Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

The approach is not only a strikingly effective method of crowdsourcing—Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Trump’s charities—but it also revolutionizes the relationship between a journalist and his readers. Fahrenthold positions himself on the side of the readers: together, they are digging into Trump’s business. The relationship between the journalist and the president is explicitly adversarial, and the relationship between the journalist and the readers is one of actual, observable cooperation. Most American journalists and editors would agree that this is as it should be—the journalists are working on behalf of the public, and their relationship with power should not be overly cozy—but in reality, the tone of neutrality, authority, and restraint that legacy publications adopt has a way of shifting the journalist away from the public and toward the person in power, making them act more like go-betweens than representatives of one side and one side only. That makes the media ill-equipped to resist the autocrat’s project of coming to dominate the communications sphere.