washingtonmonthly--2020-10-26--Reporters of Color Are Declaring Independence

In 1968 , a report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—better known as the Kerner Commission—excoriated the national press for its role in the racial unrest that rocked America in the summer of 1967 .
“ The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man ’ s world , ” the commission wrote .
“ The ills of the ghetto , the difficulties of life there , the Negro ’ s burning sense of grievance , are seldom conveyed.
” Instead , the commission found , American coverage was rife with “ the biases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white America.
” Especially appalling , the commission found , was the dearth of Black journalists in U.S. newsrooms .
Fewer than 5 percent of newsroom staff were Black ; fewer than 1 percent were editors .
“ The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out , hiring , training , and promoting Negroes , ” the commission concluded .
More than 50 years later , after another summer of protest and racial reckoning , too much of what the commission wrote is still true .
While there ’ s no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ newsroom staff today who are Black , research suggests that it ’ s less than 8 percent—still far too low .
Overall , newsrooms are only about half as diverse as the U.S. workforce as a whole .
Controversies over insensitive and racist coverage have embroiled major legacy and digital outlets , including the Los Angeles Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , Refinery29 , and the Ringer .
At The Philadelphia Inquirer , a story about the impacts of unrest on city infrastructure headlined “ Buildings Matter Too ” led to a staff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the resignation of a top editor .
At The New York Times , an op-ed by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for military intervention to quell protests led to another high-level editor ’ s ouster .
Many of the paper ’ s own reporters took to Twitter to declare that the op-ed “ puts Black @ nytimes staff in danger.
” At the same time , energy and interest in a more diverse , equitable , and inclusive media has never been more intense .
Nor has the need for it been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is leading the way .
Champions of media diversity have stopped waiting for the establishment to fix itself .
Instead , a new crop of reformers is staging its own insurgency , working outside traditional media and often in spite of it .
“ I don ’ t know that we can integrate fairly at this point , ” Angela Ford , founder of the Black media start-up Obsidian Collection , says .
“ It ’ s time for the world to hear the Black voice from a Black filter.
” The result @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of nonprofits , philanthropic efforts , and media start-ups led largely by people of color .
New outlets are serving overlooked communities , experimenting with ways to engage audiences and giving journalists of color a platform for their voice .
Media upstart PushBlack , for instance , covers topics like voting rights and criminal justice reform and Black history .
Sahan Journal , launched in 2019 by a Somali American reporter , focuses exclusively on the concerns of Minnesota ’ s immigrant and refugee communities .
Both of these outlets have the financial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fund ( REJ Fund ) , an ambitious project recently launched by the Ford Foundation and other partners to grow and sustain an emerging sector in equitable media .
These outlets are critical sources of information for minority communities .
But minorities are not the only audience .
Billboard magazine , for instance , reported that the singer Mariah Carey urged all of her listeners to follow PushBlack .
Sahan Journal won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a piece on drug overdoses among Minnesota ’ s East African community @ @ @ @ @ @ @ content and learning , ” says Tracie Powell , a former journalist and independent publisher who is now a program officer at Borealis Philanthropy , which works on racial justice in media .
“ They ’ re plugged into Black Twitter ; they ’ re seeing content on Facebook and Instagram .
They are being exposed and being educated.
” Emerging outlets like these , Powell told me , are not just powerful advocates for communities too long ignored by white-led press , but also catalysts for broader reform .
Their goal is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against it , and , ultimately , to transform an industry that has been far too reluctant to change .
Journalists of color are justifiably frustrated by traditional media ’ s lackluster attempts at diversity .
There have been umpteen minority fellowships , internships , and splashy awards created by big-city newsrooms .
( I got my first clips via a minority high school journalism workshop sponsored by my hometown paper , The Kansas City Star . )
But the pace of change has been glacial ; diversity efforts have been inauthentic ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with tokenism , stigma , and bias , as well as systemic barriers to entry and promotion .
Paul Delaney , who cofounded the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975 , wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2017 that when he started the NABJ , “ we felt empowered , on a righteous mission to lead America in the right direction , to egg it on to finally live up to its promise and principles .
We were so naively optimistic back then.
” Here ’ s one basic problem with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actually know the share of journalists in U.S. newsrooms who are people of color .
According to the News Leaders Association ’ s 2019 Diversity Survey , people of color make up 21.9 percent of the salaried newsroom workforce and 18.8 percent of newsroom managers .
( The U.S. population , by contrast , is 40 percent minority . )
However , just 23 percent of U.S. newsrooms participated in the survey , up from only 17 percent the year before .
“ As journalists , we put pressure on every industry there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give us the information , ” Dorothy Tucker , the NABJ ’ s current president , told me .
“ Yet we won ’ t do it .
It makes you question whether there is a problem with the numbers.
” Certainly , other white-collar professions face equal or greater problems with diversity .
Just 10 percent of lawyers are Black or Hispanic , according to the American Bar Association .
Big Tech is also notoriously monolithic .
The press , however , has a particular obligation to the public because of its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It has an obligation to employ a workforce that reflects the communities it purports to serve , which makes its failure to do so all the more galling .
Why is it failing so badly ?
For aspiring journalists of color , perhaps the biggest obstacles are the lack of connections and capital .
Minority journalists often have a harder time plugging into the clubby networks of ( typically white , typically male ) editors looking for talent .
“ The journos of color and women aren ’ t networking with white dudes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t in their DNA , ” Shani Hilton , now deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times , wrote in a 2014 Medium piece .
“ Call it the Twice as Hard Half as Good Paradox : Many of us are so busy working twice as hard and hoping to get noticed that we don ’ t do the networking that seems like bullshit but is actually a key part of career advancement , ” she wrote .
Many young people of color also can ’ t afford the luxury of an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a freelancer , often prerequisites for scraping together enough bylines to land a full-time job .
In a 2015 analysis for the Columbia Journalism Review , Alex Williams found that while 66 percent of white journalism graduates found jobs in print or broadcasting in 2013 , the placement rate for minority graduates was only 49 percent .
Part of the problem , Williams surmised , was that minority students were less likely to have worked for their campus newspapers or to have had unpaid internships .
“ If you ’ re Black or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ low-income working-class community , you ’ re starting from behind compared to a middle-class white person who can rely on generational wealth while they pursue their passion career , ” says Manny Ramos , a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who described his own start in journalism as “ extremely difficult.
” “ At one point , I had an internship at a local paper , I worked full-time , and I went to school full-time , ” he told me .
“ I had no life and was barely sleeping .
A lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For journalists of color who do make it through the door , the challenges continue .
Minority journalists are often seen , not heard , their advice ignored .
The result is another frustration : missed stories and unbalanced coverage that too often depends on stereotypes and assumptions—and leads to the kinds of controversies that beset big newsrooms over this past summer .
Promotion and influence are the next big hurdles .
Diversity efforts often end at the entry level , with little thought to retention and advancement .
“ They bring this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black spot.
’ Unfortunately , too often , they don ’ t do much more than that , ” the NABJ ’ s Tucker said .
This is one reason why upper management in media is even less diverse than the rank and file .
For instance , just 8.2 percent of radio news directors are people of color , according to a 2019 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association .
Just 5.5 percent of TV news directors are Black—down from 6.4 percent in 2018 .
Sadly , things aren ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ newsrooms , financially strapped even before the pandemic , now see diversity as an unaffordable luxury .
The NABJ said that as many as half of its members surveyed have been furloughed or laid off .
“ If it was hard to get diversity , inclusion , and representation before , it ’ s that much harder now because people are getting laid off , the industry is shrinking , and there ’ s a panicked focus on profit , ” says Jessica Clark , founder of the media strategy firm Dot Connector @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Foundation .
This bleak landscape in traditional media is why a growing number of journalists , social entrepreneurs , and philanthropists are embracing a different vision of diversity in media , and a different means to achieve it .
They ’ re tired of fighting for a place at the table , and then fighting for the kind of coverage they ’ d like to see .
For these reformers , diversity goes beyond the integration of big-city newsrooms .
Rather , it ’ s about multiplying the number of voices so that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and information relevant to them .
Instead of writing about their communities for primarily white audiences , they ’ re writing for these communities as active members .
“ Let ’ s be honest , ” Borealis Philanthropy ’ s Powell said .
“ We have been begging , pleading , crying , yelling at the top of our lungs for news organizations to reflect the communities they say they serve .
And those organizations made it very , very clear that they are not serving the Black and brown people in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do you say , let ’ s stop ?
At what point do you try something different ?
