 2021, after a harassment campaign by the college Republican group at Stanford University about her support for Palestine when she’d been a student there years prior.
If the AP will throw its own under the bus and end the career of an Arizona politics reporter because she’d spoken as a college student about a situation in another country (a situation which would eventually be considered a genocide whose executioners would be wanted internationally for crimes against humanity), what kind of solidarity can the AP expect from other news organizations? If the White House press corps will look the other way as their colleague is tossed out of the State Department, why should the public care—to riff on Martin Niemöller’s poem—when the White House comes for their cold-hearted asses?
The purpose of journalism is neither anyone’s scoop nor their career; it is getting the public information so that they can create a more informed, better world.
And now, ICE agents have abducted Mahmoud Khalil, a legally documented, green-card carrying resident of the United States. His alleged “crime?” Having organized protests at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student. Secretary of State Rubio and President Donald Trump are threatening to deport him, despite lacking any legal rationale to do so; even worse, Khalil desperately asked Columbia for help, just a day before he was kidnapped from campus housing, Zeteo reported. We are at the stage where political speech is not just being suppressed in blatant disregard of the Constitution, but where political dissidents are being disappeared by the federal government. Where is the outrage from the White House Correspondents Association? From Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, or other journalism schools? From the National Association of Black Journalists?
Put the moral need for solidarity aside for a moment and ask: In a purely self-interested way, how can an industry dependent upon the First Amendment function when Mahmoud Khalil cannot exercise political speech free from state violence?
The socialization of journalists as individual strivers (or, sometimes, as two against the world) doesn’t only happen in news organizations. It happens with the valorization of scoop-driven personality in movies like All the President’s Men. And it happens in America’s journalism schools where, I am sad to say, students are taught to step over one-another, rather than to work together.
Indeed, as I wrote in September, when I was suspended from teaching, one of the reasons Dean Charles Whitaker cited was because of a speech I gave, in which I said that journalism students and professors could learn from Palestinian journalists about how a collective approach to publishing news, and how interdependence might by a better goal than independence. (After a six-month investigation, a faculty panel found entirely in my favor and recommended I be reinstated without any sanctions. Unfortunately, a day after accepting these findings, Dean Whitaker began a new investigation about me, on even more spurious grounds than the first one. Still, I am scheduled to return to the classroom in April.)
One reason Palestinian journalists are beloved in Gaza and why only about one-third of Americans trust American journalists is because journalism should be about addressing injustice. Journalism is about critically identifying injustices, and taking a stand against them. The purpose of journalism is neither anyone’s scoop nor their career; it is getting the public information so that they can create a more informed, better world.
But, to be able to practice journalism, journalists do need to fight for specific things they need—things like livable wages; access to safe housing, food, air and water; and a freedom from discrimination and oppression not just for themselves, but for their family, friends, colleagues and fellow humans. Journalists can only function freely in a society where Mahmoud Khalil can also do his work freely. These are not luxuries; these are necessary for the practice of journalism to even happen.
And when American journalists have largely silently tolerated the beating of college students (in red states and blue, under Biden and Trump), the violent repression of dissent, the expulsion of their co-workers asking rigorous questions, the deportation of dissidents, and the murder of their colleagues, who can they expect to have their back when the grim reaper’s boney hand finally starts to close around their own necks—and they finally feel the existential precarity of subjectivity?
