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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events.
While much blame has been levelled at big tech, Barbie Zelizer traces the decline of American journalism to the Cold War. She makes the bold claim that Cold War-era practices are to blame for the state of journalism today, undermining a once trusted media environment. This groundbreaking book shows how journalism's current problems can be traced back to customs developed over half a century ago and demonstrates how they've continued to upend journalism, journalists and the news ever since.
We all need a news environment that works. This book tells us why it doesn't and offers a plan to make it better. If our news is better, so is our democracy. And, if our democracy is better, we may be too.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Introduction: Where It Began
Where It Began With Russia
Where It Began Beyond Journalism
Where It Began Inside Journalism
Notes
1 How It Took Hold
Taking Hold of Individuals, Occupations and Organizations
Taking Hold of Institutions
Notes
2 Enmity, Then and Now
Enmity, Then
The Enemy Beyond
The Enemy Within
Enmity, Now
Notes
3 Invisibility, Then and Now
Invisibility, Then
Making Invisible War Real
Making Real War Invisible
Invisibility, Now
Notes
4 Outreach, Then and Now
Outreach, Then
Strategies of Outreach
Icons of Outreach
Domestic Outreach
Outreach, Now
Notes
Conclusion: Why It Needs to End
Why Enmity Needs To End
Why Invisibility Needs To End
Why Outreach Needs To End
Can It End?
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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HOW THE COLD WAR BROKE THE NEWS
The Surprising Roots of Journalism’s Decline
Barbie Zelizer
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Barbie Zelizer 2025
The right of Barbie Zelizer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press Ltd
Polity Press Ltd
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6637-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6638-9 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025942407
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
I wanted to be a journalist for as long as I can remember. As a child, I recall scouting my neighborhood on the hunt for news, a yellow writing pad tucked under my arm that was busting with half-composed notes and drawings. As a teenager, I worked on the school newspaper, winning a regional award for a sports piece I had written, to the amazement of everyone who knew of my disinterest in most things athletic. By the time I became a wire service reporter in the Middle East, my excitement for journalism went deep. I was captivated by the immediacy it demanded and access it afforded. Enthralled with being part of something important and in-process, however small my role. Thrilled at being tasked with unraveling the complexity of public events and turning them into narratives everyone could understand. Journalism was a drug, and I was hooked for life. Or so I thought.
For sometimes journalism depletes its practitioners’ passion, typically when they are least aware. Immediacy and access became at times more grueling than exciting. Being part of something important and in-process often amounted to little more than doorstepping into the wee hours of the morning, cigarette and spy novel in hand. Unravelling the complexity of public events came sometimes at the expense of my capacity to understand events closer to home.
The problems with journalism began to surface with the same intensity and frequency as its charms. Its exaggerated closeness with sources. Its formulaic approach to storytelling. Its timidity in the face of challenge. Its tendency toward groupthink about events more complicated than recounted. Its declared allegiance to norms that made no sense on the ground. And, most important, its inability to leave behind routines that didn’t work in the same way anymore. Each realization brought doubts closer to the surface about whether journalism, in its then current state, had lost its way. I decided to put some distance between me and newsmaking, as much to figure out my own pathway as to clarify journalism’s role moving forward.
Easier said than done, for once a journalist, always a journalist. When I left journalism for the academy, I pivoted with the full confidence that the journalism I had lived would be the journalism I would study. Only that my lived journalism was nowhere in the academy. The scholarly picture of journalism failed in so many ways to reflect the journalism I had come from. This set my academic agenda from the beginning: to make journalism in the academy reflect more broadly journalism in the world. Or, at least, journalism as I knew it.
The bold contours of my experience and the discomfort it fostered, I’ve since been told, mirror that of many other former journalists. The frustration of knowing that journalism is never fully understood or appreciated. The twinge that comes with continuing to experience its thrills while others aggressively chart its deficits. The ease with which folks slide back its relevance without recognizing that whatever rests on it – history, politics, society – cannot get there on its own. I kept asking myself: If journalism is part of the cement that holds us together, for better or worse, then why is it repeatedly looked over? Why do people shrink its impact when circumstances, like those of today, shout for its relevance?
This book is my attempt to flesh out that discomfort and put it on the page. I started it over a decade ago, and its changing title charted its growing relevance, going from “How the Cold War Anticipates the News,” to “… Shapes the News,” to “… Drives the News” to “How the Cold War Broke the News.” It was clear that, the longer I stayed with it, the more intense my argument became. But I couldn’t find a way to end it.
It now feels as if I was waiting for the right circumstance that would finally tell me it was okay to let it go. Trump’s return to the US presidency did the trick. Thinking about journalism through the lens of what he has created brings together the lived and observed realities of journalism while there’s still time to make them whole. It helps us understand what keeps journalism from embracing all that it can be in lieu of aspiring to the smallest version of itself. And it asks us to imagine a journalism that matters to all instead of one that is barely noticed by a few. If we do not take these opportunities to task, we have only ourselves to blame when all that relies on journalism crumbles. Waiting is a luxury we can no longer afford.