” Among the journalists who broke from the establishment to blaze their own trail is Sahan Journal founder Mukhtar Ibrahim , whose editors at Minnesota Public Radio and the Minneapolis Star Tribune discouraged him from pursuing stories about the area ’ s immigrants .
“ I worked hard to open pathways to communities that were invisible to mainstream reporters , ” he wrote in The Investigative Reporters and Editors Journal .
“ I realized , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not committed to forging new relationships with these communities.
” Ibrahim launched Sahan Journal in August 2019 .
The journal is part of a larger boom in nonprofit publishing , much of it driven by journalists and social entrepreneurs who put diversity , equity , and inclusion at the heart of their mission .
The Institute for Nonprofit News reports that its membership is approaching 300 , double what it was three years ago .
Many of these new outlets are aimed at serving diverse populations , which is why the universe of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traditional , for-profit media .
According to the INN ’ s 2020 Diversity Index , roughly one in three nonprofit news employees is a person of color , as is one in five executives .
“ These younger organizations are diverse from the get-go , ” the INN ’ s executive director , Sue Cross , told me .
These outlets ’ strategies are also as diverse as their staffs .
PushBlack , which reaches nine million readers exclusively through text messages and social media , runs campaigns on voter education and criminal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Black news and history .
MLK50 is a Tennessee-based investigative news organization founded in 2017 by the veteran reporter Wendi Thomas .
In 2019 , Thomas partnered with ProPublica on a series that led to the forgiveness of $ 11.9 million in hospital debts owed by low-income patients of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis .
Nonprofits are also still working to desegregate traditional newsrooms .
The NABJ , for instance , hopes to turn up the pressure on pipelines for retention and promotion so that more journalists of color populate the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the highest echelons of investigative and political reporters .
At the entry level , Report for America trains and places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities .
This year , it placed 226 reporters in 47 states , in a variety of outlets ranging from big-city newsrooms to digital-only start-ups .
The organization also pays half of reporters ’ salaries , enabling outlets to get coverage they otherwise couldn ’ t afford .
“ I like to think that I ’ m good enough to get hired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Report for America corps member placed with The Dallas Morning News .
“ But I do believe that without the funding , I ’ m not sure the newspaper was looking to bring in another Hispanic issues reporter.
” Manuel has since been hired full-time .
The emerging diversity ecosystem also has its share of for-profit outlets experimenting with new models for generating revenue .
The Chicago-based Obsidian Collection , for instance , aims to launch a stock photo service composed exclusively of images licensed from Black legacy newspapers and photographers .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ working to digitize nine million images from the archives of Black newspapers across the country , including such storied outlets as her hometown ’ s Chicago Defender .
She ’ s also working on a separate portal for Black photojournalists to upload and sell their work .
“ When we protest , when we celebrate , we want those images through the eyes of Black photo-journalists available to Black media , ” she said .
“ This gives photojournalists a revenue stream and the Black media access to images in a timely manner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of innovation , however , many new outlets are still financially fragile .
A Borealis survey of 114 outlets led by and for people of color found that nearly four in five organizations have staffs of five or fewer and that one-third have experienced layoffs .
Just 39 percent of outlets reported revenues of more than $ 100,000 ( though one-fifth also declined to answer ) .
To preserve the progress made so far , the Ford Foundation , along with the Democracy Fund , Craig Newmark Philanthropies , and other partners , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in September 2019 with $ 6.1 million in initial commitments .
Administered by Borealis , the fund distributed $ 2.3 million to 16 outlets in April 2020 led by and serving communities of color .
It hopes to grow to $ 30 million over the next three years , according to cofounder Farai Chideya , a program officer at the Ford Foundation .
The grantees include PushBlack , Sahan Journal , and MLK50 ; Black legacy outlets such as The New York Amsterdam News and The Atlanta Voice ; organizations such as Buffalo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities in the Northern Great Plains ; La Noticia , a Spanish-language outlet based in North Carolina ; and WURD Radio , Pennsylvania ’ s only Black-owned commercial talk radio station .
Many of these are helping keep local news alive in places where regional newspapers have collapsed .
One purpose of the REJ Fund is to help fix an imbalance in philanthropic funding for media initiatives led by people of color .
According to a report by Chideya for the Ford Foundation , media outlets serving diverse communities received just 8 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and 2017 .
Given how much has already been achieved by outlets operating on a shoestring , the potential impact at scale could be transformative .
“ What I believe in this moment is that the field is being remade , ” said the INN ’ s Sue Cross .
“ It ’ s up to us to make sure it doesn ’ t dissipate.
” Fifty years ago , the Kerner Commission concluded its report with a call to action , urging that “ the painful process of readjustment that is required @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now.
” What ’ s demanded , the commission continued , is “ fair and courageous journalism—commitment and coverage that are worthy of one of the crucial domestic stories in America ’ s history.
” Traditional media outlets have so far failed to live up to that charge , but the new wave of media reformers—led by and for people of color—could be the ones who make a truly equitable media a reality .

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.
In 1968, a report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—better known as the Kerner Commission—excoriated the national press for its role in the racial unrest that rocked America in the summer of 1967.
“The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world,” the commission wrote. “The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed.” Instead, the commission found, American coverage was rife with “the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.”
Especially appalling, the commission found, was the dearth of Black journalists in U.S. newsrooms. Fewer than 5 percent of newsroom staff were Black; fewer than 1 percent were editors. “The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes,” the commission concluded.
More than 50 years later, after another summer of protest and racial reckoning, too much of what the commission wrote is still true. While there’s no definitive data on the percentage of U.S. newsroom staff today who are Black, research suggests that it’s less than 8 percent—still far too low. Overall, newsrooms are only about half as diverse as the U.S. workforce as a whole.
Controversies over insensitive and racist coverage have embroiled major legacy and digital outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Refinery29, and the Ringer. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, a story about the impacts of unrest on city infrastructure headlined “Buildings Matter Too” led to a staff walkout, a public apology, and the resignation of a top editor. At The New York Times, an op-ed by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for military intervention to quell protests led to another high-level editor’s ouster. Many of the paper’s own reporters took to Twitter to declare that the op-ed “puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
At the same time, energy and interest in a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive media has never been more intense. Nor has the need for it been greater. What has changed is who is leading the way. Champions of media diversity have stopped waiting for the establishment to fix itself. Instead, a new crop of reformers is staging its own insurgency, working outside traditional media and often in spite of it. “I don’t know that we can integrate fairly at this point,” Angela Ford, founder of the Black media start-up Obsidian Collection, says. “It’s time for the world to hear the Black voice from a Black filter.”
The result is a small but already flourishing ecosystem of nonprofits, philanthropic efforts, and media start-ups led largely by people of color. New outlets are serving overlooked communities, experimenting with ways to engage audiences and giving journalists of color a platform for their voice. Media upstart PushBlack, for instance, covers topics like voting rights and criminal justice reform and Black history. Sahan Journal, launched in 2019 by a Somali American reporter, focuses exclusively on the concerns of Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities. Both of these outlets have the financial backing of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (REJ Fund), an ambitious project recently launched by the Ford Foundation and other partners to grow and sustain an emerging sector in equitable media.
These outlets are critical sources of information for minority communities. But minorities are not the only audience. Billboard magazine, for instance, reported that the singer Mariah Carey urged all of her listeners to follow PushBlack. Sahan Journal won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a piece on drug overdoses among Minnesota’s East African community. “White audiences are seeing our content and learning,” says Tracie Powell, a former journalist and independent publisher who is now a program officer at Borealis Philanthropy, which works on racial justice in media. “They’re plugged into Black Twitter; they’re seeing content on Facebook and Instagram. They are being exposed and being educated.”
Emerging outlets like these, Powell told me, are not just powerful advocates for communities too long ignored by white-led press, but also catalysts for broader reform. Their goal is to challenge traditional media, to compete against it, and, ultimately, to transform an industry that has been far too reluctant to change.
Journalists of color are justifiably frustrated by traditional media’s lackluster attempts at diversity. There have been umpteen minority fellowships, internships, and splashy awards created by big-city newsrooms. (I got my first clips via a minority high school journalism workshop sponsored by my hometown paper, The Kansas City Star.) But the pace of change has been glacial; diversity efforts have been inauthentic; and journalists of color must still contend with tokenism, stigma, and bias, as well as systemic barriers to entry and promotion. Paul Delaney, who cofounded the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2017 that when he started the NABJ, “we felt empowered, on a righteous mission to lead America in the right direction, to egg it on to finally live up to its promise and principles. We were so naively optimistic back then.”
