“THE ENEMY CAMP is certain networks.” In his rambling election victory speech, Donald Trump clearly demarcated his friends from his enemies. The enemy camp he refers to is mainstream news media — journalists who, irrespective of their personal and employers’ political affiliations — would have stayed up all night, with pizzas, to deliver the news.
Trump has his favourites in the media: he declared Elon Musk as a star, Fox News as his megaphone. No wonder then, that the world largely receives its news from Twitter/X, foregoing that painstaking process that journalists are trained for.
Months of watching this nail-biting circus — with both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump nauseatingly championing American exceptionalism — has drawn to an end. More than the narrative of winners and losers, what was truly at stake was the idea of truth — and how it is manipulated. But more importantly, what made the US election of 2024 also remarkable within the ambit of truth-telling, is the role of news organisations in covering this quadrennial circus of exercising democracy.
Come election season, major news organisations across the US would ritually declare who they would be rallying for in their editorials and opinion columns while attempting to fact-check the many claims made by their endorsees. However, if journalism ought to be the fourth pillar of a democracy — the one that asks the tough questions of the legislative, executive and judiciary — the process of endorsing a political candidate seems to undermine its own legitimacy.
This is all the more crucial in these times when newspaper subscriptions are at the lowest ever globally, with people getting their news from social media where there is no process of verification, and when large corporations that have bought news organisations are determining the tone of coverage of any political event or process that needs microscopic scrutiny. No wonder then that a global survey in 2022 found that news trust in the US was among the lowest.
No matter the well-crafted explanations by the editors, the process of political endorsement does more damage to the public perception of journalism; now more so than ever before. This is why, Washington Post not endorsing either of the presidential candidates made big news; the daughter of the owner of LA Times declaring that the refusal to endorse “a candidate that is overseeing a war on children” made even bigger news, causing ripples within the organisation as well as across other news media in the US. Nearly 200 journalists from the LA Times wrote an open letter to the newspaper’s owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and the newspaper’s current executive editor Terry Tang questioning their cancellation of endorsement for Kamala Harris. Many other newspapers followed suit, in maintaining a “neutral” stance.
The US is not the only country to endorse candidates and political parties during national elections: most newspapers in the UK endorsed the Labour Party in 2024, with many of the Conservative-supporting ones switching their allegiance. Australia—which has among the most stringent laws attacking free speech, with journalists being attacked for any story questioning the government’s surveillance — also has its newspapers endorsing election candidates.
In my own native country of India, we do not have the practice of publicly endorsing an election candidate; even as the elections in 2014, 2019 and 2024 have shown India the journalists who forgot their jobs when they were busy taking selfies with India’s Islamophobic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while journalists who are actually uncovering corruption are arrested. But in journalism school, we learn early on that, irrespective of which political party is in power, our job as journalists is to hold them accountable to their election promises.
This seems to be the case in most countries. The evidence? Journalists continue to be killed for doing their job, in their own homelands, for uncovering everything from local to regional corruption. Even so, a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that Haiti and Israel are the world’s top offenders in allowing the murderers of journalists to go unpunished.
As a journalist with nearly two decades of experience, I have witnessed how people lambast news media for everything possible. They claim that news media “propagate fake news”, even as they themselves fall prey to messages on social media without pausing for a moment to ask themselves, “Could this to true? Have any of the newspapers reported it?”
I see people tell me how to do my job; they wouldn’t dare tell a surgeon how to do his. They forget that as journalists, we painstakingly verify our facts repeatedly, irrespective of our own personal and political views. Notwithstanding my personal discomfort with the politics of the New York Times, during my month working for their City Desk in New York, I saw how the newspapers took this seriously, with their corrections.
That the New York Times has been immensely skewed in reporting the daily atrocities committed by Israel on Palestine is well evident, if one compares their headlines to their stories on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. NYT’s bias towards the Israeli army is as clear as ocean water. Sadly, biases like this are not new: as an immigrant living in Ireland — but with the hawk eye of a journalist — I see on a daily basis how newspapers in Ireland reveal their bias towards and against certain groups of people.
It seems like a mystery how editors behind these news organisations forget Ireland’s own migration history; they seem to forget to account for the widely varied experiences of people who have made Ireland their home and contribute to its economy and diversity. At the same time, the absence of journalists from a working-class background shows up in the ways how news organisations cover issues that impact the working class.
What story gets reported and in which way depends largely on who is reporting about it and who is making the editorial decisions. In the age of social media, what we can do least — if not subscribe to newspapers — is to verify the source of information forwarded to us.
As we gear towards elections on this island to which almost every US president has ties, I hope Ireland does not go down that typical lane of following American trends. Journalism must stay separate from political endorsements. It must reflect the needs of the people it wants as its readers. Washington Post, LA Times and other newspapers — irrespective of the hidden motives for neither endorsing the newly-minted president who has been convicted of 34 felony counts; nor the other who could have been the country’s first woman president but one who refuses to call an end to Israel’s genocide of Gaza —made a tiny dent in making journalism great again.
Could this be one tiny step towards restoring faith in journalism? For people in the US, and the rest of the world, that would mean learning to pause before every sensational news headline; in realising that while experts will sit and pontificate, while journalists will do their job.
How does one differentiate the real news? I still remember a plaque on a wall I had seen in 2012: it was at the Newseum in Washington DC, which was dedicated to the history of journalism. The plaque bore the words of American journalist Rod Dreher: “There are three kinds of people who run toward disaster, not away: cops, firemen and reporters.”
The Newseum no longer exists; but maybe it’s time to remember those we ought to trust, for the ways they do run towards disaster, to tell the news.
A native of India, Priyanka Borpujari has been a journalist for 18 years, reporting from India and several other countries. She currently resides in Dublin and is pursuing a PhD at Dublin City University (DCU), and is finishing her first book on the Nellie massacre of 1983.
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