If President Donald Trump had it his way, the revolution would not be televised, published, livestreamed or posted about. It wouldn’t even make the front page of The New York Times. 

The president’s attacks on media and free press organizations have been a hallmark of his political campaigns since 2016, when he used the crutch of “fake news” to call out any reporting he didn’t agree with. But over the past decade, Trump’s tirades against journalism have gradually come to be more widely accepted. 

Some of the most recent chronicles in the White House’s crusade against the media include yet another lawsuit claiming defamation, this time against The New York Times, and restrictions on coverage of the Department of Defense at the Pentagon. No other administration has been so adverse to democratic transparency and independent media.

Trump has inflicted so much drastic change that a majority of the public seems to have become numb to it. You can only read so many news articles about devastating and disappointing new developments before they start to lose their gravity.

The American public has fallen victim to outrage fatigue, which has led to a normalization of deviance as continued abuses of power from the president go unchecked in the trifecta of Republican-controlled federal branches. 

But while the rest of the public can understandably get worn down by media-warranted desolation, they rely on journalism to stand strong. These times are not normal, and it’s journalists’ obligation to communicate that and keep the stakes of political overstep visible. 

The situation that our country finds itself in is not only unprecedented — it’s urgently dangerous. Headlines that might have seemed outrageous in decades past are now published daily. Watergate forced Nixon to resign after surely facing impeachment, while Trump’s felony conviction barely made a dent in his political career.

Scarier yet, the public is so stupefied by recent barrages of absurdity that they’ve begun to adopt a form of short-term memory loss.

For example, Charlie Kirk’s assassination caused major upheaval from the right, lamenting the dark reality of political violence as if two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers weren’t murdered just two months prior, which made almost no waves nationally. 

It can be hard for the public to prioritize which headlines demand our attention — a March 2022 survey by the American Psychological Association found that nearly three-quarters of adults felt overwhelmed by the multitude of current crises in the world.

It’s easy to forget about your president allegedly being a part of the Epstein files when there’s an ongoing genocide in Gaza and furloughed federal workers in the United States struggling amid a government shutdown. 

In light of this, we must stand up for journalism’s right to exist in the U.S. as a sovereign check on the government.

Unfortunately, the institution of journalism is its own worst enemy in the advocacy process. Lofty ethical principles demand that journalists “avoid conflicts of interest,” even if that interest is in seeing their profession being adequately respected by the government. 

These moral codes reasonably exist to ensure that standards of objectivity are met when reporting. But the objective truth is that a pure democracy cannot exist without critical journalism.

Nowhere in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics does it state an inherent responsibility for journalists to defend the freedom of the press, unlike Al Jazeera’s, which states to “stand by colleagues in the profession and give them support when required, particularly in the light of the acts of aggression and harassment to which journalists are subjected at times.”

In fact, if a reporter were to directly call out Trump after he equated journalists to “the enemy of the American people,” they most likely would face disciplinary action, just as ABC reporter Terry Moran did when he was fired for calling Trump a “world class hater.”

Most professionals are entitled to join unions and advocate on behalf of their jobs, but journalism students today are being trained by this SPJ code of ethics to “avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility,” effectively instructing them to sit idly by while their government slowly chips away at them.

Let journalists call it how it is: The President winning multi-million dollar settlements against media conglomerates and the White House hand-selecting its pool of reporters isn’t merely an unfortunate new circumstance — it’s an attempt to remove the role of journalism, and truth, from our democracy. 

We must redefine objectivity to include journalistic advocacy — publications shouldn’t fear allegations of partisanship for simply defending themselves.

Journalism is under attack — and it shouldn’t take the stigma of editorializing or the label of “opinion” to be able to say that in a newspaper. It shouldn’t be considered partisan to call Trump the assailant of free speech. We’ve clearly entered a new era of the U.S., and it’s time to enter a new era of journalism; one where the truth is not only reported, but fought for.