The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 22 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m from The New Republic. I’m the host of Right Now. Today I am excited to be to joined by Kathy Roberts Forde. She’s a professor of journalism at UMass Amherst and also a journalism historian. And so I want to talk to her about both the past and the present, maybe the future of how journalism should be thinking about its role in democracy. So Kathy, thanks for joining me.
Kathy Forde: It’s so great to be here, Perry.
Bacon: Let me start by, you wrote this book, or you were editor of this book, which is a book of essays called Journalism and Jim Crow. I want you to talk about that book a little bit for the audience if you don’t mind.
Forde: Oh yeah, I’m happy to. This is a book that came out several years ago. I co-edited it with a colleague and we recruited some really tremendous thinkers about the role of journalism in building subnational, authoritarian regimes in the U.S. South and what came during and after Reconstruction. And what came of that, of course, was Jim Crow, which was more than segregation of groups of Americans based on race. It was also this authoritarian regimes, one party political rule maintained through business and court and politico and politician and newspaper collaborations. So this book tries to intervene into the ways we often think about the role of U.S. news media as these having been always great contributors and protectors of democracy. Because the story in reality is actually much more complicated. It’s not that our news media haven’t served these roles, but it’s also that they have, for very long periods of time, been deeply involved in anti-democratic projects.
Bacon: So talk about that in this post–Civil War period. A lot of the white-owned papers in this time did what? They legitimize the backlash against Reconstruction on some level. So talk about what they did.
Forde: Yeah. So they not only legitimize through the soft power of storytelling—for example, normalizing lynching as a tool of social control in the South and of demeaning and degrading Black opportunity, Black citizenship, and Black humanity. They propagated the story of “the Lost Cause,” this notion that the South and its goals during the Civil War were noble somehow. They did a lot more. They were also political actors. These newspaper editors and publishers worked collaboratively with business leaders and political leaders and industrial giants and the court systems in actively promoting all kinds of policies and systems that built an exclusionary governmental regime. So you wind up having post-Reconstruction, one party rule in the South. So one party, the Democratic Party, which then was the party of white supremacy. You have rigged elections; you have election fraud; you have stochastic terror used as a way to frighten and control not only Black citizens but also white citizens who might want to ally and build populist fusionist movements with their Black neighbors and fellow citizens.
And so when you put all that together, you see that you have these elite triads, or even more angles in that, collaboration to build these. What Robert Mickey has written about in Paths Out of Dixie is these authoritarian enclaves all over the South, and they lasted for generations.
Bacon: And your argument is newspapers were part of it. In some ways, newspapers help entrench Jim Crow. I don’t think I fully understood that until the book.
Forde: Yeah. They not only entrenched Jim Crow; they built authoritarian regime. And they were political actors. They worked collaboratively with politicians to help politicians stay in power, to get elected in the first place. Henry Grady actually helped with the Tilden-Hayes presidential election in 1876. It actually brought an end to Reconstruction in the South. Henry Grady was the managing editor of The Atlanta Constitution. They helped defend and protect and even participated in some of the convict leasing system, which was a way in which so many Black Americans in the U.S. South were were caught up in this really terrible system of mass incarceration.
Vagrancy, for example, was criminalized. And so Black folk could get caught up in the system where they were then arrested, convicted. And instead of being housed in prisons, they were leased out to private industrial corporations and worked to death in many instances and brutalized in order to build profits and build so much of the civic infrastructure as the South was rebuilding after the Civil War. These kinds of cooperative regimes among elites in the South were ways of building the racial hierarchy right into the political system. And make no doubt about it, these media leaders and their newspapers were political actors too. And I think that’s something that far too many political scientists, scholars of democracy, journalism historians, and the press itself today does not understand and has yet to reckon with.
So when we look at, what’s happening in the U.S. today with the rise of authoritarianism and democratic erosion and backsliding, this history has something to teach us. It can help us think about paths not taken, and it can also help us explain where we are in certain ways through path dependence.