IntroductionWhere It Began
On November 5, 2024, Donald J. Trump was reelected into the White House. His victorious return, promised loudly and often during an intense year-long presidential campaign, further cemented the powerful polarization that splits the American public. The conflicting responses it prompted – one side celebrating his reemergence as America’s saving grace, the other despairing he would irreparably transform America’s identity – have laid bare a rough and perilous road ahead. For a victory or defeat that satisfies half the public while vilifying the other half cannot work long-term in a democracy. This circumstance, if not understood, managed and kept at bay, is what often turns democracies into autocracies.
Journalists can stop it from happening. It’s their role to describe what democracy and autocracy look like, explain what they mean, call out when the latter advances and anticipate where the former might go in response. But journalists are so caught up in belonging to one side or the other they fail to lay out the stakes that matter most. And if they don’t figure out how to come together, the chances for a democratic future in the US are in peril.
The 2024 elections were brutal, by all accounts. As Americans and observers elsewhere hung on the results that some felt unthinkable and others saw as inevitable, the prospect of another term with Trump confounded most pollsters, academics, pundits and journalists. But it didn’t surprise Trump’s supporters. How did so many kinds of experts tasked with foreseeing where this election was headed get it so wrong?
A small anecdote points us in the direction of understanding. At one point late in the campaign, journalists in some news outlets recognized that Trump’s speech was becoming increasingly disjointed. Journalist Maggie Haberman initially described it as “more rambling,” “more incoherent” and “longer.” The Daily Beast wondered if it were a “red flag for mental decline.” The New York Times shared results of a computer analysis that Trump’s rally speeches lasted an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016, used 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than eight years earlier and used swearwords 69 percent more often than he did in 2016. “He rambles,” it said. “He repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought – some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical.”1
But Trump pushed back, calling his speaking style “a weave”: “I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together.” Though Haberman interpreted Trump’s description as “PR [trying] to explain why he’s talking this way,” subsequent coverage across the political spectrum lost no time in using the term “the weave” rather than admit Trump’s incoherence. Alarmed by how easily normalization took over, The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer gave a context for journalists’ response. They were stifling their outrage because Trump’s transgressions rode on steadily intensifying versions of what had already been accepted as normal. Many news outlets, he said, were “painfully slow to describe the even more autocratic version” of Trump, who was “running on far more explicit pronouncements of his authoritarian intentions.” Instead, they described “Trump’s ‘old grievances,’ which implies that he’s merely playing back his greatest hits, more of the same old anger,” when, “on the merits, this warning should crowd out every other story in the campaign.”2 Foer implied coverage left no room to understand he was intensifying rhetoric that was already violent to begin with.
It takes a bit of effort to connect Trump’s speaking style to his violence, but doing so shows they’re both important parts of the kind of performance that mutes journalists before they can even get going. It’s the reason anecdotes associated with the 2024 presidential election like this one are not outliers. They hint at how much of American journalism is off kilter.
We know journalism isn’t living up to its potential, regardless of how we feel about society, politics or culture. Wherever we look – its shaky funding models, public negligibility and sinking credibility, outdated ethics and norms, irrelevant practices, precarious workforce, internal divides on race, gender, class and age – we find profound disarray. The list of irrelevancies goes on and on, raising the question of whether journalism is even worth saving anymore.
This book says it is. We tend to think of the challenges to journalism as being fairly modern: technology and social media, late-stage capitalism, democratic backsliding propelled by partisan interests and unregulated corporate funding. To be sure, each challenge has done its part to diminish journalism’s relevance. But this book turns our attention to the role journalism has played in its own undoing. The problems with journalism didn’t start yesterday. They go back to the Cold War, giving the now dysfunctional relationship between journalism and politics, the public, the market and technology a point of origin in Cold War logic.
Cold War logic is a way of thinking and acting that prompts people to behave as if they are still living in Cold War times, regardless of surrounding realities. Called also a mindset, worldview, logic, paradigm or ideology, it describes what lurks at the core of most American institutions. In journalism it permeates nearly every aspect of newsmaking, where journalists use it, knowingly or not, to explain current affairs through Cold War conditions that developed during the war’s formative years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Cold War prism of a war of wills between the US and Russia justifies the combination of fear, suspicion, secrecy, acquiescence and a strident opposition to communism being readily accepted as real decades after the Cold War ended.
We find Cold War logic in the news by locating its three key markers: enmity, invisibility and outreach. The idea of enmity makes certain the news will always be about Us versus Them. Invisibility facilitates divorcing coverage from evidence by mixing up what is real and imagined. Outreach makes excessive proximity between journalists and political or commercial figures acceptable and even desired. Together, they ensure journalists cannot exercise their role as independent arbiters of current affairs. This book traces how Cold War thinking came to exacerbate the crisis-level contemporary decline of American journalism by exploring its development over time and goes on to suggest what we can do now to set things right.
Some of us may feel journalism is beyond help. That it has gone so off course it’s no longer open to change. As polls chart the declining numbers of Americans who pay attention to the news, distrusting journalism has become its own sport. But the list of things that disappear when journalism goes awry is vast. Shared agendas. Community. Public affairs. Common knowledge. Preparation for disaster. Exposure to different opinions. Giving up totally on journalism means giving up on much of our collective life. The only way to stop that from happening is to embrace change. Foundational, widespread and transformative change is the only thing that can nudge journalism out of its current stagnation.
