News Fix #63: The lack of solidarity in news is a case for civic media

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you. If you've been reading for a while, will you forward this to somebody you'd like to bring into the conversation? I'd appreciate it.

Lately we've seen American television networks tentatively find some common cause. At least as of this publication, they continue to coordinate a response to President Donald Trump blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from press pool opportunities in retaliation for coverage he doesn't like. As the networks' lawsuit proceeds, they decide in concert whether to all forego filming if one network is kept from working the pool. I called this “solidarity” in the last edition, and it is, of a sort. It's markedly better than news organizations' individualistic and weak response to similar actions by the Trump administration going back to his first term.

Much like Dick Tofel has done before me (and did again last week, convincingly), I wish we'd more robustly engage with both the meaning and mechanics of solidarity. As Tofel says, leaving it to the courts to work out all our ethical and political questions is a shirking of our collective responsibility to engage with tough problems and attempt to solve them ourselves.

The lack of meaningful solidarity within the press matters. It matters more, however, that so much of the information the news industry provides and the way we structure it fails to create conditions for solidarity among the people we serve.

Solidarity holds inside it the possibility of mutual support and collective efficacy; it is not just a tactic to use on the way to winning a particular outcome. To deal with ethical and political questions outside the court system, each of us needs to believe in the possibility of mutual support and be capable of the bridging, not just the bonding, so necessary for democracy. The alternative is the winner-take-all world Trump pretends we live in already and needs to continue to consolidate power.

Mutual support is so basic a social building block we rarely talk about it. When our information silos get ever more polarized and politicized, our idea of community is more dependent on us getting our desired outcomes. We see even universal threats as having two reasonable sides, destruction being one of those.

Studies of communication infrastructure theory demonstrate that more responsive and community-focused local information environments do improve collective efficacy and civic participation. That's both a big deal and a positive sign. CIT strategies are better suited for local environments, however. The reluctance of the national press to come together—even under a clear threat like Trump's network ban—is an example of how the national news helps create an information landscape where mutual support is difficult. It is also a reflection.

Where news drops the ball, civic media can pick it up

Newsrooms, especially national ones, can get in the way of more functional communities by so infrequently presenting their reporting in more actionable formats and overusing the conflict frame.

It is not essential for news to create conditions for solidarity, however. It's frankly too much to expect. The news still has a long way to go until it is consistently valuable and useful. Let's do less and do it better.

The same is not true for civic media, a larger field of which news is just one small part. Because civic media strives explicitly for civic health, it can and needs to create conditions for solidarity. Civic media is more expansive than news and can happen in libraries, on public access airwaves, and even in something like a care collaboratory. It's not just about information.

Some local newsrooms already play a more expansive role in civic life despite the higher degree of difficulty. They are news/civic media hybrids who didn't have the luxury of leaving civic health to others. From the Jersey Bee to Capital B's local bureaus to La Platia and many, many, many more, there are plenty of models of what information seeking to build mutual support can look like. (Planet Detroit is signing up beta users for its civic toolkit, btw.) They are providing information and helping people use it together and productively.

My old newsroom was one that worked explicitly towards civic health and still does this very well. But I made little time to think proactively about solidarity during my time there. I engaged in plenty of it as an instinctual response and not a practice.

As I try to rebuild and improve my own journalistic and civic media practice, I want a deeper and more considered understanding of how information makes mutual support more or less possible.

I've been turning over two different sources again and again for months like a pair of dice in my hand, trying to surface useful questions here. Then, Nikole Hannah-Jones' brutally honest and excellent piece on school segregation was published. The difficulty and possibility of mutual support are strong themes in the piece. It provided me a bit more clarity on the stakes of not changing course.

Lessons from a philosopher, an editor, and a reporter

Let me begin with Simone Weil, a 20th-century philosopher and someone I hold as a kind of a patron saint of journalism and beautiful contradictions.

Weil, whom I've written about before because I'm obsessed with her, was endlessly curious about both attention and obligation.

She forced herself to experience conditions before writing about them, unlike many of her fellow philosophers. She is a journalist's philosopher. She was an intellectual and a teacher in 1930s France, where opining on the crashing economy and the “plight of the worker” did not take particular expertise. Even so, at the age of 25 Weil took a sabbatical from her teaching job and worked the line in a Renault factory for a year to write about labor. She also worked a grape harvest and enlisted to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. She was sent home, injured by her own clumsiness, after just a few weeks. Weil knew both the gifts and limitations of mutual support.

The year I was born, Elizabeth Hardwick appreciated Weil in the New York Times Book Review, writing Weil's short life and works have a “sense of personal accountability to the world's suffering.”