Here’s one basic problem with the industry: We don’t actually know the share of journalists in U.S. newsrooms who are people of color. According to the News Leaders Association’s 2019 Diversity Survey, people of color make up 21.9 percent of the salaried newsroom workforce and 18.8 percent of newsroom managers. (The U.S. population, by contrast, is 40 percent minority.) However, just 23 percent of U.S. newsrooms participated in the survey, up from only 17 percent the year before.
“As journalists, we put pressure on every industry there is to show us the numbers, give us the information,” Dorothy Tucker, the NABJ’s current president, told me. “Yet we won’t do it. It makes you question whether there is a problem with the numbers.”
Certainly, other white-collar professions face equal or greater problems with diversity. Just 10 percent of lawyers are Black or Hispanic, according to the American Bar Association. Big Tech is also notoriously monolithic. The press, however, has a particular obligation to the public because of its power to shape opinions and events. It has an obligation to employ a workforce that reflects the communities it purports to serve, which makes its failure to do so all the more galling.
Why is it failing so badly? For aspiring journalists of color, perhaps the biggest obstacles are the lack of connections and capital. Minority journalists often have a harder time plugging into the clubby networks of (typically white, typically male) editors looking for talent. “The journos of color and women aren’t networking with white dudes doing the hiring because it isn’t in their DNA,” Shani Hilton, now deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote in a 2014 Medium piece. “Call it the Twice as Hard Half as Good Paradox: Many of us are so busy working twice as hard and hoping to get noticed that we don’t do the networking that seems like bullshit but is actually a key part of career advancement,” she wrote.
Many young people of color also can’t afford the luxury of an unpaid internship or the underpaid life of a freelancer, often prerequisites for scraping together enough bylines to land a full-time job. In a 2015 analysis for the Columbia Journalism Review, Alex Williams found that while 66 percent of white journalism graduates found jobs in print or broadcasting in 2013, the placement rate for minority graduates was only 49 percent. Part of the problem, Williams surmised, was that minority students were less likely to have worked for their campus newspapers or to have had unpaid internships.
“If you’re Black or brown and you grew up in a low-income working-class community, you’re starting from behind compared to a middle-class white person who can rely on generational wealth while they pursue their passion career,” says Manny Ramos, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who described his own start in journalism as “extremely difficult.” “At one point, I had an internship at a local paper, I worked full-time, and I went to school full-time,” he told me. “I had no life and was barely sleeping. A lot of people can’t do that.”
For journalists of color who do make it through the door, the challenges continue. Minority journalists are often seen, not heard, their advice ignored. The result is another frustration: missed stories and unbalanced coverage that too often depends on stereotypes and assumptions—and leads to the kinds of controversies that beset big newsrooms over this past summer.
Promotion and influence are the next big hurdles. Diversity efforts often end at the entry level, with little thought to retention and advancement. “They bring this person in and give them the ‘Black spot.’ Unfortunately, too often, they don’t do much more than that,” the NABJ’s Tucker said. This is one reason why upper management in media is even less diverse than the rank and file. For instance, just 8.2 percent of radio news directors are people of color, according to a 2019 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association. Just 5.5 percent of TV news directors are Black—down from 6.4 percent in 2018.
Sadly, things aren’t likely to get better. Many newsrooms, financially strapped even before the pandemic, now see diversity as an unaffordable luxury. The NABJ said that as many as half of its members surveyed have been furloughed or laid off. “If it was hard to get diversity, inclusion, and representation before, it’s that much harder now because people are getting laid off, the industry is shrinking, and there’s a panicked focus on profit,” says Jessica Clark, founder of the media strategy firm Dot Connector Studio and a consultant to the Ford Foundation.
This bleak landscape in traditional media is why a growing number of journalists, social entrepreneurs, and philanthropists are embracing a different vision of diversity in media, and a different means to achieve it. They’re tired of fighting for a place at the table, and then fighting for the kind of coverage they’d like to see. For these reformers, diversity goes beyond the integration of big-city newsrooms. Rather, it’s about multiplying the number of voices so that disparate communities are better equipped with news and information relevant to them. Instead of writing about their communities for primarily white audiences, they’re writing for these communities as active members.
“Let’s be honest,” Borealis Philanthropy’s Powell said. “We have been begging, pleading, crying, yelling at the top of our lungs for news organizations to reflect the communities they say they serve. And those organizations made it very, very clear that they are not serving the Black and brown people in their communities . . . At what point do you say, let’s stop? At what point do you try something different?”
Energy and interest in a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive media has never been more intense. Nor has the need for it been greater. What has changed is who is leading the way.
Among the journalists who broke from the establishment to blaze their own trail is Sahan Journal founder Mukhtar Ibrahim, whose editors at Minnesota Public Radio and the Minneapolis Star Tribune discouraged him from pursuing stories about the area’s immigrants. “I worked hard to open pathways to communities that were invisible to mainstream reporters,” he wrote in The Investigative Reporters and Editors Journal. “I realized, however, that editors and reporters were not committed to forging new relationships with these communities.” Ibrahim launched Sahan Journal in August 2019.
The journal is part of a larger boom in nonprofit publishing, much of it driven by journalists and social entrepreneurs who put diversity, equity, and inclusion at the heart of their mission. The Institute for Nonprofit News reports that its membership is approaching 300, double what it was three years ago. Many of these new outlets are aimed at serving diverse populations, which is why the universe of nonprofit news is decidedly more inclusive than traditional, for-profit media. According to the INN’s 2020 Diversity Index, roughly one in three nonprofit news employees is a person of color, as is one in five executives. “These younger organizations are diverse from the get-go,” the INN’s executive director, Sue Cross, told me.
These outlets’ strategies are also as diverse as their staffs. PushBlack, which reaches nine million readers exclusively through text messages and social media, runs campaigns on voter education and criminal justice reform in addition to its stories on Black news and history. MLK50 is a Tennessee-based investigative news organization founded in 2017 by the veteran reporter Wendi Thomas. In 2019, Thomas partnered with ProPublica on a series that led to the forgiveness of $11.9 million in hospital debts owed by low-income patients of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis.
Nonprofits are also still working to desegregate traditional newsrooms. The NABJ, for instance, hopes to turn up the pressure on pipelines for retention and promotion so that more journalists of color populate the ranks of top management, as well as the highest echelons of investigative and political reporters. At the entry level, Report for America trains and places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities. This year, it placed 226 reporters in 47 states, in a variety of outlets ranging from big-city newsrooms to digital-only start-ups. The organization also pays half of reporters’ salaries, enabling outlets to get coverage they otherwise couldn’t afford. “I like to think that I’m good enough to get hired,” says Obed Manuel, a Report for America corps member placed with The Dallas Morning News. “But I do believe that without the funding, I’m not sure the newspaper was looking to bring in another Hispanic issues reporter.” Manuel has since been hired full-time.
Nonprofits are still working to desegregate traditional newsrooms. The National Association of Black Journalists, for instance, hopes to turn up the pressure on pipelines for retention and promotion. Report for America trains and places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover underreported communities.
The emerging diversity ecosystem also has its share of for-profit outlets experimenting with new models for generating revenue. The Chicago-based Obsidian Collection, for instance, aims to launch a stock photo service composed exclusively of images licensed from Black legacy newspapers and photographers. The founder, Angela Ford, is currently working to digitize nine million images from the archives of Black newspapers across the country, including such storied outlets as her hometown’s Chicago Defender. She’s also working on a separate portal for Black photojournalists to upload and sell their work. “When we protest, when we celebrate, we want those images through the eyes of Black photo-journalists available to Black media,” she said. “This gives photojournalists a revenue stream and the Black media access to images in a timely manner they can afford.”
Despite the flurry of innovation, however, many new outlets are still financially fragile. A Borealis survey of 114 outlets led by and for people of color found that nearly four in five organizations have staffs of five or fewer and that one-third have experienced layoffs. Just 39 percent of outlets reported revenues of more than $100,000 (though one-fifth also declined to answer).
To preserve the progress made so far, the Ford Foundation, along with the Democracy Fund, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and other partners, launched the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund in September 2019 with $6.1 million in initial commitments. Administered by Borealis, the fund distributed $2.3 million to 16 outlets in April 2020 led by and serving communities of color. It hopes to grow to $30 million over the next three years, according to cofounder Farai Chideya, a program officer at the Ford Foundation. The grantees include PushBlack, Sahan Journal, and MLK50; Black legacy outlets such as The New York Amsterdam News and The Atlanta Voice; organizations such as Buffalo’s Fire, which serves tribal communities in the Northern Great Plains; La Noticia, a Spanish-language outlet based in North Carolina; and WURD Radio, Pennsylvania’s only Black-owned commercial talk radio station. Many of these are helping keep local news alive in places where regional newspapers have collapsed.
