Journalism is Vital, So Why Can’t We Remember Any of It?
The Trump years sparked a frenzy of reporting. For essentially half a decade, the U.S. was awash in passionate op-ed pieces, exposés, and a revival of long-form. To be clear, some of that was a kind of reactive journalism by tweet situation, but it kept everyone glued to their phones and frantically scrolling through social media for years. In that climate, the Fourth Estate felt more important than ever. It was a pillar holding up our besieged democracy and conveying truth in a time of insane falsehoods. That’s why our collective morning after (if you can call it that) has led to a bizarre realization. I know that I read a lot of major news articles in the last few years — the very recent past. Moreover, I know that my friends, family members, colleagues, peers, and wider community read those things too. We eagerly shared them, celebrated them, debated, and evangelized their content. But now how much of it does anyone really remember?
My story starts at the end of 2021. Between surging omicron cases and a week of bad weather, I was stuck at home. Killing time online, I decided to compile and save the best articles I had read in the last year or two. That should have been easy enough since I had been quarantined through several national crises. Reading and watching the news was one of the few activities I could do that whole time. The problem was it was all a little hazy now. I could remember a couple things, but which news source was that from? And I don’t have any idea who wrote it or when. Reaching out to friends and family elicited similar responses. At first, I chalked it up to the holidays, life commitments, and the blur of being quarantined for so long. “Who even keeps track of that stuff?” I said. But the more I thought about it, the issue somehow seemed deeper than just those things.
Beginning with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, consuming and supporting quality journalism in America took on a new significance for everyone. Suddenly, it was a civic responsibility, a political necessity, a safeguard for our democracy, a battlefield over what the truth is, and a platform for elevating marginalized voices and problems that might otherwise be overlooked. And maybe at its best journalism has always been that, but now there was a profound urgency that hadn’t existed before. In a time when a demented old bigot relished in his demagoguery, this was the last line of defense against a daily onslaught of lies. If I don’t remember this stuff, what is worth remembering?
Armed with a newfound sense of purpose, I began to methodically review my social media feeds, trying to reconstruct what I had been reading over several years. I went through my Facebook and Twitter back to the very beginning. I searched through old emails to friends and looked at what I had posted on my blog and elsewhere. During that process, I rediscovered some great examples of journalism, over a hundred stories that I saved and catalogued. More importantly though, I was reminded of events I had completely forgotten about. To be sure, some of these were Trump era political scandals of the week, but others weren’t and that’s what bothered me. I had already forgotten the trillions of cicadas that blanketed the U.S. in the summer of 2021. And the further back I went in time, the more likely this was. I was ten years removed from the viral notoriety of Kony 2012 or the time the DEA accidently forgot a college student stuck in one of their holding cells for days. Browsing through old articles, I remembered the anti-gay purges in Chechnya. Events that were a big deal had long since slipped my mind. And on the technical side, while some saved links routed to their original stories, others had been deleted in the temporary world that is the internet.
After all this, I felt somewhat disappointed in myself as a news junkie. My deeper fear though was that most people aren’t that different: we see something, time passes, life happens, we move on. And under more conventional circumstances, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. However, since some leaders are actively trying to rewrite recent history, our shared memory of it becomes incredibly important. How we engage with the news becomes vital to the kind of country we live in. It can’t just be something we react to and then forget. It’s the first draft of something greater than its individual parts. But there’s a critical gap in time after an event takes place when it’s still too new for historians, but not recent enough for journalists anymore. That’s where the reader is left to reflect on the impact of all that information, all the revelations, photographs, and calls to action. And if journalism has a duty to report the truth, then we certainly have a responsibility to remember it.
