Alan Stevens is an investigative reporter who covers gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.
new york times recently released a comprehensive report on President Donald Trump’s campaign against the American press. These include FBI agent visits to reporters’ homes, subpoenas for journalists’ records, Pentagon access restrictions, regulatory pressure on television networks, numerous lawsuits against news organizations, and an increasingly politicized Federal Communications Commission.
“Nearly 20 months into Trump’s second term, his long media conflict has grown into a far-reaching campaign to control speech in the United States, striking in that he is applying so many tools at once and so quickly,” Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg wrote. I wrote. “Every time the president attacks long-standing protected speech… he erodes norms and undermines the role of an independent press.”
All in all, it’s a terrible stock.
It’s also difficult to read without noticing who occupies almost every frame. us.
Dear reporters. Editor. TV presenter. network. Publisher. their lawyers. And our industry has become heavily reliant on access.
The Times is right about the threat. Although judges have repeatedly criticized some of the administration’s legal strategies, President Trump does seriously threaten the First Amendment by weaponizing private lawsuits against government agencies and news organizations. But President Trump’s attacks on free speech extend far beyond journalism. ICE protester To teachers in solidarity with Palestine on a Los Angeles college campus. But somewhere along the way, the American press began to conflate two things: freedom of the press and the conditions to which the press was accustomed.
they are not the same thing.
Freedom of speech was never free.
It was torn off and came loose. Grinding, stretching, repressing, and reborning are common on the backs of those who prioritize the pain and personal safety of others over their own pain.
Somewhere along the way, the American press began to confuse two things: freedom of the press and the conditions to which the press was accustomed.
In 1892, more than 20 years after the country had recovered from the war, Ida B. Wells challenged the lies used by white terrorists in Memphis to justify the lynching of black men in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlights. In retaliation, the mob ransacked her office and destroyed the newspaper’s printing equipment. Wells happened to be away. Threatened with death if she returned, she continued her investigation from North Korea. There was no White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no central podium for the president’s press corps to be invited to, and no glorious reporting awards. As a black woman, she couldn’t even vote. In her lonely situation, the best job security for her is carry a pistol.
“I am not happy that I played a part in the corruption exposed here. Someone has to show that the African American race is guilty of more than they are guilty of, and it seems like it is incumbent on me to do that,” she wrote. in her book On the excruciating personal trade-offs she made to pursue her career: perspective. Her fear, fatigue, and loneliness existed alongside something larger: her physical body, visible violence, and unjust living.
To be honest, I’m full of depression. I write this as a journalist who has grown depressed while sneaking through annual industry conferences, newsrooms, and brown bag luncheons. There is a palpable fear in most discussions, a recognition that the world is less fair, less stable, and overwhelmingly difficult.
we talk about everything. Except for the need to win, and most importantly, for whom.
Israeli airstrike Attacks continue to kill and displace Palestinians in Gaza, the United Nations reported last month. medical shortage And restrictions on critical supplies continue to weaken an already overwhelmed health system. in west banksettler violence, stopped by the Israeli military, is a growing threat every day. Deaths in Israel’s war in Gaza nearly 300 Journalists – more people covering both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined.
The Times, in particular, has done more than almost any other media outlet to launder the justifications for this ongoing death and destruction, and to police the language that is allowed to be used to discuss it, without mentioning it at all in its summation of attacks on free speech.
In the United States, ICE arrests are approximately 51,000 people in August alone This comes in the wake of the Trump administration’s dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement. Many of those detained had no criminal history, but courts continue to fight the regime’s detention practices. Department of Homeland Security Oversight Agency reported on Monday Migrants at Florida’s defunct Alligator Alcatraz prison were reportedly held for more than an hour at a time in outdoor metal cages known as “sedation areas,” barely larger than a telephone booth.
Government enforcement and obfuscation is difficult. It cannot endure death, conquest, and the helplessness of its victims.
As Wells said, I discomfort I have covered national violence, discomfort in living it.
Nothing in my day job can match the pain and persistence of loved ones being separated from their families, the lifelong inequality of racial ostracism, or the haunting emotional pain these events leave as a legacy.
As a result, hearing the stories of journalists crushed by the tyranny of power creates a vibratory discomfort that borders on nausea, so that our own claims of injury become so loud that we begin to obscure the suffering beyond us. Perhaps that’s part of the purpose of these attacks in the first place. It hurts us until the wound is on the horizon. Please hurt us so that we forget those who have been hurt more.
We need to fight harder for the truth. Not because journalists are the chief victims of the erosion of truth, but because those outside the walls of newsrooms who pay a much higher price are the reason we do this work.
People starved to death in Gaza at the discretion of the United States. People suffering and dying around the world after our medical aid is cut off. Millions of Americans are living through a crisis to avoid ruin. deprived of their medical care.
We need to fight harder for the truth. Not because journalists are the chief victims of the erosion of truth, but because those outside the walls of newsrooms who pay a much higher price are the reason we do this work.
This contradiction may also help explain why Americans increasingly roll their eyes when journalists describe threats to journalism as threats to democracy.
In 2025, gallup The survey found that only 28 percent of Americans trust newspapers, television, and radio to report the news completely, accurately, and fairly, the lowest level ever measured. When Gallup started asking this question in the 1970s, the numbers ranged from 68 to 72 percent.
There are many reasons for that collapse, from deepening partisan tensions and a fragmented information ecosystem to the hollowing out of local news.
But some of that doubt is understandable.
You can see why no one wants to invest in a product from an industry that won’t admit it wants to win.
And by “victory” I mean journalists have become strangely embarrassed to admit what we want. To make it difficult to abuse humans without anyone noticing.
There is nothing neutral about its mission.
And that never happened.
Perhaps the mistake stems from imagining the freedom of the press, and its proxy, as a property rather than a practice.
Perhaps the mistake comes from imagining the freedom of the press, and by proxy the freedom of the press, as a property rather than a practice, an inherited and intact right, rather than an ability that must be exercised, tested, and fought for, tried and fought for when the costs of its enforcement rise.
in him 1951 book In “True Believers: Reflections on the Nature of Mass Movements,” author Eric Hoffer captures the appeal of fascism with five heart-stirring words uttered by a young fervent Nazi: “Freedom from freedom.” He used this quote to consider the unpleasant possibility that freedom is not something inherent in the human mind, but more like a muscle, strengthened by tension, grown by resistance, and atrophied if left unused.
Freedom of the press also lives under the same rules. Its value is not measured by how easily journalists can wield it, but by what survives when power turns hostile.
Our task is to comfort those who are suffering and to make those who are comfortable suffer. The journalists’ own comfort was not part of the equation.