One purpose of the REJ Fund is to help fix an imbalance in philanthropic funding for media initiatives led by people of color. According to a report by Chideya for the Ford Foundation, media outlets serving diverse communities received just 8 percent of journalism philanthropy funding granted between 2013 and 2017.
Given how much has already been achieved by outlets operating on a shoestring, the potential impact at scale could be transformative. “What I believe in this moment is that the field is being remade,” said the INN’s Sue Cross. “It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t dissipate.”
Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded its report with a call to action, urging that “the painful process of readjustment that is required of the American news media must begin now.” What’s demanded, the commission continued, is “fair and courageous journalism—commitment and coverage that are worthy of one of the crucial domestic stories in America’s history.” Traditional media outlets have so far failed to live up to that charge, but the new wave of media reformers—led by and for people of color—could be the ones who make a truly equitable media a reality.


washingtonmonthly--2020-10-26--Two and a Half Cheers  for the Mainstream Press

Americans often complain that reading the news during the Trump era is exhausting .
They should try covering it .
In the past , the White House press office would announce to reporters covering the president that “ the lid is on , ” which meant there was no more major news coming and they were done for the day .
Not anymore .
Under Trump , there is no lid .
The president famously delights in announcing policy changes and making newsworthy statements—typically grotesque , mendacious ones—via Twitter at all hours .
That means White House correspondents and their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in work mode .
It ’ s been like this for four years .
Four years of being corralled into cages at Trump rallies—and , if you ’ re a recognizable TV correspondent , protected by network-provided bodyguards .
Four years of having the president call your work “ fake ” and having 40 percent of Americans believe him .
Four years of hate-filled comments from readers on the right and charges of spineless complicity from those on the left .
Four years of writing long , complicated , hard-to-report stories about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get a few hours of news cycle attention before being eclipsed by more lying , corruption , and catastrophe .
In the final months of the presidential campaign , however , the dynamic seems to have changed .
Whereas four years ago , Trump was manipulating the media into doing his bidding—with cable networks covering nearly all his campaign appearances live and unfiltered and major newspapers hyperventilating over Hillary ’ s emails—now it ’ s the news media forcing Trump to react .
On July 28 , the Axios reporter Jonathan Swan used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to provoke the president , on air , to be both honest and tellingly dismissive about the COVID-19 death toll by saying “ It is what it is.
” Roughly one month later , The Atlantic ’ s Jeffery Goldberg reported that in 2018 Trump had disparaged U.S. soldiers killed in action and buried in French cemeteries as “ losers ” and “ suckers.
” Those stories , and the White House ’ s pushback , were still ricocheting around the internet a week later when The Washington Post published excerpts from Bob @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump admitted , in a taped interview , that he knew the coronavirus was “ more deadly than even your strenuous flus ” while he was telling the American people the opposite .
Trump responded by comparing his lies to Churchill projecting “ calmness ” during the Blitz .
Soon after , The Atlantic ’ s Bart Gellman reported on plans by the Trump campaign to avoid conceding defeat in the election—including convincing GOP-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors should late-counted mail-in ballots start going Biden ’ s way .
Then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Times released its investigation of Trump ’ s tax records , which it had managed to obtain .
They showed that the president paid only $ 750 in taxes in 2016 .
The White House was still trying to contain that bombshell when , on the evening of October 1 , Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg broke the news that one of Trump ’ s closest aides , Hope Hicks , had tested positive for COVID-19 .
In the hours of pandemonium that followed , Trump admitted that he and the first lady had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported that senior administration officials had tried to keep Hicks ’ s illness quiet .
Within days , the rest of the press had pieced together a timeline revealing that an earlier Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett attended by dozens of GOP notables was , in the words of Anthony Fauci , a “ superspreader event.
” Will any of this coverage move what seems to be a locked-in electorate ?
We ’ ll find out soon enough .
Still , you have to hand it to the much-maligned mainstream press @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the 2020 elections , it will be a source not only of information , but also of inspiration .
You might suspect that a “ but ” is coming .
And you ’ re right .
It ’ s not , however , the standard complaint that journalists indulge in “ both-sides-ism ” or portray Trump ’ s lying , racism , and authoritarianism euphemistically .
They ’ ve actually gotten much better at that .
Rather , the greatest current sin of the big national papers and networks is their failure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the media as a whole .
As I note in the introduction to our special package in this issue , one in four newspapers in America has closed since 2004 , with most of the loss concentrated at the local level .
This decline , which has accelerated since the pandemic , is as big a long-term threat to democracy as anything Trump is doing now .
Indeed , it may even explain why he got elected in the first place .
The big media outlets cover the collapse of local journalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of tragic natural disaster , like an earthquake .
It is not .
It is a consequence of policy choices made or not made in Washington .
As such , it is a solvable problem .
In this issue we lay out a number of specific solutions .
They won ’ t happen , however , unless the major news media report on and indeed advocate for such solutions—using the power they ’ ve shown they have for a righteous cause they are uniquely positioned to champion .

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.
Americans often complain that reading the news during the Trump era is exhausting. They should try covering it.
In the past, the White House press office would announce to reporters covering the president that “the lid is on,” which meant there was no more major news coming and they were done for the day. Not anymore. Under Trump, there is no lid. The president famously delights in announcing policy changes and making newsworthy statements—typically grotesque, mendacious ones—via Twitter at all hours. That means White House correspondents and their editors are always, for practical purposes, in work mode.
It’s been like this for four years. Four years of being corralled into cages at Trump rallies—and, if you’re a recognizable TV correspondent, protected by network-provided bodyguards. Four years of having the president call your work “fake” and having 40 percent of Americans believe him. Four years of hate-filled comments from readers on the right and charges of spineless complicity from those on the left. Four years of writing long, complicated, hard-to-report stories about lying, corruption, and catastrophe that get a few hours of news cycle attention before being eclipsed by more lying, corruption, and catastrophe.
In the final months of the presidential campaign, however, the dynamic seems to have changed. Whereas four years ago, Trump was manipulating the media into doing his bidding—with cable networks covering nearly all his campaign appearances live and unfiltered and major newspapers hyperventilating over Hillary’s emails—now it’s the news media forcing Trump to react.
On July 28, the Axios reporter Jonathan Swan used the simple expedient of knowledgeable follow-up questions to provoke the president, on air, to be both honest and tellingly dismissive about the COVID-19 death toll by saying “It is what it is.” Roughly one month later, The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg reported that in 2018 Trump had disparaged U.S. soldiers killed in action and buried in French cemeteries as “losers” and “suckers.”
Those stories, and the White House’s pushback, were still ricocheting around the internet a week later when The Washington Post published excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book Rage in which Trump admitted, in a taped interview, that he knew the coronavirus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” while he was telling the American people the opposite. Trump responded by comparing his lies to Churchill projecting “calmness” during the Blitz.
Soon after, The Atlantic’s Bart Gellman reported on plans by the Trump campaign to avoid conceding defeat in the election—including convincing GOP-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors should late-counted mail-in ballots start going Biden’s way. Then, on September 27, The New York Times released its investigation of Trump’s tax records, which it had managed to obtain. They showed that the president paid only $750 in taxes in 2016.
The White House was still trying to contain that bombshell when, on the evening of October 1, Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg broke the news that one of Trump’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, had tested positive for COVID-19. In the hours of pandemonium that followed, Trump admitted that he and the first lady had also tested positive, and Bloomberg further reported that senior administration officials had tried to keep Hicks’s illness quiet. Within days, the rest of the press had pieced together a timeline revealing that an earlier Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett attended by dozens of GOP notables was, in the words of Anthony Fauci, a “superspreader event.”
Will any of this coverage move what seems to be a locked-in electorate? We’ll find out soon enough. Still, you have to hand it to the much-maligned mainstream press. When future historians write the story of the 2020 elections, it will be a source not only of information, but also of inspiration.
You might suspect that a “but” is coming. And you’re right. It’s not, however, the standard complaint that journalists indulge in “both-sides-ism” or portray Trump’s lying, racism, and authoritarianism euphemistically. They’ve actually gotten much better at that. Rather, the greatest current sin of the big national papers and networks is their failure to fight against the unprecedented economic collapse of the media as a whole. As I note in the introduction to our special package in this issue, one in four newspapers in America has closed since 2004, with most of the loss concentrated at the local level. This decline, which has accelerated since the pandemic, is as big a long-term threat to democracy as anything Trump is doing now. Indeed, it may even explain why he got elected in the first place.
