The Truth Dies When Journalism Dies

“To look at politics from the standpoint of truth,” Hannah Arendt writes, “means to take one’s stand outside the realm of politics.” It is the standpoint of the “truthteller,” the person who rejects the pursuit of power and abandons influence in public affairs in order to tell the truth. The truthteller, Arendt writes, “forfeits his position” as truthteller as soon as he “tries to interfere  directly in human affairs and to speak the language of persuasion or of violence.” And while the truthteller eschews politics and stands apart from politics, politics needs truthtellers. It is truthtellers who secure the common world, the world of facts that is the ground on which we stand and the sky above us. 

Sebastian Junger, who will be giving the keynote address at the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2024 Conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, makes a similar point about the important role of journalists as truthtellers.  Junger recently has written: “Journalism is important because reality is important, and reality is something that many generals and politicians have a complicated relationship with.”  When journalism dies, Junger argues, “The truth dies with it.” It is fashionable to criticize journalists and to deny that there is anything like a professional class of journalists who are impartial and dedicated to unearthing facts, to offering an account of the real world. But journalists, at least those who deserve the name journalists, are truth-tellers.  Junger adds: “A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.” In “When Journalism Dies,” Junger writes:

For better or ill, the press is the only place to get such a thing. Being human, journalists have lied, plagiarized, distorted, and made mistakes, just like the people they investigate, but their sins are generally investigated by the press itself. If there were a more reliable alternative to the press, I would tell you to throw your arms around it and never let go, but there isn’t. Small-town newspapers are particularly important for public accountability, but they are dying out at an alarming rate, and as they go, a certain ground truth about the American experience goes with it. In fact, a Boston-based nonprofit called the GroundTruth Project is dedicated to preserving our nation’s local press and seeding “news deserts” with reporters and photographers.

“The crisis in local reporting has become a crisis for our democracy,” says founder Charles M. Sennott. “In news deserts, three things occur: Voter participation plummets, polarization surges, and bond ratings drop as banks do not want to invest in communities where no one is watching the store. And into the barren terrain, toxic misinformation seeps into the soil and further divides an increasingly uninformed population.”