Bacon: I’m going to come back to the future, and I’m going to come back to the present in a little bit. But let me ask a couple more questions about back then. These were not the only journalists operating, of course, these white-owned pro. Talk about Ida B. Wells and the other tradition that’s happening at the same time in this Jim Crow period.
Forde: What happens post–Civil War is the Black press, which was born earlier in the nineteenth century right as the slavery question was becoming a huge national question of debate. By the time we get to the end of the Civil War, the Black press all over the country explodes because Black Americans understand fully that their citizenship rights, which are gained through the Fourteenth Amendment, their voting rights through the Fifteenth Amendment, [have] to be maintained and protected and defended. And the Black press and leaders and activists are—every Black activist almost is also a newspaper editor. During this period, the two go hand in glove.
Bacon: Your book mentions Du Bois as a journalist at this point.
Forde: Yeah, all of them. Every single one of them. And they understand that they need to use the press as a forum for Black organizing to mobilize Black publics, as a forum where Black Americans can reach across geographical distance and work across all kinds of class lines, geographical lines to talk with one another and collaborate together to try to figure the way forward when the federal government has turned its back on the South’s efforts—or Black efforts in the South—to build biracial government during that period of Reconstruction. So the Black press is working actively from the Civil War on under incredibly difficult circumstances due to just resources to be part of a movement to build Black political power and agency and economic opportunity.
The whole time you have these white newspapers in the South—and some outside the South—working on these anti-democratic projects, you also had the Black press very actively trying to push and cajole and lead and demand for Black inclusion in the democratic project. They’re working consistently toward a pluralist, multiracial, democratic project. And this goes on. This is a battle that takes place well across the twentieth century.
Bacon: I was going to move there exactly. Let’s move to the 1950s, ’60s. So the Black press, we know what it’s doing. And at this point, talk about—the story I think I knew before was along the lines [of] The New York Times, Time magazine, Life, the East Coast liberal press or East Coast press, Northern press to some extent help the Civil Rights Movement. They covered King fairly favorably, but there’s more nuances. So talk about the role the press plays in the ’50s and ’60s.
Forde: I think what’s incredibly important for everyone listening to this podcast and all Americans to understand is that it was the Black press that empowered and pushed the white press to cover the Civil Rights Movement with some degree of sympathy and empathy and recognition of what the Civil Rights Movement was trying to do. And there were all kinds of fissures too. There was not this monolithic white savior press in The New York Times or Time magazine, etc., acting all gung ho behind the Civil Rights Movement activists. They had to be persuaded, and they made lots of missteps along the way. And I think that they learned—I know that they learned—so much from the Black reporters who they worked with and depended on—with Jet and Ebony and other Black publications—Black newspapers at the time in order to understand what the stakes were and what was being demanded by Black civil rights activists in the South and their allies in the North.
Bacon: But in the ’60s period is this idea that the media is an actor and it plays a role in democracy. In that period, the media as a whole was maybe pro–civil rights to some extent, and they helped legitimize the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act. The media was an actor in this period, right?
Forde: There’s no doubt. In fact, that was very much part of the Civil Rights Movement strategy with Andrew Young and Dr. King. They had a media strategy and their goal was to get as much publicity through the white mainstream powerful press in the country as possible to expose what was happening in the South: the violence, the political control, the economic control, the authoritarian work that was happening all over the South, and the brutality that was part of this system in the South. And so part of it was their very clear understanding of how they needed to get cameras on and newspapers on and broadcast news on to showcase for all of America the moral injury that the American democratic project was—and certainly all over the South—inflicting on [not only] Black Americans but also all of America.
Bacon: Let me move to the—I’m going to call the period 1980 to 2020, and you’ll understand why I’ve said it that way. There’s been two things, I think, going on in the press. This is something I’ve experienced by being in the press too. One, there’s a big push—more and more news organizations are owned by these megacorporations. There’s a big push for “objectivity.” This is the new thing. Most of American history, you had Hamilton and Jefferson having their own paper. Most American history had partisan newspaper. But these last—really—50 years, there’s been a very big focus on news organizations must be objective between the two parties and not have any values. You have, too, the simultaneous push for more diversity in the media, more racial diversity, particularly more inclusion of African Americans specifically. So talk about those. And those two things, I think, have some obvious tension, right?
