I have spent the last 36 hours or so considering what Donald Trump's election means for me and my country. I've also spent a fair amount of time considering what it means for my profession as a journalist. Consider this - for the better part of the past year, there have been no competing narratives involving what is described as the mainstream media. The first has been perpetuated by the media itself since it has been part of its mission and mantra since "the media" was a thing. Namely, that we (meaning journalists that get paid to do the job) are the truth-tellers.. that we are the gatekeepers of fact and, although admittedly there are bad apples in our bunch, that we are the American public's best bet as to getting the real scoop on what's happening in the world. To say it more bluntly - our version of the world around you most closely comports with the way reality actually is. The version perpetuated by conservatives, alt-right websites, many Republicans and, frankly, a lot of Americans period - is that the media has an agenda. That we deliberately twist stories and coverage and "facts" to fit the reality we want them to see; that at best ,we cherry-pick facts and at worse, make things up out of whole-cloth. Throughout the past year, I have felt and seen my profession increasingly come under attack by people who have no idea what we go through on a regular basis to try and present things even-handedly and with as little bias as humanly possible to prove to them that we really are the truth-tellers we claim to be. Then Tuesday happened. And it handed every person who doubt's the media's veracity a silver bullet to shoot us with - right between the eyes. The America that was revealed in Tuesday's election was the world they always believed was there - the world they accused us of trying to cover up; a world that we insisted DID NOT EXIST. We can blame the polls all we want. We can blame all kinds of things and people, and we will. But the media and journalism came out on the losing end of our election Tuesday - because we lost our credibility. And it will take a long time to get it back.
I think it remains to be seen how much our profession will change in the coming months and years. Like anything, time has a way of easing your worst fears and revealing ideas you'd never imagined. My hope is that as President, Trump doesn't continue tweeting at the American public. Cogent ideas and policies can't be explained in 120 characters or less. It also feeds the laziness we have of getting our information as quickly as possible (and consequently with as little context as possible). But context and full explanations begin with us too. The media failed to explain what a Trump presidency could mean to America because it never considered what the possibility it might happen. It largely failed to dig into his policies and proposals (and he did put them out - in fact, the Trump team begged us to look at them more closely). Would either of those things impacted the way people thought about him? Maybe so or maybe not, but it sure would have made me sleep a lot better at night if we had. More than once, I pitched questions - not full segments - just questions to address issues like trade and entitlements. The questions rarely if ever made it to air, consistently dropped because we spent too much time on the latest insult or bizarre action that Trump had just dropped. And yes, it made good television. But being a journalist has to go beyond good television. A producer said to me today that no one would've watched if we had a segment on trade. Maybe. Or maybe they would have. Point is that we share responsibility - not for the fact that Trump was elected - but for a failure to fulfill our duties of trying to fully inform the public. Sounds like old-school whining over ethics, doesn't it? And it is, to a point. Ethics and an adherence to the duty your profession demands is important, even if it doesn't get ratings. But here's the other problem. The public doesn't need us to show them Trump's latest antic. They can get it on YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else. It requires no context, no explanation (if you don't want any). Moving forward, the role for journalism =has= to be as the provider of context that is missing from so much of social media. In doing so, we risk taking heat from those that don't like what we say. But at least we would be providing something that people won't get from the rising tide of digital media. That, as the laws of supply and demand dictates, is absolutely vital to our survival.
All of this brings me back to where I began: the waves that have been threatening to swamp the boat of traditional (or mainstream) journalism over the past two years now threaten to sink it. A President Trump has the ability to completely circumvent the media, either through social media or through a network/mouthpiece of his own making ("Granma" anyone?). It's not just him, of course, the exponential growth of digital media has made it nearly impossible for the traditional media to respond to or actively fact-check the tide of garbage and lies that get through out there. But who is going to believe us now? What we said was up turned out to be down. So if some blogger out there with 10 million followers says Trump is going to buy everyone a new car, what does it matter if the Washington Post says it's not true? Are they going to be believed? There is no truth-tellers out there anymore - at least not ones that we can all agree on. My father told me that back in the 1960's and 70's when they watched the news, it was the news. It was fact - no one questioned it, no one took issue with it. It didn't mean that everyone was on the same page or shared the same ideas, of course. But it was the reason people were actually able to have a reasonable discussion - a shared set of facts upon which to hash out a disagreement. As the politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." I'm not sure everyone would agree with that these days. That reality is largely gone. And it's not just Republicans. Passions are high on both sides. There are conservative-leaning publications doing good work as well. If they presented a die-hard liberal with facts - and i mean that literally - that contradicted their long-held beliefs, would they be able to re-examine those beliefs? Perhaps we are in an age where passion or conviction trumps (pun intended) fact. After all, the dictionary defines "fact" as something that is "indisputably the case". Outside of death itself, what in our public sphere can be considered indisputably true? People instead are opting to believe their gut, their conscience - there are plenty of words for simply believing what you believe. Belief vs. fact - when one is something you feel in your gut and the other is something that contradicts that feeling? I'm betting many people will side with their own convictions. It's difficult to fight that. So where do we go from here? Do we, as journalists, simply pack it up and go home? No. But I do think that it's time to recognize that the fight for truth is, indeed, a fight. Reason, empathy, persuasion - these are tools in the future of journalism. And I don't mean as tools to convince someone of a particular side. I mean to simply get them to listen. Many will simply dump "facts" or shout them or tweet them or scream them from the virtual rooftops. That won't work. But to try and stand for the truth and argue for it as passionately as those who cling to incorrect or uninformed beliefs (whatever political party they belong to), then we are fighting passion with passion. And maybe then we have a chance.
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