This is the story of how American journalism reached this impasse and how it can be jumpstarted onto a better path forward. It traces journalism’s current troubles to the entrenchment of Cold War logic in a particular kind of newsmaking that didn’t go away when the Cold War ended. Despite the passage of time since the Cold War, it continues to drive US journalism. How can we expect journalists to draw insights about current affairs if they operate through an outdated and irrelevant way of thinking? If we don’t identify its particulars, it will never disappear.
Cold War logic started long before people even thought to notice. It built on conventions that had shaped US newsmaking from the beginning of the Republic and made journalists central to forging national identity and setting a public agenda. The occupational adjustments they embraced along the way – nods to ethnocentrism and elitism, formulaic and dramatic stories, jingoism, stereotypes, cozy relations with sources, elitism, objectivity and balance, neutrality and impartiality, deference and moderation, among others – would help keep journalists necessary to the long project of American democracy. But when combined with the kind of newsmaking needed to cover Cold War realities – a deep belief in enmity, an agreement that things don’t have to be visible to be treated as real, and an unquestioned regard for external intervention in media outreach – they produced a journalism uniquely suited to helping the United States realize its Cold War aims. As tensions with Russia moved from friendly rivalry to the fierce enmity of the late 1940s and onward, conditions both beyond and within journalism would end up laying the groundwork for Cold War thinking.
Telling this story requires us to start where it started. Figuring out where Cold War thinking began – with Russia, beyond journalism and inside journalism – gets us closer to understanding the soil on which journalism still stands today.
Where It Began With Russia
The past rarely remains past. The ongoing Russian assault on Ukraine has injected a contemporary spin to longstanding enmity between Russia and the West, but it’s been there a long time. Even Trump’s flirtation with Russian President Vladimir Putin in early 2025 is a version of the relationship that helped turn Ukraine into a proxy war for the decades-long standoff between Russia and the United States. This constellation ignites still unsettled East–West tensions by allowing old rivals to retake familiar positions, some dating to the earliest days of nation-building. As we watch, the past is being remade, reasserting earlier understandings while inserting itself into new arrangements. The boldness and riskiness of these circumstances are softened by the comfort of knowing we’ve been here before and so we presumably know how to respond.
It helps to remember the relationship between America and Russia has always swung between friendship and enmity. The two nations shared an otherness already in the 1700s when their bids for independence from old Europe – the American Revolution on Europe’s western front and Russia’s penetration of Europe from the East, led by Peter the Great – occurred at roughly the same time. Like two siblings competing for parental attention, very little happened without the other in mind. As historian Martin Malia sees it, “despite the differences between eighteenth-century British North America and Russia, the two may plausibly be seen as contrasting forces of a single expansion of Europe.”3 Longstanding tensions between old and new were easily transposed onto the differences between East and West.
At first, friendly ties seemed to hold promise. American columnists wrote excitedly of Russia, deeming it “the only real and natural ally the United States can have in Europe.” Citing the geographic expanse and extensive plains of both countries, a Russian visitor to America hailed their “identical” geography. “Is not our steppe the same as their prairie?” he asked, adding, “Russia and the United States are two states before whom there is opening up a most promising future.” By 1838, Russia was so front of mind that an American travelogue of the country went through five printings.4
Shared discomfort with European expansionism and elitism fueled gestures that each country made on the other’s behalf. When Great Britain requested Russian troops to help suppress the American bid for independence, Catherine the Great refused, instead instructing the Russian embassy in London to find out more about the new American leadership. The possibility of blocking British interests in the Pacific helped drive the American purchase of the Alaskan territory from Russia in 1867, and both Russians and Americans invested efforts mediating or arbitrating each other’s conflicts: the British–American War of 1812, the Treaty of Ghent in 1820, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.5
But instead of seeding shared interests into a generative relationship over time, America and Russia pivoted instead toward rivalry. Hatred between countries begins in small ways, nudged forward by possibly unintended insults or magnified by the rough edges of soft rebukes. This hatred was set against the backdrop of European disdain, where many Europeans found neither country compelling. Early European travelers described Russians as vulgar and tyrannical, Americans as ruthless and impersonal. There was also much to fuel rivalry without Europe’s involvement. When America sent its first official representative to Russia in 1780, Russia did not officially recognize him due to its ongoing ties with Great Britain. When the US established its first consular appointment in St Petersburg in 1803, Russia did not reciprocate for six years. In 1821, Tsar Alexander set up monopolies of Russian trading, fishing and fur hunting in Alaskan territories that were protested by their American counterparts. These are small acts, but they reflected core underlying tensions. For as the key ideological differences between the two nations started to emerge, ill-will intensified. By the mid-1800s, political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville predicted a fight between Russia and America to the end, pitting the forces of servitude and authoritarianism against those of freedom and democracy.6
Hatred often drives people into a frenzy, but it needs a spark to make fundamental differences intolerable. State violence against the public provided the spark. One member of an 1891 US congressional delegation to Russia pointed to what he saw as irreconcilable traits: “Here we have liberty of speech; there you cannot have a public gathering without permission of the authorities. Here, freedom of the press; there, a governmental censorship. Here, everything not expressly forbidden is allowed; there, everything not expressly allowed is forbidden.”7 Reports of tsarist support for the Russian penal exile system in Siberia and pogroms against Russian Jews began to circulate, highlighting autocratic tendencies that alarmed Americans newly committed to the ideas of democracy, equality and freedom.
