But it’s not 2020 anymore. We are seeing a huge retrenchment, particularly in elite institutions, from caring about racial inequality and describing the Republican Party honestly. The latest example came Monday morning, when Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah announced that the paper had fired her for posts Attiah wrote on social media after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Her posts (at least the ones I have seen) were not particularly incendiary. Attiah, while condemning Kirk’s shooting, argued that America is rife with political violence and that the country seems to accept it. According to Attiah, she was the only full-time Black opinion columnist at the paper.
Owner Jeff Bezos blocked from publication an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris that the Opinion staff wrote last fall. He attended Trump’s inauguration. In February, he announced the paper’s Opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” In June, he named a former Wall Street Journal editorial page staffer to run the Post’s Opinion section. Nearly all of the left-leaning writers, myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that Post would not want our content.
I wrote a enthusiastically a few years ago that the mainstream media was leaning into playing a more pro-democracy role. That’s over now. Covering democracy honestly would entail covering politics in an unbalanced way, because the Republican Party of this era is much more anti-democratic than the Democrats. So major outlets are instead leaning into the “both sides’ model that they were reconsidering from 2014-2021. So for example CNN’s 10 p.m. show, which during Trump 1.0 featured journalists explaining why Trump was a uniquely radical president, is now conservative and liberal pundits getting equal time.
And while the media changes are more subtle, the racial retrenchment is obvious. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court and lower-level courts and now the Trump administration have essentially outlawed any program that seeks to address racial disparities.
I am obviously very personally invested in the plight of Black political journalists. These are my peers and, in some cases, my close friends. But my concerns are much deeper than whether I or my friends lose prestigious jobs. (I quickly landed at TNR after leaving the Post.) America remains a place where being Black too often means that you are less likely to have a job with good pay and health insurance and more likely to be the victim of racial discrimination. It’s also a place where our commitment to democratic norms and principles increasingly pales in comparison to other nations. Black journalists, like Black activists and politicians, are often the people in their profession most willing to discuss America’s shortcomings forthrightly and urge the country to do better. For example, Attiah and Reid were two of the most prominent voices at their organizations calling for the United States to change its policies toward Israel to prevent the mass deaths of Palestinian civilians.
Our reckonings on racism and journalism didn’t go too far. The opposite is true—they didn’t go far enough. And the diminishment of prominent Black journalists is the latest indication that a period of progress in America has ended and a period of retrenchment is in full bloom. An America where Black people, journalists and Black journalists lose political power is one where inequality, racism, authoritarianism and other ills will be rampant. Institutions such as the Post may be done with reckoning with their shortcomings, but the rest of us should carry forward the ideas and ideals of 2014-2021.
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