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Since Donald Trump was reelected, a feeling has pervaded newsrooms. It can perhaps be best summed up as: Why don’t Americans believe us?
It’s good we’re asking. The forces that brought us to this moment are powerful and complex and beyond the capacity of individual journalists or news organizations to resolve, but we can’t be paralyzed by that. We still have a critical role to play.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years with foreign correspondents. I’ve noticed there are two types. Those who travel to new places but cling to their preconceptions, isolate themselves from the people they cover, and strive to get close to power. They often rely on Western embassies and senior government officials for information. Then there are those who immerse themselves in a different culture, guided by humility and curiosity and a desire to understand rather than judge.
The latter represents the best kind of journalism and, to me, shows us a way forward. In the days after the election I called a number of former and current foreign correspondents to ask for their views. In Georgia—the state—I spoke with Margaret Coker, who spent twenty years traveling the world and served as Turkey bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times.
In 2019, Coker moved back to the US to write a book, The Spymaster of Baghdad. She settled in Savannah, a beautiful city of quiet squares and historic homes that is smack-dab in the middle of a news desert. A year later, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was gunned down while out for a jog near Brunswick, Georgia.
Outraged and concerned by the lack of accountability journalism, Coker gathered up a group of friends and decided to start a nonprofit news organization, The Current. Today, it reaches about sixty thousand civically engaged coastal Georgians each month through its website, and thirty thousand additional readers via newsletters and text messages.
It covers health, education, and the environment, and when it delves into national politics it does so in a nonjudgmental way, like a portrait of a local barber who is an avid Trump backer. The Current does not publish any editorials or opinion columns. “There’s so many places where you can be immersed in the politics of outrage,” Coker says. “That’s not our zone.”
While Coker has made the transition to local reporting, she continues to draw on her roots as an international correspondent. “The best foreign correspondents have always been humble,” Coker pointed out. “You have to get immersed in the culture in order for someone to really trust you and for you to really be able to tell behind-the-scenes, in-depth stories. That is what I tried to do as a foreign correspondent. That’s definitely what we’re doing here locally.”
Suzy Hansen has written a book about her own experience covering Turkey, Notes on a Foreign Country. It’s a critique of the role of the traditional foreign correspondent—but also an affirmation of the power of discovering a new community, a new culture, while challenging your own assumptions. I asked Hansen if anything she described in her book could be applied to the current reality in the United States.
She said that before she moved to Turkey, in 2007, she “had not done enough examination of my own biases and prejudices and this kind of arrogance that one can have.” Her goal in writing the book was to try to break down the role of journalists as figures of authority. “If you are feeling self-congratulatory in any way, when you’re going into trying to understand something, you have a problem,” Hansen explained. “You have to keep pushing deeper and deeper and deeper into understanding while remaining open-minded to the possibilities.”
This concept resonated with me. I spent a decade at the beginning of my career as a freelance journalist in Mexico and Central America. There was so much I didn’t know and understand about the changing world around me, and the only thing I could do was inform, enlighten, and engage my admittedly modest audience. My editor at the time, Sandy Close from Pacific News Service, always told me she wanted the “chicken’s-eye view.” I was under no illusion that anything would change as a result of what I wrote, but this didn’t make me cynical. The work felt incredibly vital and important—and fulfilling.
I also spoke with several reporters who have covered the US as foreign correspondents, including Chris McGreal, a reporter for The Guardian and former correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg, and Jerusalem. McGreal, who is British, has now lived and worked in the US for fifteen years and writes for The Guardian US. But he tries to maintain a kind of radical openness as he travels around the country. “I still am an outsider observing America, I guess, in my own head,” McGreal explained.
McGreal spent the six weeks leading up to Election Day in Saginaw, Michigan, a deeply purple bellwether district in a crucial swing state. He arrived believing that Kamala Harris and the Democrats had an advantage in a community with a sizable working class, much of it unionized, along with significant Black and Latino populations. But he was soon disabused. Union leaders and others told him that Harris was not speaking effectively about economic issues and that the relentless ads attacking Trump weren’t landing. Women voters told him they cared about reproductive rights, but felt patronized that the Democrats would assume they were one-issue voters.
Another revelation came in the waning days of the Trump campaign, when a comedian at a Trump rally in New York described Puerto Rico as “a floating pile of trash.” The Harris campaign trotted out celebrities who expressed outrage. But Latino voters in Saginaw shrugged off the insults. “It didn’t make a blind bit of difference to them,” McGreal said.
The Guardian US newsroom has a staff of more than a hundred reporters, a mix of Americans and Brits. It reaches more than forty-seven million readers every month in the US, and its audience is growing. Clearly, some segment of the American public appreciates The Guardian’s approach. It’s less connected to US centers of power, and—because it seeks to inform not just Americans but global readers—it often highlights aspects of US society that are overlooked in other outlets, like the lack of a social contract, the high level of income inequality, and the persistence of the death penalty.
McGreal’s colleague Ed Pilkington, the chief reporter for The Guardian US, told me that Trump’s victory sparked an intense newsroom debate in which journalists spoke about the collapse in trust that had turned a good portion of the American public away from fact-based journalism. “Yes, it hurts, and it commands our attention,” Pilkington said.
McGreal, who participated in the discussion, said he tries to maintain a self-reflective and critical outlook. But he has not internalized the criticism that the election of Donald Trump somehow represents a media failure. “I’m no more responsible for that than I am for the election of Benjamin Netanyahu when I was reporting from Israel,” McGreal told me. “You do what you do as a journalist. You tell it as best you can. And the great American public is going to vote.”
Declining power and influence is not the only way that journalism will change under Trump. It will also become more adversarial. There will be greater hostility toward journalists in the streets and online; legal harassment will likely increase, along with regulatory pressure. Here too the experience of foreign correspondents is instructive. US journalists may have to manage greater risk and report with more courage and determination. We can’t be deterred. Yes, there are challenges in terms of our changing relationship to our audience and to the people we cover along with the environment in which we work. This is to be expected. But we have a vital story to tell.
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