A particularly brutal attack on the Jews of Kishinev in 1903 magnified American discomfort. When an early Reuters dispatch circulating sparse local details of an attack “on workers” was investigated by Michael Davitt, an Irish reporter with the Hearst-owned New York American and the New York Evening Journal, his gruesome eyewitness accounts and graphic images of a full-blown pogrom against Russian Jews – with violent group rapes, body gouging and brutal infant murder – captured media and public attention. Unusual by American standards, the explicit coverage magnified Americans’ recognition of Russian brutality.8 Public protests surfaced in prestigious US venues, such as New York City’s Carnegie Hall or Baltimore’s Academy of Music, and included speeches by leaders – religious and secular, local and congressional – protesting Russian barbarity.
It wasn’t long before American journalists across the board were branding Russian atrocities unthinkable. Labeling them “a disgrace to civilization,” the Los Angeles Times called for “the nations of the civilized world to join in a formal protest,” while Leslie’s Weekly pronounced it “inconceivable that civilizations can stand by and permit such intolerable atrocities to pass unchallenged.” Russia was not pleased with what it characterized as “anti-Russian agitation in America … fomented by the press.”9 The US–Russian relationship began to fall apart.
And so, for many in the West, Russia went from being barbaric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to being also brutal and backward at the beginning of the twentieth. Within a few decades, Russia would also be described as totalitarian. Lingering uneasiness from binaries between old/new and East/West reared its head as Russian–American enmity grew from Russian–American commonality. Pricked by anxiety over which country would achieve firstness in the world, full-blown enemy formation was not far behind.
But holding onto ideological positions requires all the available details to fall in line. One voice absent from the burgeoning condemnation of Russia over violence against the Jews was that of the US government. Instead of protesting the brutality, US officials said sovereign nations had the right to act on their own volition. Some thought American officials were being mindful of the US hope for better trade relations with Russia. But others saw the hypocrisy of reacting to violence abroad when the same violence was operating full scale at home. Ongoing racial violence in the United States made a US–Russian confrontation tricky. Lynching, mob violence and acts of brutality toward the Black community struck an uneasy parallel with Russian atrocities that called into question the very distinction between an authoritarian government and a democratic one.10 And so American officials stayed mum.
The irony was not lost on Black journalists, who decried the indifference shown lynching stories alongside the attention given the Russian pogroms. The Cleveland Gazette followed up a news item about lynching with a description of “the terrible massacre of Jews in Kishinev [as] only what have taken place many times in the (US) south … all of which goes to show that the boasted civilization of today is not near what we affect at times to believe it to be.” The Colored American said, despite rampant lynchings and mob violence in parts of America, “the sense of justice and fair play is still alive in the bosom of the American people and will make itself manifest in due time,” while the Baltimore Afro-American proclaimed “Jew baiting in Russia and Negro baiting in the United States are one and the same thing,” voicing hope for “when America would sympathize as much with the Negro at home as she does with the Jews in Russia.”11
The message was clear: if brutal violence toward targeted populations was a mark of authoritarian regimes, what did the systemic racial violence on US soil say about American democracy? When the US government eventually did respond to the Russian atrocities – via a moderately worded petition against violence – the Russians refused to receive it or hear the concerns it aired. Instead, it was archived in the United States, where it would remain, in the view of one Jewish leader, “a witness that the friendship of Russians for the United States was not strong enough to permit a respectful appeal for religious liberty, made by citizens of this country.”12 No similar effort was made to address the intensifying racial violence against Black Americans.
There’s nothing like doubt about one’s own values to shore up passion. So when the Bolshevik Revolution began in the fall of 1917, Russian–American ties took a predictable deep dive. Coming on the heels of a revolutionary effort in February that had raised and then dashed hopes for an end to autocracy, the US used the October Revolution to break ties, dampening American thoughts of democracy in the region. Well-publicized pogroms unrolled with a vengeance, followed by imprisonment, destruction and mass transfers to Siberia. Rather than spotlight commonalities, the Revolution played to the worst of American fears about autocratic rule, highlighting Russian tendencies toward centralization, conspiracy, mistrust of the outside world, secrecy and espionage. When a series of anarchist bombings hit the US two years later and a short-lived two-year national panic – the First Red Scare – erupted, the distrust of anarchists, socialists and communists on American soil went sky-high. Later, US journalist James Aronson would observe that “the journalistic Cold War against Communism” began already in 1918.13
Most US journalists at first covered the budding US–Russia tensions in a deferent and workmanlike fashion, understating what they saw. But as domestic labor unrest ensued and hundreds of foreign-born US citizens, labor activists and leftists were rounded up and detained in an official overstep in 1919 that came to be known as the Palmer Raids, journalists justified the action. Reporting the unrest as “Reds Plotted Country-Wide Strike,” the New York Times praised the raids as “only the beginning. The Department [of Justice’s] further activities should be far-reaching and beneficial.”14
Not everyone was happy with the shifting position on Russia. Journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann led a handful of reporters challenging the rancor toward Russia. Then an editor at the New Republic, in 1920 he and Charles Merz, a columnist for Harper’s and the New Republic, conducted a comprehensive study of the New York Times coverage of the 1917 Revolution. Publishing a 42-page supplement to the New Republic that documented systematic negative bias toward Russia, Lippmann and Merz blasted the Times for portraying Russians as unreasonable, unethical and immoral: “The news about Russia was a case of seeing not what was but what men wished to see.”15 While the report got some public attention, including a repeat analysis twenty years later that upheld its findings, it was short-lived in a media environment that would grow increasingly in-step with anti-Russian sentiments.
