The Guardian is unafraid. And it’s independent. (No billionaire bosses.) In this media climate, those qualities are as rare as they are crucial to good journalism.
Good journalism is also crucial to the informed citizens we need for a functioning democracy. From too many legacy media outlets based in the US we’re getting something else entirely: horse race coverage, scraped-up and reheated scandals of little significance, credulous repeating of claims, polite evasions about the threats and crimes of the right, and what’s been dubbed “sanewashing”: the translation of the luridly loopy utterances of Donald Trump and his minions into coherent-sounding policy statements. And now we’re seeing billionaire owners of major papers suppress their own editorial department’s endorsements.
As we face another momentous election in the United States, I think hard about what the last several years might have been like if these institutions did their job with the fearlessness of the Guardian when it comes to calling lies lies, crimes crimes, and threats threats.
I believe that the deference and evasiveness of legacy US media organizations comes from many causes, including fear and the habit of pursuing the appearance of even-handedness even at a time when the national political situation is wildly lopsided. Lopsided, that is, because one side is pursuing attacks on democracy and the constitution, and seeks to institute an authoritarian regime while stripping rights away from most of us: from women, immigrants and refugees, queer people and trans people, and the rights of workers to be safe in their workplaces.
The other side has its flaws, its timidities and eagerness for compromise, and the Guardian covers them well, but it is at worst a status-quo party seeking to hold off the coup. That is, the two are not alike, and good journalism does not create the false appearance of symmetry – does not engage in “bothsiderism”, as it’s sometimes called. The situation we’re in is so new we’ve had to reach for new words to describe it. Strikingly, both sanewashing and bothsiderism unpack the failure to accurately represent the realities of the situation. They’re diagnoses of diseases that weaken truth-telling, and thereby democracy.
The Guardian has become a major US source, in terms both of its readership and its coverage of the local and national scene. It has reporters on the ground from protests in the north-west to disaster response in the south-east, has some of the best political journalists at work covering Washington, funds investigative journalism and a wide bench of opinion-writers (yeah, including me, and I’m loyal to the Guardian because it’s the one place I can write what I think without it being edited into something much more tame and mainstream). It’s been bold and uncompromising in its support for reproductive rights and women’s rights, as well as immigrant and other human rights.
The Guardian also does more and better climate journalism than any other newspaper out there and that’s been true for a long time. What if all the major news outlets had given climate the centrality it should have in our public conversations, our politics, our reporting, as the Guardian does? The climate is a physical reality and its future depends on political action – it, too, is something at stake in the current election. The climate is the physical circumstances of our existence on earth, and of all the other species from polar bears to coral reefs. When it goes haywire, systems break down and nature and people suffer, as we’ve seen this year from climate-intensified hurricanes in the south-east to extreme heat in the south-west.
Climate deserves centrality in our news coverage and our conversations, and that’s another one of the important reasons I’m proud to write for the Guardian – and to support it financially myself, too. We can’t change what all the other newspapers do, but we can keep doing what we do, and you can keep supporting fearless, independent news that covers what matters – including the failures of the mainstream media.