The big media outlets cover the collapse of local journalism as if it’s some kind of tragic natural disaster, like an earthquake. It is not. It is a consequence of policy choices made or not made in Washington. As such, it is a solvable problem. In this issue we lay out a number of specific solutions. They won’t happen, however, unless the major news media report on and indeed advocate for such solutions—using the power they’ve shown they have for a righteous cause they are uniquely positioned to champion.


washingtonmonthly--2020-10-26--The Case for Threatening the Courts

The Case for Threatening the Courts

Traditionally , Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’ s attempt to expand the Supreme Court is viewed as a disaster .
“ Dear Democrats : FDR ’ s court-packing scheme was a ‘ humiliating ’ defeat , ” The Washington Post wrote in 2019 .
Citing “ New Deal history , ” two law professors argued in The Atlantic that “ a titanic contest over the Supreme Court hardly seems worth it.
” In National Review , Charles Cooke dismissed talk of expansion as “ silly ” by citing Roosevelt ’ s doomed efforts .
“ Back in 1937 , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less divided than it is now , FDR was more popular than a President Biden would be , and voters cared less about the Supreme Court , court-packing was met with a definitive ‘ no.
’ ” The message to Democrats is simple : Don ’ t even bother .
These assessments are correct in a literal sense .
Faced with a Supreme Court that aggressively overturned significant portions of the New Deal , Roosevelt proposed legislation to expand its size .
The bill never received a vote .
The number of justices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roosevelt introduced his proposal , the Court stopped overturning the administration ’ s programs .
The shift was widely seen as related to the president ’ s frontal attack on the judiciary— “ the switch in time that saved nine , ” as one contemporary humorist put it .
The most important swing justice , Owen Roberts , eventually suggested as much .
Speaking before Congress in 1954 , Roberts said that FDR ’ s plan placed “ tremendous strain and threat to the existing Court of which I was fully conscious.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Court has proved susceptible to outside pressure .
FDR ’ s proposal is just one of many successful institutional attacks .
In the mid-1950s , the liberal Warren Court backed away from protecting victims of McCarthyism because a popular Senate bill threatened to strip the Court ’ s powers .
Throughout the 1970s and ’ 80s , conservative politicians flooded Congress with legislation to stop the Court from ruling on racial integration .
The justices retreated from enforcing busing regulations .
For Democrats worried about being railroaded by a 6–3 conservative bench , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ none of these instances did Congress or the president truly enact laws that changed the Court .
In each of them , the Court changed anyway .
These attacks can exact costs , as FDR discovered ; his particularly aggressive push weakened his power within Congress .
But they also have clear payoffs .
Threats to expand , strip , or otherwise limit the Court—done with credibility—can influence judicial behavior .
“ Historically , I think we have found that the Court gets the message , ” Keith Whittington , a political scientist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the judiciary , told me .
“ When conservatives are pressing these types of bills , the Court becomes a little more conservative .
When liberals are pressing these types of bills , the Court becomes a little more liberal.
” If Joe Biden takes office in January , he will confront a landscape not unlike the one FDR faced in 1937 .
Biden , like Roosevelt , will grapple with an economic downturn of historic dimensions .
He ’ ll have won promising to enact a variety of sizable spending and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has explicitly cited the Roosevelt presidency as a template .
But , much like FDR , Biden will have to contend with a Supreme Court stacked with six conservatives .
For Roosevelt , these six men were perhaps his most powerful enemies .
With large majorities in both the House and Senate , the president moved transformative economic legislation—from minimum wages to maximum hours—with remarkable ease , only to have it struck down by justices who didn ’ t abide by the bromide of not “ legislating from the bench.
” These activist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ declared that the Court was creating a “ ‘ no-man ’ s-land ’ where no government—state or federal—can function.
” They also stirred up popular sentiment .
Much like today , the Supreme Court hung over the 1936 presidential election .
FDR won that election with more than 60 percent of the vote .
Emboldened , he decided to confront the Court .
Within weeks of his inauguration , Roosevelt announced an initiative to add six justices to the body .
The Supreme Court was furious .
Privately , Chief Justice Charles Hughes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Court as an institution.
” At first , the public was closely divided over Roosevelt ’ s plan , as was Congress .
Republicans , southern conservatives , and some liberals came out against the idea .
But Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson , who was promised a seat on the expanded bench , backed the president .
After a fireside chat on March 8 , so did a large plurality of Americans .
“ We can not yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men who , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present , ” Roosevelt said .
As FDR spoke , the Court was preparing to rule on perhaps the biggest case of his tenure , National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation .
The decision would determine the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act , landmark New Deal legislation that made it significantly easier to join and form a union .
Legal observers widely expected that the act , like its predecessors , would fall .
So did the president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Court upheld it in a 5–4 decision , with Hughes and Roberts in the majority .
Almost immediately afterward , public support for adding justices dipped .
Then , at the end of May , the Court upheld the creation of Social Security , again in a surprise 5–4 ruling .
The plan grew even more unpopular .
In a May 25 cartoon in the Rochester Times-Union , Roosevelt ’ s “ Supreme Court Packing Case ” was depicted as a large crate , collapsing as the Court ’ s various liberal decisions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toppled beneath it .
By the end of July , FDR ’ s proposal was dead .
There ’ s a vigorous academic debate about the extent to which the Court ’ s pivot had to do with pressure from Roosevelt versus organic jurisprudential development .
There ’ s no doubt that the Court ’ s constitutional doctrine was already evolving in ways that made siding with the president easier .
The Court that had struck down child labor laws and FDR ’ s National Recovery Act was evolving into a body more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s hard to see how the swing justices couldn ’ t have been touched by Roosevelt ’ s attacks and the resulting public discourse .
As The New Yorker sarcastically wrote in 1937 , the only way the Supreme Court could not have been impacted was if its then-new building , completed in 1935 , “ has a soundproof room , to which the Justices retire to change their minds.
” Does that mean that if Democrats win in November , they could be equally effective by threatening to expand the size of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be skeptical .
If he wins , Biden will not enter the White House backed by more than 500 electoral votes .
If Democrats control 52 Senate seats come 2021 , they will consider it a roaring success .
In 1937 , the party held more than 70 .
( It ’ s also unclear if the Roberts Court will aggressively strike down Biden legislation . )
But some of the differences between Roosevelt ’ s era and today ’ s could actually work to the advantage of modern Democrats .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sprawling entity , featuring both New Deal liberals and the southern right .
The latter were some of the most tenacious opponents of court expansion .
They included , for example , former Texas Congressman John Nance Garner—Roosevelt ’ s own vice president .
Today , the Democratic Party is far more unified .
The southern conservative constituencies that once fought Roosevelt now almost all vote Republican .
Unlike FDR ’ s vice president , Kamala Harris won ’ t go AWOL .
She expressed openness to expanding the size of the Supreme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg led Biden to soften his opposition .
FDR was not the first person to intimidate the Supreme Court .
In the Progressive Era , major politicians put forth all kinds of proposals to curb the power of a judiciary they viewed as in thrall to big businesses , from allowing voters to override Supreme Court decisions to making it easier to recall justices .
None passed , but scholars believe that the clamor may have kept the Court from making it impossible for reformers to reshape @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alone in that assessment .
“ I may not know much about law , ” President Theodore Roosevelt remarked in 1905 , “ but I do know that one can put the fear of God in judges.
” In the latter half of the 20th century , politicians toyed with more targeted attacks .
According to Article III , Section 2 of the Constitution , the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over all cases “ with such exceptions , and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.
” Conservative congressmen and senators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that would “ strip ” the Court of its right to rule on racial integration .
These bills , for the most part , went nowhere .
But , much like FDR ’ s court-expansion attempt , they still made a difference .
During the tenure of Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1986 , the justices kept careful track of “ jurisdiction-stripping ” legislation , circulating them to one another whenever they came up .
Burger himself kept a file of all these proposals as they moved through Congress .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Court retreated from many attempts to force integration , even as it gave a yellow light to affirmative action .
Part of that change , no doubt , stems from personnel ; the Burger Court had more conservative membership than the Warren Court that preceded it .
But academics argue that congressional pressure also had a clear role .
In a memo to eight of the Court ’ s justices , for example , one law clerk noted that a major busing case had attracted great political and congressional controversy .
He recommended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hear it .
They followed his advice .