Because relations with enemies are often interspersed with periods of friendly attachment, it’s not surprising that in 1933 Russia and the United States briefly resumed ties. Ostensibly this was because then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the severed ties had not slowed communism. But the budding spread of fascism in Germany was the more likely impetus, and it fostered a tense and brief de facto partnership as war allies in 1941 that prevailed till the end of World War II. Journalists accommodated the change in perspective by highlighting Russia’s value. The New Republic paid “homage to a fighting people,” while Life hailed “the World’s Number One Army.” Time twice pronounced Stalin “Man of the Year,” saying similarities between the two countries suggested the United States, “of all nations, should have been the first to understand Russia.” In 1944, an American project began translating Russian academic works and articles from Izvestia and Pravda into English, while a joint US–Soviet journal – Amerika – enjoyed a brief publication run. By year’s end, only three newspapers – the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News – “could be considered anti-Russian in the most general sense.” Most editors “believed that the United States and the Soviet Union were on the threshold of a postwar rapprochement which would benefit all mankind.” As one journalist wrote in We’re in This with Russia: “They are going forward … The Soviet people are on the way.”16
But the cooling off period was fleeting. It was also undermined by simultaneous acts that sent the opposite message. In 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started investigating US citizens suspected of disloyalty and possible fascist or communist leanings. The idea of red fascism began circulating in the United States as an explainer for the parallel ground on which fascism and communism stood, and alarms sounded about communist propaganda overworking the US mail system.
Anti-Russian public sentiment was soon on the rise. By 1944, 60 percent of Americans believed the Russians wanted more territory and doubted the possibility of cooperation between the two countries. In the summer of 1946, news outlets began to list so-called communist-front associations, such as the League of Women Shoppers or the National Maritime Union. By 1947, polls showed most Americans distrusted the Soviet Union and 75 percent felt a third world war was inevitable.17
We know the previous war always determines part of what matters in the war to come. World War II had bolstered American exceptionalism with the help of journalists. The sense of American singularity that was already a preferred way of telling America’s origin story took on new contours as the United States emerged as the only country better off from the war than it had been going in. As America looked to establish itself as an unvanquished and powerful nation, its stock rose considerably in European eyes.
US publisher Henry Luce dubbed what followed “the American Century.” But the American Century came with big objectives, and its triumphalism was undercut by American ties with Russia. Even with most Americans exhausted by World War II amid a growing disinterest in current affairs, Russia felt closer and more threatening than ever before. As recognition of the Red Army’s ruthless defeat of the Nazis in 1945 swelled to suggest what a brutal war with Russia might look like, public fear intensified.
Relevant to the budding postwar hostility was a strand of paranoid right-wing thinking that would come to permeate the American political landscape of the time. According to the much debated views of US historian Richard Hofstadter, the theater of action was “an arena for uncommonly angry minds [that reveal] qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy [whose] expression by more or less normal people … makes the phenomenon significant.” Hofstadter saw extremism of this period as an extension of a long legacy of conspiratorial thought. At stake, he argued, is “always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.”18
All this would soon prove central to Cold War thinking, for World War II did not produce a victory that could withstand time. Although Allied forces temporarily defeated fascism, they did not defeat authoritarianism, and its relevance to the holes and inconsistencies in American ideological positioning was left unaddressed. By the time the Cold War rolled around, a naturalized repertoire of choices for journalists was ready to shift into gear. Cold War architects left little to chance in helping them on their way.
Where It Began Beyond Journalism
Cold War journalism evolved from an institutional culture that had played a part in nation-building from the earliest days of the Republic. Working with figures in other institutions to position the emergent nation above the fray of others, journalists took on a role that involved recognizing that, the clearer America could be in distinguishing itself, the easier it would be to carry out its objectives. As journalists set about articulating what was exceptional about America, they looked askance at those who were different, sometimes to the point of hatred. And because hatred is never quite as distant from friendly alliances as we might think, it too became relevant to the power dynamics that create and sustain American identity.
Creating a national identity meant first distinguishing the United States from Great Britain, its European colonizer. Though we now know many of the same institutional builders behind American exceptionalism were slave holders, bigots and misogynists, nation-building involved associating the United States with democracy, equality and freedom and weeding out European ideologies of aristocracy, colonialism, feudalism and socialism. While upholding the distinction from Britain no doubt felt essential to putting and keeping America on the map, Britain was really no more than a placeholder for distinctions yet to come. US Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin was one of the first to say that America could accommodate only one enemy at a time.19 This made enmity with Great Britain useful until fractious relations between the United States and Russia would take center stage.
