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A Country in Peril Needs Journalists It Can Count on
An interview with columnist Will Bunch about what’s at stake as Trump militarizes the country and whether the news media is meeting the moment.
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Donald Trump’s plot to militarize America is underway and the National Guard now patrols two American cities: Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Armed federal agents from multiple departments (most with no police patrolling experience or any relevant knowledge) are walking D.C.’s streets, finding more cameras than crimes.
Meanwhile, Trump’s heavily-armed, masked men are increasingly grabbing people from schools, parking lots, hospitals, and restaurants and disappearing them into American concentration camps. It’s more clear than ever that the dictatorship is consolidating power and the United States is taking on elements of a police state.
A country in peril like this needs journalists it can count on. Will Bunch is one such journalist.
He is not afraid to call out Trump for his unprecedented attacks on the very foundations of our democracy. As national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bunch brings the fire in every piece he writes. There are no government minders like the ones the Trump FCC has mandated for CBS News or corporate overlords like Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos dictating what Bunch can and cannot write. From the headlines alone, you can see that nothing is off limits:
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Because of Bunch’s unflinching approach, I wanted to talk to him about where things stand nearly seven months into this tumultuous time — and where we go from here. We share dismay at the capitulation by corporate media outlets and a growing fear that things will get much worse. But this is also an extremely important time to be a journalist if you are brave enough to speak truth to power. Bunch told me:
“A lot of us grew up reading George Orwell’s 1984 and you had this idea that if there was a dictatorial government, that they would just impose some kind of total censorship regime, possibly, or somehow they would just have hyper-control. And the reality of what they kind of call authoritarian capture of the media is very different because it's a range of different, adaptable, flexible techniques that change depending on what makes more sense for that circumstance.
It’s kind of like a neutron bomb. It leaves the buildings, the institutions intact. You can still go to the Washington Post News room or NPR is certainly still there. All these organizations haven't been shut down. They're still functioning. They're just just not functioning the way that they're supposed to.”
The Price of Kowtowing to Trump
Many news organizations are forever changed. The ones that paid off Trump, like ABC News and Paramount/CBS, along with those that intentionally altered editorial content to support administration propaganda, like the LA Times and the Washington Post, might pay a hefty price if and when the country regains its footing. Here’s how Will put it:
“These institutions now are so damaged, like, can they be fixed? Do we need to replace them with a whole new media infrastructure? Can they recover from this? I was thinking probably not. The outlets that were always pro-democracy, that were never captured, are going to have a certain cache and prestige in this kind of new situation that we find ourselves in.
Conversely, the ones that sold out in the worst possible ways are gonna just suffer gigantic reputational damage, right? The people that reap the rewards of that are the ones out there right now when it's really tough, doing the journalism that needs to be done. That’s the best case scenario, assuming we’re not lapsing into decades of the Handmaid's Tale.”
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So … let’s talk about the way traditional media has been covering Trump in his second term. | ||||||
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Fearless Journalists vs. the Cowards
Bunch credits fearless outlets like Wired, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and his colleagues at the Philly Inquirer for meeting the perilous moment with fact-based journalism. He also gave a nod to the growing number of independent journalists, particularly Marissa Kabas and her newsletter, The Handbasket.
But the long-time columnist has nothing but disdain for news organizations that have “the North Korea state media type way of looking at things.” It’s “this incredibly bleak environment where some outlets are owned by people who support Trump, some have owners that are terrified of criticizing the regime.”
He specifically called out Politico, Axios ,and Alex Thompson, an Axios reporter who is the co-author of a book on former President Joe Biden with CNN’s Jake Tapper:
“Somebody who's the kind of journalist who thinks six months in the Trump [administration], the biggest story out there is still Joe Biden's cognitive health. I don't understand people like that. For me, that's why you go into journalism is to challenge the status quo, you know, challenge corruption, which we've certainly seen a lot right now, threats to freedom, threats to civil rights.”
Have We Hit Rock Bottom?
Bunch thinks everyone is a potential target of the Trump administration, including journalists.
He told me: “bad things could happen to us and our lives can be turned upside down by this government, because the government is essentially hostile to what we do as journalists.”
He continued:
“There could come a time where people like us (journalists) could get arrested, get harassed in terms of 'truth social’ posts from Trump or they could audit our taxes, they could investigate us. I mean, they're investigating people these days for all kinds of specious reasons so there's no reason why more journalists couldn't be investigated for leaking national security secrets or who knows what kind of crazy stuff like they're doing with (U.S. Senator) Adam Schiff. There's all kinds of things that between now and then they could do to us.
In many other countries, including the one right next door to us, in Mexico, journalists have faced all kinds of punishments, including the possibility of death. I think the 100 journalists have been murdered in Mexico over time. Of course, we all know that well over 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza trying to get people the news.”
Signs of Hope
With all this dismal news, there are some encouraging signs. A new survey of the June 14th ‘No Kings’ protests reports it was one of the largest single day demonstrations in U.S. history with “between 2 and 4.8 million people participating in over 2,150 actions nationwide.” The analysis by the nonprofit news outlet Waging Nonviolence found “the historic number of No Kings Day protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing and durable pro-democracy movement.
Bunch says those ongoing protests against Trump are important. He explained:
“I think there's a real positive here, which is that again and again, we've seen, the majority of the American people support the idea of democracy. We saw the No Kings and these other events and how many people were willing to go out and protest. I'm not sure what the next step is, but I think it shows that the faith in the good things about democracy runs pretty deep in this country.”
He is not alone. Across the country, many brave journalists are doing the work that needs to be done. Their powerful reporting is available, but Americans have to look for it. As always, the dictator has the megaphone and uses it to hide or to drown out competing voices. If journalists are courageous enough to do the dangerous work of holding Donald Trump to account, Americans should have the moral and mental courage to find and read their work. Increasingly, that’s exactly what we are doing.
Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at Indistinct Chatter. Read the original column here.
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