“ The clerk is writing for eight of the nine justices , ” said Tom Clark , a political scientist at Emory University and the author of The Limits of Judicial Independence .
“ [ It ] tells me that the clerk was aware the justices would want to know that.
” It ’ s unclear exactly why John Roberts decided in 2012 to uphold the Affordable Care Act , but it ’ s entirely possible that his vote was one of institutional deference : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sitting president ’ s greatest accomplishment .
And so far , under Donald Trump , Roberts has sided with liberals on a number of surprising occasions , including an abortion case .
Perhaps that ’ s to keep the Court from being dragged into the country ’ s partisan slugfest .
Perhaps , and relatedly , it ’ s because of Democrats ’ heated rhetoric about the need to bend the judiciary .
“ I think he takes those threats seriously , ” Princeton ’ s Whittington said .
But once Amy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is pending as of this writing ) , Roberts will no longer be the Court ’ s swing justice .
That title will instead likely belong to either Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh .
Both were elevated to their jobs by a conservative judicial movement increasingly incensed that the Supreme Court won ’ t tack further right , even though Republicans have appointed 12 of the last 16 justices .
Barrett clerked for Antonin Scalia .
With such a rock-solid conservative majority , this bench will be more hostile to liberal policies than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we really expect it to show any restraint ?
The behavior of some leading jurists suggests that the answer is no .
In a speech before Notre Dame Law School ( where Barrett used to teach ) , Attorney General Bill Barr summarized much of the legal right ’ s thinking in astonishingly blunt terms .
“ Militant secularists , ” he warned , “ seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.
” He cited as evidence a now-struck-down Affordable Care Act provision requiring that employers cover contraception @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the justices who fought Roosevelt ’ s New Deal had similarly apocalyptic visions .
The sweeping programs FDR thought necessary for the economy were , to them , a tyrannical violation of the Constitution .
Dissenting from a case that upheld Congress ’ s power to heavily regulate gold , four of the era ’ s justices declared that the government ’ s actions “ annihilate its own obligations ” and destroy “ the very rights ” the Constitution was supposed to protect .
That passion didn ’ t stop two justices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Justice Owen Roberts said after Roosevelt ’ s reelection , “ the Court took cognizance of the popular will.
” Today ’ s Chief Justice Roberts is also clearly concerned with the Court ’ s legitimacy and does not want it to be seen as a purely partisan body .
And despite their impeccably conservative credentials , Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have both shown a willingness to break with orthodoxy on high-profile occasions—including , in the case of Gorsuch , a seismic expansion of LGBTQ rights .
Whether the Court can be pressured , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just how much muscle Democrats are willing to employ .
To truly constrain the Court , the party must , of course , win both the presidency and the Senate .
But winning is not enough .
They must be willing to credibly threaten the Court , something that requires a bold , unified front on the judiciary .
Right now , such tenacity and unity are lacking .
But that may well be changing .
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer , a procedural moderate , told reporters in late September that should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ nothing is off the table.
” Biden , a former court-expansion opponent , now ducks court-expansion questions .
Even Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey , one of the only congressional Democrats who support overturning Roe v. Wade , told reporters he wants “ to get through the election ” before taking a stance .
Barrett ’ s confirmation is not the only thing radicalizing Democrats .
Support for reining in the Supreme Court will become fevered if it actually strikes down , rather than “ simply ” menaces , cornerstone liberal policies .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ during whatever chaos comes next ) , the bench will hear its third challenge to the Affordable Care Act .
If Democrats win the White House and Senate , and the Court still invalidates the ACA in the midst of a pandemic , the party of FDR may not be able to resist retaliatory measures .
Biden famously called the act ’ s passage , which came while he was vice president , a “ big fucking deal.
” It is unlikely that he will let it go gentle into that good night @ @ @ @ @ @ @ course , know this .
Like their counterparts in the 1930s , they do not exist in a soundproof room .
If they nonetheless begin an aggressive assault on whatever New Deal–style social policies liberals enact—like a public health insurance option , major climate change legislation , or heavy regulations on internet giants—they will be wagering that Democrats are just full of hot air .
They may well be right .
The Court is generally more popular than Congress or the president , making attacks on it very risky .
Even Roosevelt , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , paid a political cost for battling the bench .
Roosevelt ’ s plan helped save laws he had already passed .
But it alienated many congressional Democrats , and his New Deal was effectively ended by the election of conservatives in 1938 .
Nonetheless , modern Democrats can not shy away from intimidation .
The justices FDR confronted were almost all in their 70s ; he might have been able to wait them out .
Today ’ s conservatives are substantially younger .
Barrett is 48 , and if she ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ginsburg ’ s age , she ’ ll be ruling until 2059 .
And as the 1970s showed , politicians don ’ t need to threaten the Court with expansion to get a response .
Stripping legislation that limits the Court ’ s powers could also help Democrats send a powerful message .
The party may not need to go as far as Roosevelt did to make their point .
But if they face serious defeat at the Court , they can learn from his resolve .
“ You ’ ve got to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ Then you get the justices to respond.
” This is an updated version of “ Packing the Court Might Work .
Threatening to Pack It Did , ” which first appeared online on September 26 , 2020 .

Traditionally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court is viewed as a disaster. “Dear Democrats: FDR’s court-packing scheme was a ‘humiliating’ defeat,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019. Citing “New Deal history,” two law professors argued in The Atlantic that “a titanic contest over the Supreme Court hardly seems worth it.” In National Review, Charles Cooke dismissed talk of expansion as “silly” by citing Roosevelt’s doomed efforts. “Back in 1937,” he wrote, “when the country was less divided than it is now, FDR was more popular than a President Biden would be, and voters cared less about the Supreme Court, court-packing was met with a definitive ‘no.’ ” The message to Democrats is simple: Don’t even bother.
These assessments are correct in a literal sense. Faced with a Supreme Court that aggressively overturned significant portions of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed legislation to expand its size. The bill never received a vote. The number of justices remained at nine.
But shortly after Roosevelt introduced his proposal, the Court stopped overturning the administration’s programs. The shift was widely seen as related to the president’s frontal attack on the judiciary—“the switch in time that saved nine,” as one contemporary humorist put it. The most important swing justice, Owen Roberts, eventually suggested as much. Speaking before Congress in 1954, Roberts said that FDR’s plan placed “tremendous strain and threat to the existing Court of which I was fully conscious.”
Throughout modern U.S. history, the Supreme Court has proved susceptible to outside pressure. FDR’s proposal is just one of many successful institutional attacks. In the mid-1950s, the liberal Warren Court backed away from protecting victims of McCarthyism because a popular Senate bill threatened to strip the Court’s powers. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, conservative politicians flooded Congress with legislation to stop the Court from ruling on racial integration. The justices retreated from enforcing busing regulations.
For Democrats worried about being railroaded by a 6–3 conservative bench, these conflicts should be instructive. In none of these instances did Congress or the president truly enact laws that changed the Court. In each of them, the Court changed anyway. These attacks can exact costs, as FDR discovered; his particularly aggressive push weakened his power within Congress. But they also have clear payoffs. Threats to expand, strip, or otherwise limit the Court—done with credibility—can influence judicial behavior.
“Historically, I think we have found that the Court gets the message,” Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University who studies the politics of the judiciary, told me. “When conservatives are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a little more conservative. When liberals are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a little more liberal.”
If Joe Biden takes office in January, he will confront a landscape not unlike the one FDR faced in 1937. Biden, like Roosevelt, will grapple with an economic downturn of historic dimensions. He’ll have won promising to enact a variety of sizable spending and welfare programs. In interviews, Biden has explicitly cited the Roosevelt presidency as a template.
But, much like FDR, Biden will have to contend with a Supreme Court stacked with six conservatives. For Roosevelt, these six men were perhaps his most powerful enemies. With large majorities in both the House and Senate, the president moved transformative economic legislation—from minimum wages to maximum hours—with remarkable ease, only to have it struck down by justices who didn’t abide by the bromide of not “legislating from the bench.” These activist rulings infuriated Roosevelt, who in 1935 declared that the Court was creating a “ ‘no-man’s-land’ where no government—state or federal—can function.” They also stirred up popular sentiment. Much like today, the Supreme Court hung over the 1936 presidential election.
FDR won that election with more than 60 percent of the vote. Emboldened, he decided to confront the Court. Within weeks of his inauguration, Roosevelt announced an initiative to add six justices to the body. The Supreme Court was furious. Privately, Chief Justice Charles Hughes remarked that the bill would “destroy the Court as
an institution.”
