Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m from The New Republic. I’m the host of Right Now. Today I am excited to be to joined by Kathy Roberts Forde. She’s a professor of journalism at UMass Amherst and also a journalism historian. And so I want to talk to her about both the past and the present, maybe the future of how journalism should be thinking about its role in democracy. So Kathy, thanks for joining me.
Bacon: Let me start by, you wrote this book, or you were editor of this book, which is a book of essays called Journalism and Jim Crow. I want you to talk about that book a little bit for the audience if you don’t mind.
Bacon: So talk about that in this post–Civil War period. A lot of the white-owned papers in this time did what? They legitimize the backlash against Reconstruction on some level. So talk about what they did.
And so when you put all that together, you see that you have these elite triads, or even more angles in that, collaboration to build these. What Robert Mickey has written about in Paths Out of Dixie is these authoritarian enclaves all over the South, and they lasted for generations.
Forde: Yeah. They not only entrenched Jim Crow; they built authoritarian regime. And they were political actors. They worked collaboratively with politicians to help politicians stay in power, to get elected in the first place. Henry Grady actually helped with the Tilden-Hayes presidential election in 1876. It actually brought an end to Reconstruction in the South. Henry Grady was the managing editor of The Atlanta Constitution. They helped defend and protect and even participated in some of the convict leasing system, which was a way in which so many Black Americans in the U.S. South were were caught up in this really terrible system of mass incarceration.
So when we look at, what’s happening in the U.S. today with the rise of authoritarianism and democratic erosion and backsliding, this history has something to teach us. It can help us think about paths not taken, and it can also help us explain where we are in certain ways through path dependence.
Forde: What happens post–Civil War is the Black press, which was born earlier in the nineteenth century right as the slavery question was becoming a huge national question of debate. By the time we get to the end of the Civil War, the Black press all over the country explodes because Black Americans understand fully that their citizenship rights, which are gained through the Fourteenth Amendment, their voting rights through the Fifteenth Amendment, [have] to be maintained and protected and defended. And the Black press and leaders and activists are—every Black activist almost is also a newspaper editor. During this period, the two go hand in glove.
Forde: Yeah, all of them. Every single one of them. And they understand that they need to use the press as a forum for Black organizing to mobilize Black publics, as a forum where Black Americans can reach across geographical distance and work across all kinds of class lines, geographical lines to talk with one another and collaborate together to try to figure the way forward when the federal government has turned its back on the South’s efforts—or Black efforts in the South—to build biracial government during that period of Reconstruction. So the Black press is working actively from the Civil War on under incredibly difficult circumstances due to just resources to be part of a movement to build Black political power and agency and economic opportunity.
Bacon: I was going to move there exactly. Let’s move to the 1950s, ’60s. So the Black press, we know what it’s doing. And at this point, talk about—the story I think I knew before was along the lines [of] The New York Times, Time magazine, Life, the East Coast liberal press or East Coast press, Northern press to some extent help the Civil Rights Movement. They covered King fairly favorably, but there’s more nuances. So talk about the role the press plays in the ’50s and ’60s.
Bacon: But in the ’60s period is this idea that the media is an actor and it plays a role in democracy. In that period, the media as a whole was maybe pro–civil rights to some extent, and they helped legitimize the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act. The media was an actor in this period, right?
Bacon: Let me move to the—I’m going to call the period 1980 to 2020, and you’ll understand why I’ve said it that way. There’s been two things, I think, going on in the press. This is something I’ve experienced by being in the press too. One, there’s a big push—more and more news organizations are owned by these megacorporations. There’s a big push for “objectivity.” This is the new thing. Most of American history, you had Hamilton and Jefferson having their own paper. Most American history had partisan newspaper. But these last—really—50 years, there’s been a very big focus on news organizations must be objective between the two parties and not have any values. You have, too, the simultaneous push for more diversity in the media, more racial diversity, particularly more inclusion of African Americans specifically. So talk about those. And those two things, I think, have some obvious tension, right?
And what that suggests is diversity of perspective, diversity of experience, diversity of ways of thinking and making sense of the democratic project. And yet objectivity suggests that there are no values. There should not be values attached to the way we think about producing the news. So they’re in obvious tension. And in fact, there’s this great new book—and I need to disclaim, I edit the book series this book came out in. It’s called Racializing Objectivity by a terrific scholar by the name of Gwyneth Mellinger. And she demonstrates how in the South in the ’50s and ’60s, white newspaper editors and publishers actually used objectivity as this weapon, as this cudgel and as this veil to hide behind as they were very, very actively behind the scenes working to maintain segregation and to maintain Jim Crow. And they were very publicly using—she brings the receipts—objectivity as this justification and a veil for what they were actually doing.
Forde: Yes. And I think it’s led by elites—elites on the right. It’s a really frightening—I find this moment we’re in of the rise of authoritarianism in the federal government, this move to the national level, of all kinds of techniques and stratagems that were developed in many of these Southern states generations before have been nationalized. And in the process, one of the things we’re seeing today is a federal government that is attacking the press in all kinds of way and has been during the two Trump administrations. The idea of the press as enemy of the people, the fact that there’s a Trump crony in charge of the FCC and that Trump crony as head of FCC is investigating all kinds of news media outlets. You have this revolving door among certain right-wing news media outlets and this administration, with some of the people who have been significant personalities, I’ll call them, on Fox News and other places either holding positions of power within the Trump administration or somehow providing extraordinary levels of access to them. We see Fox personalities involved in CPAC.
Bacon: So the parallel now that I’m seeing that you’re seeing between the period of 1870 to 1920 and today is that again, you have these rich elites who are using their economic power to also shape the media in an anti-democratic way.
Bacon: And so what would a media look like that was trying to defend democracy? What would that look like right now?