Forde: Do they ever? So objectivity, we think of it—actually Walter Lippmann, who’s a founder of The New Republic, was one of the great proponents of objectivity as a professional news standard back in the 1920s and ’30s. And this grows throughout the twentieth century as this God standard in professional journalism. And it involved being fact-centered using evidence, using rational thought to understand the news—a process of verification, a way to make sure that the news that’s being purveyed is based on an expert collection of facts and evidence and is accurate and is somehow neutral, is somehow divorced from values. And so if that is what objectivity means.… And then at the same time, there’s this recognition that we need in newsrooms not just white control and white men controlling what news decisions are made, what editorial judgements are made, being the ultimate arbiters of what counts as news and how new should be analyzed and interpreted and opinion-formed. Once we get away from that notion that white men should have control over all of this, women enter, people of color enter into the space of professional journalism in more numbers than ever. And that is sought after in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement at the same time.
And what that suggests is diversity of perspective, diversity of experience, diversity of ways of thinking and making sense of the democratic project. And yet objectivity suggests that there are no values. There should not be values attached to the way we think about producing the news. So they’re in obvious tension. And in fact, there’s this great new book—and I need to disclaim, I edit the book series this book came out in. It’s called Racializing Objectivity by a terrific scholar by the name of Gwyneth Mellinger. And she demonstrates how in the South in the ’50s and ’60s, white newspaper editors and publishers actually used objectivity as this weapon, as this cudgel and as this veil to hide behind as they were very, very actively behind the scenes working to maintain segregation and to maintain Jim Crow. And they were very publicly using—she brings the receipts—objectivity as this justification and a veil for what they were actually doing.
Bacon: So as a Black journalist, I feel like we’re in a whiplash period where from 2014 to 2020, it was cover race. This is an important part of policy. Lean into the idea that we’re defending democracy. Democracy dies in darkness, you know that slogan, [but] let me not get into that too much. And now I feel like we’re in a period where you can see news orgs when they lay off—often they have excuse for it, but often the Black people are the first people who are leaving. A lot of these race beats are going away. A lot of the democracy beats are less focused on. Is that what you’re seeing, too, [that] we had a period—from 2014 to 2020, there was a shift in the media to a more multiracial democracy form, and now we’re going back again?
Forde: Yes. And I think it’s led by elites—elites on the right. It’s a really frightening—I find this moment we’re in of the rise of authoritarianism in the federal government, this move to the national level, of all kinds of techniques and stratagems that were developed in many of these Southern states generations before have been nationalized. And in the process, one of the things we’re seeing today is a federal government that is attacking the press in all kinds of way and has been during the two Trump administrations. The idea of the press as enemy of the people, the fact that there’s a Trump crony in charge of the FCC and that Trump crony as head of FCC is investigating all kinds of news media outlets. You have this revolving door among certain right-wing news media outlets and this administration, with some of the people who have been significant personalities, I’ll call them, on Fox News and other places either holding positions of power within the Trump administration or somehow providing extraordinary levels of access to them. We see Fox personalities involved in CPAC.
We see some right-wing outlets—sometimes they provide factual information, but they’ve often been involved in misinformation at best and disinformation at worst. We’ve seen the White House Correspondents’ Association disbanded. The Trump administration now has its own propaganda channel through Rumble. We have the AP disinvited from the White House and Air Force One. We have lawsuits against ABC and CBS in efforts to control their thought. We have Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post turning the editorial side of the newspaper into a free market zone with a conservative editor. There’s just a lot happening where you see elites on the right aligning together to reshape not only the news media space but also the information environment—because, of course, we’ve got these social media platforms that complicate things entirely. You’ve got lots of media influencers that are supplanting what had been the function of news.
Bacon: So the parallel now that I’m seeing that you’re seeing between the period of 1870 to 1920 and today is that again, you have these rich elites who are using their economic power to also shape the media in an anti-democratic way.