At first, the public was closely divided over Roosevelt’s plan, as was Congress. Republicans, southern conservatives, and some liberals came out against the idea. But Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who was promised a seat on the expanded bench, backed the president. After a fireside chat on March 8, so did a large plurality of Americans. “We cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present,” Roosevelt said.
As FDR spoke, the Court was preparing to rule on perhaps the biggest case of his tenure, National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. The decision would determine the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, landmark New Deal legislation that made it significantly easier to join and form a union. Legal observers widely expected that the act, like its predecessors, would fall. So did the president.
Instead, in mid-April, the Court upheld it in a 5–4 decision, with Hughes and Roberts in the majority. Almost immediately afterward, public support for adding justices dipped. Then, at the end of May, the Court upheld the creation of Social Security, again in a surprise 5–4 ruling. The plan grew even more unpopular. In a May 25 cartoon in the Rochester Times-Union, Roosevelt’s “Supreme Court Packing Case” was depicted as a large crate, collapsing as the Court’s various liberal decisions, each representing an underlying plank, toppled beneath it. By the end of July, FDR’s proposal was dead.
There’s a vigorous academic debate about the extent to which the Court’s pivot had to do with pressure from Roosevelt versus organic jurisprudential development. There’s no doubt that the Court’s constitutional doctrine was already evolving in ways that made siding with the president easier. The Court that had struck down child labor laws and FDR’s National Recovery Act was evolving into a body more deferential to Congress. But it’s hard to see how the swing justices couldn’t have been touched by Roosevelt’s attacks and the resulting public discourse. As The New Yorker sarcastically wrote in 1937, the only way the Supreme Court could not have been impacted was if its then-new building, completed in 1935, “has a soundproof room, to which the Justices retire to change their minds.”
Does that mean that if Democrats win in November, they could be equally effective by threatening to expand the size of the bench? There are reasons to be skeptical. If he wins, Biden will not enter the White House backed by more than 500 electoral votes. If Democrats control 52 Senate seats come 2021, they will consider it a roaring success. In 1937, the party held more than 70. (It’s also unclear if the Roberts Court will aggressively strike down Biden legislation.)
But some of the differences between Roosevelt’s era and today’s could actually work to the advantage of modern Democrats. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party was a sprawling entity, featuring both New Deal liberals and the southern right. The latter were some of the most tenacious opponents of court expansion. They included, for
example, former Texas Congressman John Nance Garner—Roosevelt’s own vice president.
Today, the Democratic Party is far more unified. The southern conservative constituencies that once fought Roosevelt now almost all vote Republican. Unlike FDR’s vice president, Kamala Harris won’t go AWOL. She expressed openness to expanding the size of the Supreme Court during the Democratic primaries, well before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg led Biden to soften his opposition.
FDR was not the first person to intimidate the Supreme Court. In the Progressive Era, major politicians put forth all kinds of proposals to curb the power of a judiciary they viewed as in thrall to big businesses, from allowing voters to override Supreme Court decisions to making it easier to recall justices. None passed, but scholars believe that the clamor may have kept the Court from making it impossible for reformers to reshape economic power. They’re not alone in that assessment. “I may not know much about law,” President Theodore Roosevelt remarked in 1905, “but I do know that one can put the fear of God in judges.”
In the latter half of the 20th century, politicians toyed with more targeted attacks. According to Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over all cases “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” Conservative congressmen and senators seized on this language to propose bills that would “strip” the Court of its right to rule on racial integration. These bills, for the most part, went nowhere. But, much like FDR’s court-expansion attempt, they still made a difference. During the tenure of Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1986, the justices kept careful track of “jurisdiction-stripping” legislation, circulating them to one another whenever they came up. Burger himself kept a file of all these proposals as they moved through Congress. In both the 1970s and 1980s, the Court retreated from many attempts to force integration, even as it gave a yellow light to affirmative action.
Part of that change, no doubt, stems from personnel; the Burger Court had more conservative membership than the Warren Court that preceded it. But academics argue that congressional pressure also had a clear role. In a memo to eight of the Court’s justices, for example, one law clerk noted that a major busing case had attracted great political and congressional controversy. He recommended that the judges deny a petition to hear it. They followed his advice.
“The clerk is writing for eight of the nine justices,” said Tom Clark, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of The Limits of Judicial Independence. “[It] tells me that the clerk was aware the justices would want to know that.”
During the tenure of Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1986, the justices kept careful track of “jurisdiction-stripping” legislation, circulating them to one another whenever they came up.
It’s unclear exactly why John Roberts decided in 2012 to uphold the Affordable Care Act, but it’s entirely possible that his vote was one of institutional deference: He didn’t want to nullify a sitting president’s greatest accomplishment. And so far, under Donald Trump, Roberts has sided with liberals on a number of surprising occasions, including an abortion case. Perhaps that’s to keep the Court from being dragged into the country’s partisan slugfest. Perhaps, and relatedly, it’s because of Democrats’ heated rhetoric about the need to bend the judiciary.
“I think he takes those threats seriously,” Princeton’s Whittington said.
But once Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed (her nomination is pending as of this writing), Roberts will no longer be the Court’s swing justice. That title will instead likely belong to either Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh. Both were elevated to their jobs by a conservative judicial movement increasingly incensed that the Supreme Court won’t tack further right, even though Republicans have appointed 12 of the last 16 justices. Barrett clerked for Antonin Scalia. With such a rock-solid conservative majority, this bench will be more hostile to liberal policies than the one that came before. Can we really expect it to show any restraint?
The behavior of some leading jurists suggests that the answer is no. In a speech before Notre Dame Law School (where Barrett used to teach), Attorney General Bill Barr summarized much of the legal right’s thinking in astonishingly blunt terms. “Militant secularists,” he warned, “seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.” He cited as evidence a now-struck-down Affordable Care Act provision requiring that employers cover contraception.
On the other hand, many of the justices who fought Roosevelt’s New Deal had similarly apocalyptic visions. The sweeping programs FDR thought necessary for the economy were, to them, a tyrannical violation of the Constitution. Dissenting from a case that upheld Congress’s power to heavily regulate gold, four of the era’s justices declared that the government’s actions “annihilate its own obligations” and destroy “the very rights” the Constitution was supposed to protect. That passion didn’t stop two justices from bowing to popular reality. As Justice Owen Roberts said after Roosevelt’s reelection, “the Court took cognizance of the popular will.”
Whether the Court can be pressured may ultimately come down to just how much muscle Democrats are willing to employ. To truly constrain the Court, the party must, of course, win both the presidency and the Senate. But winning is not enough.
Today’s Chief Justice Roberts is also clearly concerned with the Court’s legitimacy and does not want it to be seen as a purely partisan body. And despite their impeccably conservative credentials, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have both shown a willingness to break with orthodoxy on high-profile occasions—including, in the case of Gorsuch, a seismic expansion of LGBTQ rights.
Whether the Court can be pressured, then, may ultimately come down to just how much muscle Democrats are willing to employ. To truly constrain the Court, the party must, of course, win both the presidency and the Senate. But winning is not enough. They must be willing to credibly threaten the Court, something that requires a bold, unified front on the judiciary. Right now, such tenacity and unity are lacking. But that may well be changing. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a procedural moderate, told reporters in late September that should Republicans fill Ginsburg’s seat, “nothing is off the table.” Biden, a former court-expansion opponent, now ducks court-expansion questions. Even Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, one of the only congressional Democrats who support overturning Roe v. Wade, told reporters he wants “to get through the election” before taking a stance.
Barrett’s confirmation is not the only thing radicalizing Democrats. Support for reining in the Supreme Court will become fevered if it actually strikes down, rather than “simply” menaces, cornerstone liberal policies. Not long after the election (and during whatever chaos comes next), the bench will hear its third challenge to the Affordable Care Act. If Democrats win the White House and Senate, and the Court still invalidates the ACA in the midst of a pandemic, the party of FDR may not be able to resist retaliatory measures. Biden famously called the act’s passage, which came while he was vice president, a “big fucking deal.” It is unlikely that he will let it go gentle into that good night.
Today’s justices, of course, know this. Like their counterparts in the 1930s, they do not exist in a soundproof room. If they nonetheless begin an aggressive assault on whatever New Deal–style social policies liberals enact—like a public health insurance option, major climate change legislation, or heavy regulations on internet giants—they will be wagering that Democrats are just full of hot air. They may well be right. The Court is generally more popular than Congress or the president, making attacks on it very risky. Even Roosevelt, operating at the peak of his powers, paid a political cost for battling the bench. Roosevelt’s plan helped save laws he had already passed. But it alienated many congressional Democrats, and his New Deal was effectively ended by the election of conservatives in 1938.
