Unbelievable stupidities

In April 1944, in one of his early Tribune columns, George Orwell described the feeling of coming across a newspaper from before the outbreak of World War II, which at the time had been raging for almost five years, and “marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity.”

The stupidity that Orwell saw was a naive disregard—or in some cases a willful downplaying—of the danger signs of the coming global war. Instead of charting the political volatility, the mass unemployment, the march of dictators, and the atrocities that were already unfolding, he wrote, some newspapers portrayed the world as “a cozy place” of celebrity, crime, beauty-culture, sport, and animal stories. Analyzing a copy of the Daily Mail from January 1936, he finds no mention of Hitler, or the Depression, or the impending civil war in Spain, and it takes until page twenty-six for an article—with grim echoes of today—about Mussolini’s pledge that Italian air strikes on the Red Cross would stop going forward. 

In other words, for Orwell the press had disastrously failed to rise to the moment. 

I was revisiting some of Orwell’s early columns as I prepared to take over, alongside Aida Alami, writing this newsletter on Mondays. And this passage got me thinking: Ten years from now, or eighty years from now, what might future observers look back on as the media’s “unbelievable stupidities”? Will they think the press of today rose to the moment? 

So I thought that for my first installment, rather than taking a magnifying glass to one of the many alarming incidents around press freedom, I would zoom out and draw a circle around some issues we need to be especially attentive to right now, in a moment of danger and peril. To avoid “unbelievable stupidity” the press as a whole must be able to step back and do the same—not just to chase the story, but to connect it with the historical moment; to avoid the news cycle’s amnesiac tendencies; to contextualize which policies are part of a longer trajectory, and which steer us into scary and uncharted waters.

In recent days, the administration has ordered the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago and Portland, following similar moves in Los Angeles and DC earlier this year. The press has been covering this increasing militarization pretty effectively, in my view, with reporters often putting their bodies in real danger to tell the stories of vulnerable people targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But there is sometimes a tendency to frame developments as a clash between political personalities. (In the mode of Newsom slams Trump! Pritzker calls out Hegseth!) What needs to be stressed in coverage is the historically unprecedented nature of many of these moves. Past presidents have deployed the National Guard, of course, many times, but not since 1965 has it been enacted against the wishes of local governors. Reporters need to stress the executive’s authoritarian thrust into gray areas of the Constitution—and contextualize what could be done with a military force personally loyal to a man in the White House without a great record of respecting the Constitution. 

The resurgence of political violence is something I don’t think the media has quite worked out how to cover effectively just yet. Each incident—like the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk last month, or that of Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June—is treated with shock and surprise, rather than contextualization; with “this is not who we are,” instead of an acknowledgment that yes, it is, and we need to ask how we can change that. The press’s role here, perhaps, is to avoid falling into the groove of partisan grievances and fueling the politics of retribution further.

When it comes to covering Israel’s war on Gaza—which health officials say has now killed more than sixty-seven thousand people, many of them women and children—this presents a different challenge. The international press’s ability to report on the conflict has been severely limited by Israel’s refusal to allow journalists into Gaza. But I predict the journalists of tomorrow will look back on our time with disbelief at the benefit of the doubt afforded to claims made by Israeli military spokespeople, justifying air strikes on hospitals, ambulances, refugee camps, schools, apartment complexes, “safe zones,” and journalist hangouts. And I think future observers will find it difficult to understand how reporters who tried to move the dial on their employers’ coverage were often forced out or pressured into silence. 

Back in the US: How do you cover something that makes no sense—which has perhaps been devised to make no sense? William Davies, in a recent article for n+1, explored how, if Trump’s first term led to a critical obsession with the decline of objective knowledge (the “post truth” era of “fake news” and “alternative facts”), his second has provoked anxiety that “the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity.” 

Into this bucket we might put things such as the president’s tariff policies—which are likely to significantly drive up inflation—or health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s approach to vaccines, or the decision to cut billions in federal research grants, or the administration’s decision to shut down USAID, which could lead to a shocking fourteen million people’s deaths worldwide by 2030, according to a Lancet journal article. These policies, enacted as a kind of antiestablishment pose, are difficult to understand even now, let alone, you’d imagine, from the vantage point of the future. (Davies writes that many will “do deep harm without any apparent gain,” whereas others feel “like an assault on human progress” itself.)

The ambition for journalists covering the Trump administration’s whirlwind of policy changes now, I think, should be to connect the granular impact on the ground, the poverty and disease and layoffs, with well-sourced reporting on what might be driving a policy behind the scenes. Is it a firmly held policy belief? A loyalty test? Retribution against opponents? The result of dark-money lobbying? Just plain old stupidity?

Future observers will surely return to the ways we as journalists covered the emergence of AI. What makes this moment fascinating is that everything is still to be decided; how the future will look is being fought over now. I’d like to see less inevitability, boosterism, and hype in the coverage of AI—the belief that seems to infuse coverage from certain corners of the press that AI maximalism is unavoidable and must be embraced—as well as continued scrutiny on the practices of the companies leading the gold rush. Media executives, too, should be wary of becoming more dependent on tech companies—not just for the distribution of news content, which has been the case since the rise of social media, but also in the production of news content, if media companies come to rely on access to AI tools to aid reporting.