Forde: Yeah. And it’s an effort to consolidate power in their interests.
Bacon: And so what would a media look like that was trying to defend democracy? What would that look like right now?
Forde: That is such a good question. I’ve been thinking about this so much. I need a think tank of folks to think about this with me so my ideas are better than what it is I’m able to share with you today. But one of the things I think would be really helpful is just structural. We need much—we’ve had PBS And NPR defunded, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting totally ripped up. We need public funding of media. The First Amendment, so important in this country, but it does not mean we cannot have public funding of media set up in a way that safeguards the importance of a news media being fact-based, evidence-based and nonpartisan and oriented toward not only serving the common good but toward reporting on how democracy works and calling the shots. So that’s another thing I would like to see: I would like to see news media that don’t both-sides anything that has to do with democratic rules and regulations and laws and courts and norms. That is, we can’t both-side these things.
Bacon: Let me stop you because you said you want public media that’s nonpartisan. You also said we should have media that doesn’t both-sides. Those goals are, right now—you said you want media that’s nonpartisan, doesn’t do both-sides, but also promotes democracy, right?
Forde: Yes.
Bacon: And promotes democratic norms. How does I think that’s what NPR is struggling with. You can tell—whenever the head of NPR speaks, I can tell she’s like, Democracy is good. I don’t want to be a Democrat. So when one party is doing anti-democratic things daily, how do you maintain a nonpartisan media?
Forde: Wow. I think probably everyone listening to this podcast right now wants the answer to that question. So do I. I think there’s going to be all kinds of blurry and gray space in between the ideals of that. I don’t think there’s a way to police that boundary very well when we have one party in this country—the Republican Party—that’s been somewhat captured by the right-wing MAGA movement. I’m not sure that all conservatives are MAGA, and I’m not sure that all people who identify as MAGA want authoritarianism either. I think the terrain is really complicated. There’s no way to take the politics out because so many news media institutions are operating as straight-out political actors, and others are operating within that political sphere because that’s what they have to do even though they’re not involving themselves in an administrative positions or they’re not going to political rallies as participants and speakers. I think being pro-democracy and anti-authoritarianism is something different from being pro–Democratic Party and anti–Republican Party.
Bacon: I agree with that concept. I’m trying to think of what those in reality—is there a news outlet or a reporter [who is] pro-democracy anti-authoritarianism without being pro–Democratic Party? I agree with what you’re saying.
Forde: I don’t know.
Bacon: … Going to read that way in this current moment, if you’re pro-democracy, you’re anti-Trump. But it’s hard to reconcile those things.
Forde: It is very hard to reconcile those things and I don’t have a great, I wish I did. I hope some of the listeners have some good ideas.
Bacon: I think ProPublica is a good example of being a watchdog, doing stories that are investigative, and talking about democratic norms. They don’t necessarily go into a lot of politics. They don’t have an op-ed section. And I think op-eds can be good, but that’s a good model of something useful there.
Forde: I agree with you completely. ProPublica has been just a tremendous asset in democratic life for quite a while now.
Bacon: At the beginning you talked about the media has power, whether we like it or not, on some level, I think is what it is. Journalists can be fact-based with the idea that inherently in journalism, you are choosing which stories to cover and which ones not to. So talk about objectivity as a goal—period. Is that neutrality—or can you talk about how do you think about that? Is that a goal, is there a different principle we should look for?
Forde: I think we should be committed to evidence, to facts, to critical thought, to thinking together collectively. The newspaper in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the great debate in this country about the institution of slavery and what to do about it, it operated like the very best papers, like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s many wonderful newspapers. They operated as forums like where people would write in, and there would be this incredibly robust debate happening in the pages of the newspaper where people would collectively working out and talking and trying to come to some consensus. And we need more of that. We do have reader commentary on a lot of sites now, but far too often they devolve into something else. But sometimes, they can be really—in some places you see just some great reader commentary where people are coming together.