Nonetheless, modern Democrats cannot shy away from intimidation. The justices FDR confronted were almost all in their 70s; he might have been able to wait them out. Today’s conservatives are substantially younger. Barrett is 48, and if she’s confirmed and stays on the Court until Ginsburg’s age, she’ll be ruling until 2059. And as the 1970s showed, politicians don’t need to threaten the Court with expansion to get a response. Stripping legislation that limits the Court’s powers could also help Democrats send a powerful message. The party may not need to go as far as Roosevelt did to make their point.
But if they face serious defeat at the Court, they can learn from his resolve. “You’ve got to really rattle the saber,” Whittington said. “Then you get the justices to respond.”
This is an updated version of “Packing the Court Might Work. Threatening to Pack It Did,” which first appeared online on September 26, 2020.


washingtonmonthly--2020-10-26--Trump Plans A Series of Saturday Night Massacres If He Wins

It ’ s hard to think of a more consequential election in American history since at least 1932 .
With a raging pandemic , a closing time window to address climate change , record economic inequality and the greatest social unrest in decades , the difference between the two candidates could hardly be more stark .
Donald Trump has no plan for the pandemic and would condemn hundreds of thousands millions to die needlessly ; he doesn ’ t believe in climate change and is doing all he can to increase emissions ; he cut taxes even further on corporations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social security ; and he is the most openly racist president in modern American history .
Joe Biden wasn ’ t the most progressive candidate in the Democratic primary on these issues , but his campaign platform is the still most progressive of any Democratic nominee in at least the last half century .
But tonight the stakes grew even more alarming : Axios reports that President Trump is planning a series of Saturday Night Massacres if he wins re-election , furiously overturning the leadership of the FBI , CIA and the Pentagon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is obsessed with prosecuting his political opponents for illusory “ crimes.
” He has been every since his infamous chants of “ lock her up ” about Hillary Clinton ’ s use of a private email server ( a violation of of which he , his family and administration have also been notoriously guilty . )
Trump is furious that the FBI has not more aggressively persecuted Obama for the imagined offense of “ spying on his campaign.
” ( The Obama Administration did no such thing . )
When John Durham was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ specious counter-investigation of the FBI in retaliation for the Trump-Russia probe , Trump expected big things .
When it fizzled , he became furious with CIA Director Gina Haspel for not doing more to help him .
Meanwhile , for over a year Trump and his personal lawyer/consigliere Rudy Giuliani have been trying to dig up fake mud on the Bidens by focusing Hunter Biden ’ s employment by a company in Ukraine .
Trump ’ s attempt to extort the government of Ukraine into helping his campaign wound up getting him impeached @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another suspicious attack on Hunter Biden via a laptop supposedly left at a repair shop .
Trump and his entourage see in it a last-ditch opportunity for an October Surprise , and they ’ re incensed that FBI Director Wray hasn ’ t already set the Bidens up for scurrilous investigations and show trials .
Over at the Pentagon , Trump is outraged that the upper echelons of the military didn ’ t cooperate with his wildly unconstitutional and immoral attempts to use U.S. soldiers against racial justice protesters : And as much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Justice Department into Trump ’ s personal law firm , Trump is still upset that it isn ’ t enough–even as Barr grumbles that Trump ’ s own proclamations make it harder for him to assist in Trump ’ s attempts to flagrantly obstruct justice .
If elected to a second term , Trump will see himself as vindicated and utterly unconstrained .
With no active public policy plan for a second term , he will focus entirely on settling old scores .
Even more dangerously , he will work to eliminate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doing all he can to ensure that he and his family are never disempowered , much less held accountable for their misdeeds .
With the help of a handpicked radical Supreme Court , Trump will obliterate the last vestiges of congressional oversight , firing any and all who observe moral decency and the letter of law .
The only test for employment in the administration will be shamelessness and total loyalty to Trump ’ s will .
If Trump wins , expect to see dangerously unqualified ideologues in charge of the FBI , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There will be kangaroo court trials of Clinton , Obama , Biden and anyone else on the Fox News target list .
There will be more comprehensive purges across government of career civil servants in favor of culture war inquisitors .
The intelligence and immigration services will likely be converted into a secret police persecuting liberals and protesters ( even more than they have been historically ) , and Trump will do all he can to use the full might of the military against civilian opposition .
It is an unthinkable nightmare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ awaken–and America has just nine days left to stop it .

It’s hard to think of a more consequential election in American history since at least 1932. With a raging pandemic, a closing time window to address climate change, record economic inequality and the greatest social unrest in decades, the difference between the two candidates could hardly be more stark. Donald Trump has no plan for the pandemic and would condemn hundreds of thousands millions to die needlessly; he doesn’t believe in climate change and is doing all he can to increase emissions; he cut taxes even further on corporations and the rich while planning to defund social security; and he is the most openly racist president in modern American history. Joe Biden wasn’t the most progressive candidate in the Democratic primary on these issues, but his campaign platform is the still most progressive of any Democratic nominee in at least the last half century.
But tonight the stakes grew even more alarming: Axios reports that President Trump is planning a series of Saturday Night Massacres if he wins re-election, furiously overturning the leadership of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon:
If President Trump wins re-election,he’ll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who’ve discussed these officials’ fates with the president tell Axios.
The reason is simple: Trump is obsessed with prosecuting his political opponents for illusory “crimes.” He has been every since his infamous chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server (a violation of of which he, his family and administration have also been notoriously guilty.) Trump is furious that the FBI has not more aggressively persecuted Obama for the imagined offense of “spying on his campaign.” (The Obama Administration did no such thing.) When John Durham was made the henchman responsible for running a specious counter-investigation of the FBI in retaliation for the Trump-Russia probe, Trump expected big things. When it fizzled, he became furious with CIA Director Gina Haspel for not doing more to help him.
Meanwhile, for over a year Trump and his personal lawyer/consigliere Rudy Giuliani have been trying to dig up fake mud on the Bidens by focusing Hunter Biden’s employment by a company in Ukraine. Trump’s attempt to extort the government of Ukraine into helping his campaign wound up getting him impeached. Now Giuliani has come up with another suspicious attack on Hunter Biden via a laptop supposedly left at a repair shop. Trump and his entourage see in it a last-ditch opportunity for an October Surprise, and they’re incensed that FBI Director Wray hasn’t already set the Bidens up for scurrilous investigations and show trials.
As for Wray, whose expected firing was first reported by The Daily Beast, Trump is angry his second FBI chief didn’t launch a formal investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business connections — and didn’t purge more officials Trump believes abused power to investigate his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia. Trump also grew incensed when Wray testified in September that the FBI has not seen widespread election fraud, including with mail-in ballots.
Over at the Pentagon, Trump is outraged that the upper echelons of the military didn’t cooperate with his wildly unconstitutional and immoral attempts to use U.S. soldiers against racial justice protesters:
Trump soured on Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John’s church.
And as much as Attorney General Bill Barr has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm, Trump is still upset that it isn’t enough–even as Barr grumbles that Trump’s own proclamations make it harder for him to assist in Trump’s attempts to flagrantly obstruct justice.
If elected to a second term, Trump will see himself as vindicated and utterly unconstrained. With no active public policy plan for a second term, he will focus entirely on settling old scores. Even more dangerously, he will work to eliminate the last barriers against autocratic power, doing all he can to ensure that he and his family are never disempowered, much less held accountable for their misdeeds.
With the help of a handpicked radical Supreme Court, Trump will obliterate the last vestiges of congressional oversight, firing any and all who observe moral decency and the letter of law. The only test for employment in the administration will be shamelessness and total loyalty to Trump’s will.
Chris Liddell, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy coordination, is heading the White House’s transition effort, including vetting potential new Cabinet officials, two White House officials told Axios. He’s working closely with White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Johnny McEntee, who runs the Office of Presidential Personnel and has been conducting “loyalty tests” to weed out “Never Trumpers” from the administration.
If Trump wins, expect to see dangerously unqualified ideologues in charge of the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other key posts. There will be kangaroo court trials of Clinton, Obama, Biden and anyone else on the Fox News target list. There will be more comprehensive purges across government of career civil servants in favor of culture war inquisitors. The intelligence and immigration services will likely be converted into a secret police persecuting liberals and protesters (even more than they have been historically), and Trump will do all he can to use the full might of the military against civilian opposition.
It is an unthinkable nightmare from which it would take generations to awaken–and America has just nine days left to stop it.