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As a journalist, Gessen is inevitably preoccupied with the corruption of public discourse and particularly the rapid deterioration of the media’s ability to hold American power to account. Of course, “holding to account” also requires a legislature and a judiciary that are willing and able to act on information uncovered by news organizations, but it is true that existing problems in the media—the tendency to treat politics as a horse race, and above all the “view from nowhere,” the foundational belief in reporting the news “neutrally”—have hampered the public understanding of Trumpism. Gessen glosses “neutral” as “without assigning value or providing more than the immediate context.”

To function, both of these conventions require all parties to operate with a degree of good faith that does not currently exist. In an information environment saturated with bad actors, the convention against context makes it hard to flag deliberate misinformation. The convention against value judgment means, for example, that it took NPR until July 2019 to apply the word “racist” to one of the president’s statements. The view from nowhere is all very well if your civil rights aren’t being assaulted by the head of state. If they are, then your view is unavoidably located in your nonwhite body.

NPR’s commitment to avoiding an “angry tone”—a phrase used by an executive in an open letter about the network’s refusal to use the word “lie” to describe Trump’s many lies—is shared by other organizations and reveals a politics hidden in the supposed absence of politics. For a news organization, a commitment to unthreatening civility should surely be secondary to a commitment to civil rights and to truth, the foundational journalistic value. If reporting the truth clearly is replaced by some notion of “balance,” then it’s possible that your primary political commitments are not to that lofty objectivity mentioned in your mission statement but reside somewhere offstage, in a shared hinterland of class and culture that deserves interrogation. Your media organization may be susceptible to capture, perhaps doubly so if its source of funding rests in the hands of Trumpist politicians, or Trumpist shareholders and advertisers.

Gessen asserts that “it will be the job of journalists to embody and enforce the expectation of meaning.” The strategy Gessen puts forward is one adopted by Russian journalists in the last twenty years, faced with the blizzard of lies and threats emanating from the circle of Vladimir Putin. “When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality.” This was a problem under Stalinism, and it is again under the oligarchy:

Russian journalists opted for language that was descriptive in the most immediate way: they tried to stick to verbs and nouns, and only to things that could be directly observed. In a bid to regain trust, they resorted to a drastically reduced vocabulary.

American political commentators have struggled to operate in a world of “alternative facts,” the blandly sinister phrase of Kellyanne Conway. The supine notion of a “post-truth” world and the attendant melancholy posturing of sectors of the commentariat should be retired in favor of what Gessen frames as a rediscovered commitment to meaningful political speech,

speech intended to find common ground across difference, to negotiate the rules of living together in society…speech that, on the one hand, brings reality into focus and, on the other, activates the imagination.

This will require that journalists acknowledge where they stand. “To cover Trumpism as a system, journalists have to position themselves clearly—and critically—outside that system.”

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