The problem is we’re so polarized right now. Of course, that was true in the early nineteenth century as well. We’re so polarized that we’re often not talking except in a choir. We may not see things the same way, but we’re also not talking across major differences, which I think is really important. And I lost my train of thought. What are we talking about now, Perry?
Bacon: I asked about what ideas you had for the media for today—for the media to support democracy and also reach people. You said, We need public media, which I then stopped. What do we do, though, because we just had public media defunded, or they’re trying to defund. What does it look like to have public media? How do you build support for public media if one party is against public media?
Forde: So first of all, states can pass legislation that funds public media in their states. And there can be workarounds that is—there can be coalitions among different states to build different kinds of public media that reach beyond the state level and local level. So I think that those are important things that we need to consider during this moment. I would love to see more news outlets have a democracy beat desk. You see little things like that happening—
Bacon: Came up and died a little bit because I think that desk often produces stuff that Republicans don’t like. That’s part of the problem. You have to be OK with that, yeah.
Forde: Yeah. But then have an authoritarianism watch, right? Do more reporting that actually looks at the systems and structures and puts together the patterns of what’s happening at state levels and at the national level in terms of consolidating authoritarian power. It’s really hard. Journalism is a curriculum of everything that happens in the world on a single day or in an hour. It does, in all of its responsibilities, report the world to us and to bring us some representation and knowledge about what’s happening. What’s often missed are these kinds of syntheses and these putting together and telling us all the—we reported on these 25 things that happened this week in Washington or these 25 things that happened at the state level (let’s say we’re in a red state) or in the last month or in the last year. Let us put this together for you and show you a pattern and let’s have some experts in to discuss evidence-based and interpretations of how we can think about this. I think it’s really hard for journalism to do a good job like that, but I think we need that ambition in our journalism.
Bacon: The thing I’ve struck by is you’ve said two things. One barrier to pro-democracy journalism is that a lot of people support the regime or support authoritarianism—or that’s one group. The second group—when people on Bluesky debate New York Times headline X, sometimes I’m like, That headline was probably written at 7:30 p.m. by somebody on a Saturday shift.
Forde: But we know how that works. Not everyone does.
Bacon: Not everyone does, and every headline is not written by the writer. We can get into that, but I think that’s where I want to finish this. I think The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post news operation—forget about the opinions thing—the AP, the CNN, these organizations that are not.… The New Republic is more left of center explicitly. And so is MSNBC. And then you have Fox and so on. But the middle of the news—the things that are trying to reach a broad audience—that’s where I think the hard part is. What should they—when Trump brings in the National Guard to D.C., what should the coverage look like?
Forde: It should explain that as one tactic in an authoritarian playbook, one of many, many, many to consolidate authoritarian power. And maybe this makes me sound like a real lefty partisan—
Bacon: You’re going to sound—you sound like Hakeem Jeffries, but maybe that’s the truth in this case, right? That’s the problem.
Forde: I think if we look to people who study how authoritarianism gets built, how authoritarian power gets consolidated, if we look to history for our understanding of how this works and how democracy erodes and democracy backslides, it’s piecemeal. There’s small actions that when they’re all taken together add up to a lot, and those small actions become bigger actions in a certain zone or sector. Right now, we are living in a space where all the institutions of accountability are under attack. Journalism, universities, law firms, the courts. These are patterns that need to be surfaced and discussed and understood for what they are. And in the midst, I’m painting a pretty stark picture and I’m working on the edges where things are really clear. There are all kinds of things in the dark, murky, middle that it’s hard to make sense of and who knows and what’s being done.
We should also know what is being done to protect democracy. Where are the successes? Who are those actors? What are the networks? How can we understand all the political players and networks and think tanks and foundations.
Bacon: But just to zone in, if you’re covering the National Guard being deployed in D.C., if you call experts on authoritarianism, it’s not like that’s your opinion. That’s a reported story. You can call authors, you can call scholars, you can call people who worked in Turkey or people who worked in Hungary or people who worked in Russia. This is not just opinions. It is like this is an authoritarian tactic according to this.… There’s a journalism project here that would involve the going beyond saying Trump is a meanie.