Journalists of colonial and revolutionary times created America’s image by focusing on its energy, size, youthfulness, resources, accomplishments and future. Though enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples were left out of the imagined collective, early newspapers nonetheless circulated stories across the thirteen colonies to create unity. They developed practices of satire, editorials and caricature – under pseudonyms protecting them from authorities – to intensify animosity toward the British. The dichotomy they helped create between old and new nations was not just geographic but also normative, finding expression in a wide set of beliefs and practices that made America exceptional: individualism, social mobility, religious freedom and moral purity. As historian Richard Pells argues, “there was never a moment when the Old World and the New World were not practically and culturally intertwined, or at odds with what each meant to the other.”20
But American exceptionalism was initially slow to catch on beyond America. Most Europeans were wary of what they read and heard about the nation-building taking place across the Atlantic. They fretted over America’s passion for mass production, modern technology and consumerism, worrying what would happen to local artisans, small specialty shops and neighborhood shopkeepers. Books like William Stead’s The Americanization of the World were still criticizing America at the turn of the twentieth century for being too closely aligned with modernization and popular culture.21
And then came World War II. The United States was slow to enter the war but went out with much fanfare, unlike the British, whose exit, in comparison to that of the Americans, was described as the difference between “a great party and austerity.” American singularity began to capture widespread attention. But it wasn’t all admiration. When Italian journalist Luigi Barzini wrote Americans Are Alone in the World in 1953, his description of Americans, “who get out of bed only for the greatest crusades – to change the face of the world and to right all wrongs forever – [and who] are reluctant to accept everyday, non-revolutionary tasks,” reflected prevailing critiques. Barzini pointed to American hypocrisy, complaining Americans “expected gratitude, good will and friendship as their reward,” while their actions – the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, Fulbright program, NATO – were bursting with the carefully plotted dissemination of American values and self-interest.22
So maybe it makes sense that efforts to sustain US exceptionalism haven’t disappeared over time. Institutions hold each other up when they share goals, play by the same rules, implement action in tandem and resist external pressures by adopting strategies that make change less appealing.23 This is why it’s hard to imagine news coverage that doesn’t center the government, courts, political parties or Wall Street. It’s also why journalism is so affected by conditions seemingly having little to do with the news. Institutional actors of all sorts regularly get involved in newsmaking, where they build influence incrementally and without much fanfare. How often are we startled by mention of a new funder or roll-out of a new regulation? We shouldn’t be, for novelty doesn’t happen without early signs of interest in change. But because journalism can easily comingle with the institutions around it, we don’t always pay attention to activity that unfolds below the surface. It’s easy to lose sight of the ongoing mechanisms keeping institutions dependent on each other.
And there’s a flip side of American institutions too. When the institutional landscape is fraught with policies that don’t match practices, means that can’t produce ends, pressures from the outside and hidden ways of accommodating self-interest, institutions show a different face. Fragmentation, polarization and decoupling send them into crisis mode, where what institutional actors say doesn’t match how institutions operate. The gains between institutions can be mutual: journalism’s public stature rises if people believe journalists have reliable access to well-placed sources of institutional information. But sometimes institutions legitimate institutional actors and accept at face value the information and views they deem important, even when they no longer reflect existing institutional priorities. Whenever any part of this arrangement goes sour, it’s hard to find a repair that works. We need only think of the institutional disarray that’s been introduced by the second Trump administration to grasp how deeply problematic this is.
So we are always dealing with an upside and downside of institutions. Both have much to do with American exceptionalism. The Cold War helped ingrain the coexistence of institutional highs and lows, largely by prescribing what the high looked like and pitting its cheerleaders against challengers from below. On one hand, institutions were held up as exemplars for disseminating Cold War thinking. Pressure to sustain widespread conformity of thought and action across institutions produced Americans who learned how to stay below the radar. On the other, the same institutions pushed to dismantle otherwise normative and consensual beliefs and actions. Politicians learned to put acquiescence before public service, educators to put propagandizing before teaching and, most pertinent to our story, journalists to put American exceptionalism – along with elitism, ethnocentrism, jingoism and patriotism – before truth-telling.
Today, American institutional settings continue to wrestle with these same tensions. The split between those who prize institutions and those who decry them turned the 2024 elections into a referendum over American institutions. While the two sides appeared to mirror each other, in a curious way they exemplify the structuralist assumption that absence and excess deliver the same result. Both an uncritical insistence on institutional viability and a frenzy to prove institutional unviability end up making institutions irrelevant.
Coverage of the presidential campaign during the summer of 2024 shows how. The surprise roll-out of the race’s mid-summer events was nonstop: a disastrous July presidential debate, an assassination attempt on Trump, the Republican National Convention and selection of J. D. Vance as vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden’s exit from the race, the rapid elevation of Kamala Harris to be Democratic presidential nominee, another assassination attempt. The pace transformed campaign reporters from what the Washington Post called “one of the sleepier election cycles in decades” into circumstances where reporters could barely contain their excitement: “chomping at the bit,” “bonkers,” “off to the races,” “a whole new ballgame,” “pure adrenalin and caffeine,” “unprecedented,” was how they described the shift.24 And this was before the race ended in an electoral result that November that shocked many.
