Malka Older: In these fraught times, the press must continue, and intensify, its role of bearing witness

The free press is often called one of the pillars of democracy, but that’s understating the case.

A free press is a necessary, integral part of democracy, not just something that props it up. Without meaningful, trustworthy, and trusted sources of information, voting is just a guessing game. Even in a small city, there are too many people and issues for any one voter to have a grasp of all of them, and in our interconnected world, many topics require global knowledge, as well. We need the news to be able to make meaningful choices in the voting booth and beyond.

We can see the impacts of a shaken, not quite free, definitely not trusted press in the latest U.S. election.

Votes for proposals in referendums went along with votes for candidates opposed to those proposals; studies showed high levels of misinformation among voters about what the different candidates represented. And this comes after months and months and months of articles, polls, and features about the election, not to mention candidate ads and endless party fundraising emails. In the syllogism that proposes elections → democracy → good governance and prosperity, something is broken.

In fact, many things are broken, from the public education system to the Electoral College to the legislative disenfranchisement of citizens living in the nation’s capital. But for this piece, let’s focus on the press and some of the ways we can make it better, even as things get worse.

First, though, we’re going to talk about elections.

Democracy is more than just elections. That’s easy to forget, given the hype. Elections are loud and long, filling screens and pages with competition and the calculation about it. Elections are exciting; they feed into ideas about winners and losers, right and wrong. They’re often used to stand in for democracy, as when autocrats try to legiti-wash their reigns with an unfair, unfree vote.

Even when they are conducted according to international standards, elections aren’t the sum total of democracy. Elections are a mechanism for getting us to democracy by understanding what the people want. They might be necessary for democracy, but they’re not sufficient. They shouldn’t absolve us from participating in what happens in the four years between them; they shouldn’t absolve the government from listening to the people in the interim.

And yet, they often do. Elections often become a synecdoche for all of democracy: visible, quantifiable, photogenic. We focus on that and forget about the rest of democratic work: connecting with our neighbors, understanding other people’s problems, thinking hard about alternatives, and imagining better futures.

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Similarly, certain kinds of coverage have come to symbolize the role of the press in democracy. There’s the trope of the crusading journalists uncovering a scandal in time to alert the electorate, who can then vote for the other candidate. Certainly, investigative journalism is important (polling, I would argue, not so much). But revealing a scandal has proved less effective in recent election cycles, and as the United States leans into authoritarianism, it’s likely to be less effective still. Authoritarians don’t worry about scandals because they don’t expect to be held accountable.

What we do need is for the press to continue, and intensify, the function of bearing witness. Whatever is coming, people need to know about it. We need to mark the actions and abuses, for the present and for posterity.

That means not glossing over, not pretending everything is normal, not letting traditional mores or some vestigial respect for the office get in the way of reporting on what is happening. Fortunately, we have many examples of journalists doing this in other places to inspire us, from the Philippines to Venezuela to Palestine to Myanmar, as well as many of my colleagues at Global Voices. Doing a better job of covering what’s going on in the world — using local sources, not foreign correspondents who arrive only for the crisis — will mean better coverage at home.

As much as the direct coverage of events, we need journalism to provide a view into the lives of others. When politicians shamelessly use dehumanizing language for groups of people, building empathy and understanding is vital. Hollywood and Netflix are only ever going to show us a small segment of the other and mostly beautified and dramatized to the point of disbelief.

My chosen medium for this, written fiction, is sadly not as popular as it should be. Journalism, done well, can work that understanding into stories packed with information, demonstrating humanity along with business forecasts or sports bulletins or technology updates. That means eschewing the stereotypes, objectifying, and slur or slur-adjacent language that have become far too normalized in the political sphere.

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It also means that someone with power deciding to use marginalized groups for political gain should not be the only time those groups are reported on. We need the witnessing of how people are being attacked and exploited, but we also need more than only articles about marginalized people under duress, without agency, or through the words of their attackers. We need interviews that let them speak, articles about joy and art along with articles about crisis.

To make that work, the press needs to include more perspectives. Right now, for all their pretensions to neutrality and balance, most newsrooms are dominated by majority groups, in part because of persistent racism and sexism affecting journalists, and their news coverage (present company excepted, of course) shows a very distinct positioning: well-off, well-educated, and insulated. Naturally, that is going to generate mistrust among people who not only don’t fit into those categories but who are routinely ignored or looked down upon by those who do.

We need journalism to provide a view into the lives of others.

Meanwhile, in almost any community you can imagine — elementary schoolchildren, the unhoused, new immigrants, college dropouts — you can find people eager to tell the stories that are vital to them. Newsrooms need to diversify along all sorts of axes so that both the people being covered and the people doing the reporting demonstrate a belief in democracy that represents everyone.

Of course, a story from a very different perspective isn’t always fully understandable to the audience. Another critical role of the press is to provide the context that allows people to make sense of the facts and opinions being presented. Particularly in a country like the United States, where secondary education is skimping on social studies and history, the press needs to draw connections and explain implications while always, always showing their work.

Without context, it’s easy for news stories to become just another set of superficial, half-believed narratives, disconnected from significance and impact, no more consequential than the brevity of a video game life.

If there’s a path to rebuilding trust in the news, one of the first steps has to be reclaiming earnestness.

The intense coverage of elections reflects and perpetuates this slippage of meaning. The election becomes important as a contest rather than as a tool to get the best government we can; polling becomes a game of predictions, with few stakes for those who practice it.

Over and over during the past months, I read headlines, and sometimes full articles, that offered no news at all, only a reframing of the on — and on and on — going dichotomy. Words like controversial and provocative made hate speech, threats, and dangerous policies into topics whose only value rested in the reactions they garnered. If there’s a path to rebuilding trust in the news, one of the first steps has to be reclaiming earnestness: believing in the importance of events and writing about them in a way that reflects significance. If there isn’t anything meaningful to write about the election, then write about something else, like the local ballot questions or the latest community meeting.

Fully communicating meaning and importance also means finding ways to get through to people despite the loss of trust in news media, the shift away from paper subscriptions, the surge in alternative sources of information. Someone is getting people to believe political disinformation; there must be a way to get them to believe in reporting again, too. If audiences are mainly reading headlines and clickbait ledes, then those fragments need to face editing as rigorous as full stories. If people aren’t buying the bothsidesist posture, then try transparency about values and perspectives.

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Finally, journalism can help us imagine a better future — a capacity that seems sorely lacking at the moment.

Sometimes this can come through comparative studies, or features about localities that are trying something exciting and new. Sometimes that glimpse of increased possibility can come from a critique of the status quo, a reminder that the way things are is not inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices. Sometimes it’s not news at all and needs to come on the op-ed page, in the form of someone saying, I believe our city, our country, our world can be better than this. There is another way to live.

However it comes, we need to be open to it. Because despite whatever the polling might say, even the best journalism cannot tell us the future, but it might help us shape our present.

Malka Older is the executive director of Global Voices, an international nonprofit supporting community journalism, digital rights, media literacy, and Indigenous languages. She is the author of “Infomocracy,” a science fiction political thriller about the future of democracy, and the Mossa and Pleiti series, murder mysteries set on Jupiter, and she is a faculty associate at Arizona State University.