Bacon: Let me stop you because you said you want public media that’s nonpartisan. You also said we should have media that doesn’t both-sides. Those goals are, right now—you said you want media that’s nonpartisan, doesn’t do both-sides, but also promotes democracy, right?
Bacon: And promotes democratic norms. How does I think that’s what NPR is struggling with. You can tell—whenever the head of NPR speaks, I can tell she’s like, Democracy is good. I don’t want to be a Democrat. So when one party is doing anti-democratic things daily, how do you maintain a nonpartisan media?
Bacon: I agree with that concept. I’m trying to think of what those in reality—is there a news outlet or a reporter [who is] pro-democracy anti-authoritarianism without being pro–Democratic Party? I agree with what you’re saying.
Bacon: … Going to read that way in this current moment, if you’re pro-democracy, you’re anti-Trump. But it’s hard to reconcile those things.
Bacon: I think ProPublica is a good example of being a watchdog, doing stories that are investigative, and talking about democratic norms. They don’t necessarily go into a lot of politics. They don’t have an op-ed section. And I think op-eds can be good, but that’s a good model of something useful there.
Bacon: At the beginning you talked about the media has power, whether we like it or not, on some level, I think is what it is. Journalists can be fact-based with the idea that inherently in journalism, you are choosing which stories to cover and which ones not to. So talk about objectivity as a goal—period. Is that neutrality—or can you talk about how do you think about that? Is that a goal, is there a different principle we should look for?
The problem is we’re so polarized right now. Of course, that was true in the early nineteenth century as well. We’re so polarized that we’re often not talking except in a choir. We may not see things the same way, but we’re also not talking across major differences, which I think is really important. And I lost my train of thought. What are we talking about now, Perry?
Forde: So first of all, states can pass legislation that funds public media in their states. And there can be workarounds that is—there can be coalitions among different states to build different kinds of public media that reach beyond the state level and local level. So I think that those are important things that we need to consider during this moment. I would love to see more news outlets have a democracy beat desk. You see little things like that happening—
Forde: Yeah. But then have an authoritarianism watch, right? Do more reporting that actually looks at the systems and structures and puts together the patterns of what’s happening at state levels and at the national level in terms of consolidating authoritarian power. It’s really hard. Journalism is a curriculum of everything that happens in the world on a single day or in an hour. It does, in all of its responsibilities, report the world to us and to bring us some representation and knowledge about what’s happening. What’s often missed are these kinds of syntheses and these putting together and telling us all the—we reported on these 25 things that happened this week in Washington or these 25 things that happened at the state level (let’s say we’re in a red state) or in the last month or in the last year. Let us put this together for you and show you a pattern and let’s have some experts in to discuss evidence-based and interpretations of how we can think about this. I think it’s really hard for journalism to do a good job like that, but I think we need that ambition in our journalism.
Forde: But we know how that works. Not everyone does.
Forde: It should explain that as one tactic in an authoritarian playbook, one of many, many, many to consolidate authoritarian power. And maybe this makes me sound like a real lefty partisan—
Forde: I think if we look to people who study how authoritarianism gets built, how authoritarian power gets consolidated, if we look to history for our understanding of how this works and how democracy erodes and democracy backslides, it’s piecemeal. There’s small actions that when they’re all taken together add up to a lot, and those small actions become bigger actions in a certain zone or sector. Right now, we are living in a space where all the institutions of accountability are under attack. Journalism, universities, law firms, the courts. These are patterns that need to be surfaced and discussed and understood for what they are. And in the midst, I’m painting a pretty stark picture and I’m working on the edges where things are really clear. There are all kinds of things in the dark, murky, middle that it’s hard to make sense of and who knows and what’s being done.
Bacon: But just to zone in, if you’re covering the National Guard being deployed in D.C., if you call experts on authoritarianism, it’s not like that’s your opinion. That’s a reported story. You can call authors, you can call scholars, you can call people who worked in Turkey or people who worked in Hungary or people who worked in Russia. This is not just opinions. It is like this is an authoritarian tactic according to this.… There’s a journalism project here that would involve the going beyond saying Trump is a meanie.
Bacon: I’m going to ask three short questions and then we’re going to end there. First, you’re doing some research on Ida B. Wells. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Bacon: End lynching? Of course not.
Bacon: You’re a journalism professor there. You’re also, I think, a dean, and maybe your title includes the word “inclusion” in it. I don’t want to get title wrong, but can you talk about what you do in terms of inclusion and why we should defend those things as opposed to surrendering them?
And so that seems to me, it’s all about access. It’s all about including everyone in the democratic project. It’s about widening the circle of “we” that get to participate and get to enjoy the amazing resources of freedom and dignity and opportunity that democracy and higher ed and in other areas of our public life give us. That’s what we do. This woke indoctrination and all these culture tropes that demonize DEI, I find to be just truly offensive and I see it as a form of backlash. We’ve lived—we continue in this country’s history to have backlash at once where there is progress made. I see it in some ways, some forms, a backlash to not only to Black Lives Matter and its many successes—but to some degree that.
Forde: Thank you so much for asking, Perry. This is a project that’s keeping me sane during these really dark and troubled times. I co-founded with a colleague at UMass Amherst—and now our former chancellor at UMass Amherst has joined us—an organization called Stand Together for Higher Ed. And what we are is a nonprofit that is trying to support a grassroots movement of faculty and staff across the thousands and thousands of higher ed institutions across this country to reclaim the public narrative, to ask policy makers and everyday citizens to demand protections for federal funding for higher ed that has done so much to open the doors for access for everyday Americans, including me, to get a college education.
Bacon: Great. And can you say it one more time because somebody is asking?
Forde: Yeah, it was great.
Bacon: And thanks everybody for watching, and we’ll be back next week.
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