The unpredictability sweeping US politics in 2024 disrupted not only the news cycle but all the careful plans journalists had laid two years earlier to improve their coverage of electoral campaigns. Before the US midterm elections of 2022, many outlets had rebuilt their news departments, shifting assignments, centering collaboration and scaffolding tasks to keep the story flowing creatively, regardless of incoming information. Panels of experts and pundits pushing analysis over speculation accompanied drone-produced videos and a focus on process and “non-competitive” contests instead of horseraces and soundbites. Journalists positioned developments against the backdrop of risks to democracy, warning, as did political commentator Molly Jong-Fast, that “the mainstream media must not cover these midterms as business as usual, because ‘business as usual’ could end democracy.”25
But though the intention was to spark public involvement in the elections, journalism’s impact was negligible. Nielsen statistics revealed smaller and less diverse news audiences for 2022 than during the midterms of 2018. Nearly 25.4 million people were watching primetime coverage across thirteen live television networks when the polls closed, roughly 30 percent fewer than the number of viewers four years earlier. Fox News dominated the 2022 ratings, and most viewers (65 percent) were fifty-five and older, with only 7 percent under the age of thirty-four.26 Public apathy, especially among younger voters, made clear that journalism done well makes little difference if nobody is around to notice.
Importantly, Jong-Fast’s comment about the mainstream media doing “business as usual” hides what has been the case for some time but became instrumental to the 2024 presidential campaign. No one knows what the mainstream media are anymore, for the term no longer describes the US information ecosystem. American journalism operates primarily through two media subsystems functioning independently of each other, whose polarization is so stark that few stories, explanations, interpretations or sources have credibility on both sides. When polarization produces such strong differences that commonality is no longer a sure thing, it’s not a good look for democracy. And though some form of journalism can exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without journalism.
We can’t even agree on what to call these sparring camps. They’re regularly classified as left/right, liberal/conservative or left-wing/right-wing, and they are further segmented by a medley of descriptors: progressive, pragmatist, moderate, centrist, alternative, radical, traditional, conventional, legacy, prestige and more. The rotation of labels does little more than nod to separate but adjacent information environments, whatever they contain inside.
Our story will call them Media Left and Media Right, with the full admission that an exercise with these terms may be only slightly more satisfying than the others. It builds on initiatives that identify instances of bias from the left, right and center as a way of signaling ideological camps in journalism. Largely focusing on national news outlets that fall into predictable ideological quarters, these initiatives position outlets with similar views together to reflect journalism’s filter bubbles. MSNBC and Fox News would be obvious outlets in Media Left and Media Right, while The Hill and Forbes would typically be located in the center.27 These positions also change over time: The Chicago Tribune was in Media Right for much of the twentieth century when it was under the conservative management of the McCormick family, but it now registers more in Media Left. The type of media content also complicates matters: Editorial content can be either more liberal or conservative than straight news coverage in the same outlet. Left somewhat in the margins of these initiatives are outlets serving special interests or specific populations.
With all its warts, the idea of Media Left and Right gives our story a way to move forward while reminding us that an outlet’s placement is dynamic, somewhat arbitrary and can change by issue. More important, it shows that, even if each side is differently polarized, they are still parts of one system. And that system is part of a larger institutional culture.
This is critical to remember, for journalism can only do so much on its own. As the political landscape imploded in the summer of 2024 and journalists largely tried to explain a story unravelling with little precedent, the political engagement they’d sought earlier came without their involvement. Instead, a frenetic outpouring of memes, gifs and viral tweets on social media made TikTok the go-to platform for one side, podcasting the platform of choice for the other. As Harris and Trump were praised from Media Left and Right for bringing “fun” back to politics, less attention focused on the fact that the presumed burst of interest among young voters or white male voters came despite journalism, not because of it.
We see here how the upside and downside of institutions necessarily build off each other. But current conditions suggest that maintaining neighborly relations across US institutional settings is no longer certain. Think about the fractious relations between the government, courts, market, public, political parties and, of course, journalism. Even though American journalists were at the gate in defining US exceptionalism in the nation’s early days, now they do little more than chart its swings between right and left political camps. As George Packer writes in The Atlantic: “American exceptionalism has two faces, equally transfixed with a sense of specialness – one radiant with the nation’s unique beneficence, the other sunk in its unrivaled malignity. These extremes, confounding friends as well as enemies, are unrealistic and unsustainable.”28 These two faces of America’s exceptionalism go far in keeping Americans at cross-purposes with each other.
Media Right maintain America is unique because of its decentralization, commercialism and religious character, while Media Left point to its universal moral ideals. The back-and-forth between these views feels endless at times. When Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham warned her viewers that Trump’s convictions would be “the end of the line for American exceptionalism … if we sit on our hands and fall into disrepair” and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told the Republican National Convention “we will revive American exceptionalism when we send Trump back to the White House,” it’s hard to imagine the same idea being embraced by Media Left. And yet, commentators like Joshua Green in the Washington Monthly say the country’s current fight against information disorder is undermining its exceptionalism and The Atlantic calls for reclaiming exceptionalism as “an ideal hijacked and misused” by the political right.29 It’s hard not to notice that, after Trump berated the longstanding US ally and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the press corps in spring of 2025, American exceptionalism was a news topic beyond the US but not among American journalists. Journalism’s current investment in activities it once played a proactive role in shaping has decidedly shrunk.