Weil's acts of solidarity were always in conversation with her ideas about attention. She examined attention as a sacred thing and even a form of prayer. And she held her attention apart from her solidarity. Our attention is not our action. Instead, attention, cultivated and practiced, created a space where she could better discern if there was a need she should respond to. It is a framework that calls us to pay attention to fewer things and yet do more.

The editor

Thinking critically about how information does or does not contribute to mutual support might seem unnecessary, or even out of bounds, for those of us in the press. There is some real reckoning to do here.

The press can struggle with its allegiance to power versus the afflicted, even in the face of truth.

Contemporay examples of are many. Israel's retaliation against Palestinian civilians after Hamas' brutal attacks on October 7, 2023, is, of course, top of mind. What was a military campaign became a genocide and is now a land grab. The continued lack of moral clarity from a majority of the press is a failure.

What does a press that won't stand up for human rights or democracy call us to do? How actively does it want to engage in creating conditions for democracy?

This is a historical example, but one I can't shake. It's also where the editor of our subhead finally comes in. In March of 1960, the New York Times ran an advertisement from a legal defense fund for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The ad contained both truths and some falsehoods about events in Montgomery, AL. It claimed King had been arrested 7 times instead of 4, for example. And that students at Alabama State University were expelled and locked out of the dining hall for civil rights activism when only the former was accurate. The ad was signed by many prominent people, including Langston Hughes and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the advertising department didn’t fact-check it. Uncontrovertible at that time, however, was that Black residents of Montgomery were systematically disenfranchised. They were brutalized for trying to challenge those conditions. Of the more than 33,000 Black residents of legal voting age in 1960 living in Birmingham, fewer than 3,000 had managed to register to vote.

Grover C. Hall Jr. was the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser in 1960, the city's largest local paper. He was instrumental in convincing L.B. Sullivan, the public safety commissioner for Montgomery County, to sue the Times for libel. Hall went as far as to suggest the Advertisers' lawyer represent Sullivan, which he did. Hall even testified for Sullivan against the Times. It was an attempt to put the northern press in its place. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court as New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

Only the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune filed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court supporting the New York Times. No newspaper associations or trade groups came to their defense. Most white newspapers, even those that covered civil rights seriously, were unwilling to stand against segregationists and for the expansion of the right to vote to Black Americans even in so specific a venue as a defamation case.

The money on the line was enough to bankrupt the newspaper; Sullivan’s claims and others based on the same ad would have cost the Times about $3 million at a time when the paper's annual revenue was just over $2 million. The Supreme Court ruled for the Times and expanded the press' protection against defamation claims. This decision continues to benefit and protect the press.

The reporter

Weil can help us see the potential within ourselves for mutual support and Sullivan the allure of self-interest even when mutual support is called for. Nikole Hannah-Jones' recent piece (and the backstory on This American Life, which includes her daughter's perspective) is a different thing altogether. It narrates the effect of mutual support, or lack thereof, on our communities.

This is a story about the miserable lack of progress the country has made desegregating schools since the civil rights movement, and I read it as such. But in her more personal approach, Hannah-Jones reveals what mutual support has made possible for her.

To TAL's Chana Joffe-Walt, she says,

I come from a people where I know my life, literally, in a literal way, is only possible because people were willing to sacrifice for a larger good.

I mean sacrifice, like put your child through a white mob sacrifice. Sacrifice like get assassinated on your front lawn sacrifice. Sacrifice, like get thrown off of the land that you worked. If everyone says, “Well, I would love to do that– I believe in the concept of equality, but I can't make a personal sacrifice,” we don't get there. I don't live my life.

Hannah-Jones also details what it was like for her and her daughter and other kids when an insufficient number of parents were willing to take a chance on mutual support within a neighborhood school.

Later in the same interview, Hannah-Jones, trying to reconcile that her daughter did pay a cost for her parent's decision to send her to the neighborhood school, says this. “I feel like the stakes are so high when it comes to the issue of integration and equality… And I don't know that we made the right choice. I don't know what the right choice would be.”

Hannah-Jones has moral clarity. She has covered school segregation in a way that makes the stakes clear, and she is willing to put herself on the line. Would more reporting of the kind she does make it more likely more people would support desegregation by being more a part of it?

All these stories show that mutual support can still be lonely. It doesn't work quickly, and it has plenty of costs and plenty of losses. Somehow it still feels necessary and more full of possibility than anything else.

Until next week, take care. I'll have details for our upcoming close reading group next time. I'm so excited for this and hope you'll join. If you are interested in reading more about New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and the reporting surrounding the civil movement, I recommend The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff.