For years, the chief complaint leveled against the American legal system has been that it is simply too, too slow to keep up with the high-speed criming perpetrated by Donald J. Trump. We blame two failed impeachments on Congress for taking too long, we fault Attorney General Merrick Garland for waiting far too long to charge Trump for his many crimes, we rage at Jack Smith for failing to move more hastily and for not bringing a tight, just-add-water indictment, and then we gnash our teeth each time the Supreme Court dreams up some pretext for sending everyone back to GO and ensuring that there can never be any form of accountability for the former president’s worst malfeasance. By its very nature the justice system is glacial, methodical, punctilious, and backward-looking in ways that make keeping up with the well-resourced, wealthy career criminal supremely challenging.
While all of that is true, it’s increasingly apparent that the same charge can be leveled against journalism as well: that this elaborate system of fact-processing tools that was constructed to—how did we quaintly put it, “hold power to account”?—suffers from virtually all the same failings as does the law. The very same qualities that have made it nearly impossible to have any meaningful legal accountability stick to the former president in a court of law are now revealing themselves as the same things that plague journalism.
To briefly review: Donald Trump declined to accept the results of the 2020 election and fomented an insurrection at the Capitol that supported his claim that the election was “stolen.” To this day he insists that the election was the product of a Big Lie. None of that matters, though, to two of the biggest newspapers in the country: On Wednesday, it was reported that the Los Angeles Times, and on Friday, the Washington Post, decided that they will not endorse Donald Trump’s opponent in the election because insert audio of gum popping, raging brush fires, and the sound of champagne bottles opening. It turns out the billionaires who own our few remaining news institutions that have the resources to do journalism think—like half of the voting populace does—that all that journalism they paid for is just irrelevant. Note to journalism: Ya blew it.
In the waning days ahead of another election where democracy—oh, and by the way, fascism— are demonstrably on the ballot, as we await the much-vaunted “October Surprise” that could somehow break the fever hold of denialism around Trump’s moral and political and cognitive failings, we seem to have forgotten that the very idea of amassing evidence and putting on proof is now fully antiquated. The very notion that the American voter is open to evidence and proof in this campaign is the same category error that allowed us to believe that a guilty verdict would change hearts and minds. This is the Algorithm Election, and the systems that once existed to test facts are obsolete. Much like criminal processes, and facts themselves, journalism is lacing up its sneakers as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk are circumnavigating the globe with oozing lies. Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is deciding to put on his slippers for the evening and sit by a nice, comfy democratic dumpster fire.
We can and will debate why this is so. Jeffrey Goldberg’s devastating reporting this week on Trump’s desire for Nazi generals who are loyal only to him should have exploded into the news stratosphere with its many revelations, chief among them Trump’s own chief of staff John Kelly’s horrified sense that Trump simply doesn’t believe the military serves anyone but him. Kelly’s willingness to call Trump a “fascist” would have also been a revelation, save for the fact that it collapsed into yet another round of internecine banter about who gets to use the word “fascist.” Partly journalism cannot rise to the occasion because it is now wholly enslaved to self-serving oligarchs and tech bros. Partly journalism can’t rise to the occasion because everyone decided to save it all for their book launch. Partly journalism can’t rise to the occasion because we will never shake off our obsession with horse races and novelty, and partly journalism can’t rise to the occasion because we live in a world of such impenetrable bubbles that even were an October surprise to burst through the sound and light show, the people who most need to see and hear and believe it never would. The October surprise, then, is that we are incapable of doing through journalism what we are also incapable of doing through the justice system: agreeing on facts and holding malefactors to account.
We can and will debate in the years to come whether this is because we allowed local journalism to wither and die on the vine, or whether it’s because we allowed capitalism to swallow journalism, just as it swallowed state courts and local governments. We can someday debate whether we so fully blurred the lines between fact and opinion that we allowed voters to believe that their own opinions mattered more than agreed-upon facts. And we can discuss whether journalism finally shrugged its shoulders and gave up and became a reality show before or after the courts did. But the undisputed truth is that there can be no undisputed truth, because Donald Trump is an arcing, sparking, frothing, flaming, black hole of truth consumption, and because millions of his followers believe him when he says that the press lies and the justice system is the deep state.
Perhaps, then, the problem is not so much a question of speed as of time. Donald Trump has managed to outrun the law and the press not because he is faster than either, but because we live in an age in which neither serves as an arbiter of anything meaningful. We in the media continue to imagine that the next story, or the next revelation, or the next sex tape will provide the smoking gun in much the same way we used to imagine that the boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago would ultimately tilt the public consciousness into reality. This is not a call to give up on journalism. It’s a call to look around and be scrupulously honest about who among us has given up on journalism, why, and if there’s any conceivable way back.
There is still a lot to be done in the days remaining in this contest, and especially in the fraught days that will follow, when Trump and Trumpism will utilize both law and journalism to pollute the vote count and question the election process. But that in turn demands that we in the press remain true to the things we already know how to do: investigate, report, bear witness, question, take our time, and admit that we don’t know what we don’t know. There is one side in this election that intends, as it has done for the past two presidential contests, to flood the zone with shit: to lie fluently and constantly in the knowledge that destabilizing confidence in the media and the courts is fascism’s own special Christmas miracle. We owe it not just to journalism and to the rule of law but to democracy itself to persist in believing in and also fighting for our centuries-old systems of truth-seeking, just as we recognize that they are suffering under the greatest stress test of our lifetimes. It is uniquely possible, this time, that journalism isn’t coming to save us any more than the courts are coming to save us, and that we therefore need to rally to save them both. While we are at it, we need to recognize that the moment has come to save ourselves, and that the time left to us can be measured in hours and days, not years and decades.