No wonder, then, journalism is now seen by many as a mouthpiece for partisan concerns instead of a stage for sustaining national unity or that it now ranks at the bottom of institutions trusted by the public. Adults under thirty get more of their information from social media than from national news outlets, and over half of all Americans rely on social media for at least some information. Some argue that declining trust stems from journalists neglecting to admit the bias that accompanies newsmaking. Lippmann saw this happening early on, noting in 1922 that journalism does no more than produce “the pictures in our heads,” for “the only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.”30 So even journalists’ early efforts to identify what was unique about America involved being selective about what mattered and not very transparent about how choices are made.
Maybe this is why journalists across the political spectrum spent much of the campaign accommodating their version of the public while staying true-ish to journalism’s charter, however they defined it. Both Media Left and Media Right relied heavily on Cold War conventions, and they worked true to form: on one end, soft-pedaling signs of authoritarianism so much it was hard to understand the news; on the other, foregrounding so much hate speech and disinformation it was hard to find the news.
These actions of journalists in Media Left and Right do not do enough to inform the public, but they are in keeping with the idea of asymmetrical polarization and its consequences. As Benkler, Faris and Roberts note, different competitive dynamics lead to asymmetrical polarization, where a well-defined and insular right-wing media face down the remainder of a less-defined media environment that stretches from center-right to the far left. Media Left comingle with adjacent institutional neighbors by invoking longstanding practices that come with a realization all institutions eventually get their turn to lead. Tensions between professional guidelines and commercial or ideological drivers put stoppers on what journalists will do to uphold truth-telling. Those in Media Right, thought to be more inwardly self-reinforcing, pivot less toward neighboring institutions and spend more internal efforts ensuring ideological purity is being maintained. This distinction – between Media Left’s “truth-consistency” and Media Right’s “belief-consistency” – structured responses from both sides to the 2024 presidential election.31
But how do we make sense of each environment being put off by the other? Media Left complained of Media Right not caring about or understanding the moment’s gravity and its threat to democracy, Media Right about the relentless and moralistic attacks from Media Left trivializing Trump and his supporters. Both media environments ended up pushing specific issues – abortion rights or liberal “wokeness” – rather than excavating the broader beliefs that put them there or wondering how to make the polity one again. Toxic horserace coverage was all over the place. Though media critic Jay Rosen advises journalists to “follow the stakes, not the odds,”32 both sides were so concerned with positionality they forgot to think about what drives it or that it doesn’t need to be this way.
Some even want to carve a deeper niche in their own side of the media environment. Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted the day after the 2024 presidential election: “the Dems problem is not that they don’t appear on, or appease, Fox or Rogan (or Musk), it’s that they don’t have their *own* versions of Fox, Rogan or Musk. They suck at messaging.” But the question of what to do next is unclear. As Thomas Frank, whose book What’s the Matter with Kansas? turned around discussions of class in the US, writes of those in Media Left: “I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.” Or, as media critic Dan Froomkin sagely observes: “You simply cannot cover Trump’s second term accurately and responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism and cruelty. And the mainstream political media – for a variety of reasons – is not willing to do anything of the kind.”33
What this means for our story is that the institutional regard for journalism goes a long way in creating a climate that ensures and vacates journalism’s relevance, often at the same time, which in turn can end up undercutting democracy’s viability. When neighboring institutions like the government, political parties, the economy, the public or social media deride and undermine newsmaking, it becomes harder to sustain claims for journalism’s centrality on either side of the divide. It also makes it harder to support democracy. The simultaneity of the upside and downside of institutions is critical to understanding what’s happening now. It’s no accident they were expertly blended during the Cold War.
The takeaway about journalism and its adjacent institutions is thus twofold. Institutions both help and hinder journalism, often in subtle and unannounced ways. This is bigger than just journalism, for without journalists democracy flounders. And when democracy is compromised, journalism gets weaponized on behalf of those institutions trying to sink it even deeper.
So despite all the talk about institutional culture making institutions into team players, journalism’s neighboring institutions can only care so much about the news. Journalists must shoulder the burden of staying relevant, especially when it is no longer assured. This makes journalistic conventions equally important to what those beyond journalism do on its behalf.
Where It Began Inside Journalism
From American journalism’s earliest days, journalists had to discern what worked as newsmaking without all the niceties accompanying most occupations. Journalists don’t go through licensing procedures, certification, accreditation, recognized training or shared apprenticeships. They need instead to figure out how to balance their own needs with demands from outside. As with any occupational group, they manage this through a mix of beliefs, values, norms and practices that are cobbled together in response to largely unexpected challenges. The markers of enmity, invisibility and outreach, so crucial to the Cold War, piggybacked on these conventions and the environment where they took shape.
It’s safe to say there are few journalists anywhere who would voluntarily give up their freedom, and American journalists in the early days of the Republic were no exception. Their desire to remain independent took on added importance against the backdrop of America’s ongoing efforts to separate from the British. In 1737, when American statesman and publisher Benjamin Franklin wrote that, if support for journalistic freedom “is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins,”34 he expressed one of the evergreen ideas motivating the practice of American journalism. Sustaining independence was an ideal from the beginning and has remained so across time. Because journalism is still one of the few American institutions without a mechanism for accommodating public review, most journalists see their autonomy as foundational. Unsurprisingly, it would become the single most pressing issue for journalists during the Cold War.