Meanwhile, ahead of the COP30 climate conference next month, media outlets will more than deserve the charge of “unbelievable stupidity” if they downgrade newsroom resources for climate coverage. The Trump administration has signaled its desire to abandon international climate targets, defund clean energy, and ramp up fossil fuel burning; nevertheless, journalists must continue to put climate politics on the agenda. We need to connect each flood, wildfire, heat wave, and hurricane to the science, and remember that, as CJR partner Covering Climate Now puts it, this is “a story for every beat.” 

Finally, Trump’s assault on press freedom reached a new summit on Friday with the deportation of Mario Guevara. Guevara is an Emmy-winning journalist covering immigration, who had been in the US for more than twenty years and held a valid work permit. He was detained for one hundred and eleven days after being arrested on June 14 for reporting on a protest against the administration in Atlanta. His removal to El Salvador is believed to be the first instance of someone deported from the US in retaliation for reporting activity.

Guevara’s deportation—as well as government pressure on Disney to silence Jimmy Kimmel, or Trump’s legal suits against media companies, or the Pentagon’s directive against reporting unauthorized material—needs to be understood as part of a multipronged attack on journalism. We’ve arrived at a place, in my view, where the protection of journalists in the US is increasingly contingent on what they’re reporting on, and how critical they are of the levers of power. The First Amendment no longer offers blanket protection. When covering stories of legal warfare, violence, harassment, detention, and deportation against journalists, news organizations need to be contextualizing them in this wider attack on the independence of the press.

These are just a few of the topics I will be trying to keep in mind in this newsletter to avoid the label of “unbelievable stupidity” in the eyes of future observers. 

Before I go, a note on my predecessor, Jon Allsop. The other day, when I was going through Orwell’s early “As I Please” columns, I found a different passage that made me think of Jon and smile. Orwell mentions walking past a cottage where, eight years before, he’d sown two little rose plants. One of them, “no bigger than a boy’s catapult when I put it in, had grown into a huge vigorous bush,” he writes, and the other “was smothering half the fence in a cloud of pink blossom.”

Jon leaves some very big shoes to fill at CJR. We’ll make sure we keep watering his rosebush. 

Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Other Notable Stories…

• Gallup began measuring trust in the media in the 1970s, when around 70 percent of Americans expressed confidence in news reporting. Last week, when Gallup released its 2025 report, trust fell to its lowest level ever—with just 28 percent expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Younger audiences were less likely to trust the media, it found, and only about 8 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in reporting, compared with around half of Democrats.
• As hopes grow for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, with talks underway in Egypt, Ruth Margalit wrote a very good piece for The New Yorker that discusses, among other things, the discrepancies in coverage of the war between US and Israeli media. Tomorrow will mark two years since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. “Israelis lost twelve hundred lives that day, and, since then, it often feels as if we have lost our soul,” writes Margalit, who reports on the war from Tel Aviv. “Every day in which the killing of dozens of Palestinians barely makes it to the bottom of the news pages in most Israeli outlets, every day in which the arrest of activists attempting to deliver food to hungry Gazans is met with applause and calls for violence, provides fresh proof that we have lost our way.”
• In the UK, the publisher of the Nottingham Post and Nottinghamshire Live, outlets barred by a local council from receiving press releases and interviewing officials, is taking legal action. The council is controlled by the right-wing Reform UK party, whose leader, Nigel Farage, is a Trump admirer. A legal letter from the publisher argues that the decision breaches UK regulations as well as Article Ten of the European Convention on Human Rights, on freedom of expression. Meanwhile, two leftist reporters—Guardian columnist Owen Jones, and Novara journalist Rivkah Brown—were expelled from the Labour Party’s annual conference last week, after they questioned lawmakers on Britain’s support for the Israeli war effort. The UK National Union of Journalists’ general secretary said in a statement: “Worryingly, this seems to be part of a growing trend of legitimate newsgatherers being denied entry to—or removed from—political proceedings that are firmly in the public interest.”
• Karen Attiah, the Washington Post’s only Black woman opinion writer, said she was fired after eleven years over social media posts following the killing of Charlie Kirk. “The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable,’ ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues—charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false,” Attiah wrote in a Substack article. The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) released a statement last week raising “urgent concerns about the environment for Black journalists” at the Post. Attiah intends to dispute the firing in court.
• Harry Jackson, twenty-eight, went to Kathmandu as part of a motorbike journey from Thailand to the UK he was documenting via vlog. Then the Gen Z protests that have rocked Nepal in recent weeks kicked off. By accident, as a Wired article relates, Jackson’s YouTube channel ended up becoming “one of the main ways people around the world saw what was happening in Nepal as youth-led protests toppled the government.” He never intended to be a journalist but somehow became one. “I have truly witnessed history, on a stupid trip from Thailand to England on a fucking moped!” Jackson says at one point.
   
• And ICYMI, for CJR, Riddhi Setty interviewed Till Eckert, a reporter for the German nonprofit outlet Correctiv on a fellowship with ProPublica. Eckert has spent recent weeks reporting from the twelfth floor of an immigration processing center in Manhattan; he captured on video the moment ICE agents pushed a woman to the floor, and was present when journalists were shoved by federal agents, leading to one person’s hospitalization. (That was not the only instance of state violence against journalists in the past few days; in Chicago, a projectile was fired at a CBS reporter’s vehicle by a masked ICE agent, she said.) “These are scenes I was not expecting to see in the United States,” Eckert told CJR. You can read Riddhi’s piece here.