Forde: Absolutely. You got it. You said it better than I managed to say it, Perry, as always. But I wanna say one more thing about what journalists can be doing. Journalists need to cover and news outlets need to cover the media environment and the information environment better than they do. They need to explain news institutions: how they’re owned, who owns them, how these ownership structures put pressures and constraints on the kinds of reporting that they do. I think news organizations owe it to readers to really surface and make clear the ways in which news organizations are themselves in many instances operating as political actors too—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. You cannot have an effective, rise in consolidation of authoritarian power without some type of news media mobilization in support of that project. It just doesn’t work.
Bacon: I’m going to ask three short questions and then we’re going to end there. First, you’re doing some research on Ida B. Wells. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Forde: Yeah. I worked with this amazing team out of the University of Maryland—I’m at UMass Amherst—and a colleague of mine, Rob Wells, who did this massive computational analysis of lynching newspaper coverage from the 1700s up through the twentieth century. And what we found in that was this incredibly surprising finding, which was that in the 1890s suddenly newspaper coverage, which had been lagging incidences of lynching up through the 1890s; lynching really becomes this huge problem in the 1880s and grows into the 1890s—suddenly newspaper coverage explodes. And what our findings tell us is that’s when Ida B. Wells begins covering lynching. Her coverage becomes well known across this country and, in fact, around the world very, very quickly. And so she sets the agenda and puts lynching on the public agenda in a way it never had been. Now, was she able to—
Bacon: End lynching? Of course not.
Forde: My God we couldn’t in this country even get federal anti-lynching legislation passed. That was first passed not too many years ago. It’s extraordinary. But she played this really important role in helping us understand why lynching happened—that it was not for reasons that white people were saying it was happening. Lynching was happening as a form of social and economic and political quashing of Black opportunity.
Bacon: You’re a journalism professor there. You’re also, I think, a dean, and maybe your title includes the word “inclusion” in it. I don’t want to get title wrong, but can you talk about what you do in terms of inclusion and why we should defend those things as opposed to surrendering them?
Forde: I am so worried about this in the world of every space that matters in public life—universities, civic institutions, and higher ed—because of all these anti DEI efforts at state level and also at the federal level what. I am an associate dean in my college, at UMass Amherst, for equity and inclusion. And for all the grotesque caricatures of what DEI means, at the end of the day, what it means is creating space, at least in my world, in university life where we are examining any kinds of structural or policy or programmatic matters that aren’t fully inclusive, that don’t open the doors of access to the good that higher education is to people across all identities and all socioeconomic statuses.
And so that seems to me, it’s all about access. It’s all about including everyone in the democratic project. It’s about widening the circle of “we” that get to participate and get to enjoy the amazing resources of freedom and dignity and opportunity that democracy and higher ed and in other areas of our public life give us. That’s what we do. This woke indoctrination and all these culture tropes that demonize DEI, I find to be just truly offensive and I see it as a form of backlash. We’ve lived—we continue in this country’s history to have backlash at once where there is progress made. I see it in some ways, some forms, a backlash to not only to Black Lives Matter and its many successes—but to some degree that.
Bacon: You are working on a project around higher education and defending higher education. Talk about that a little bit.
Forde: Thank you so much for asking, Perry. This is a project that’s keeping me sane during these really dark and troubled times. I co-founded with a colleague at UMass Amherst—and now our former chancellor at UMass Amherst has joined us—an organization called Stand Together for Higher Ed. And what we are is a nonprofit that is trying to support a grassroots movement of faculty and staff across the thousands and thousands of higher ed institutions across this country to reclaim the public narrative, to ask policy makers and everyday citizens to demand protections for federal funding for higher ed that has done so much to open the doors for access for everyday Americans, including me, to get a college education.
I grew up disadvantaged in rural East Tennessee. I don’t want the doors to close. They cannot close. And we also need federal funding for open inquiry and research that then gets taken up by corporations and fuels the economy but also saves lives consistently and makes life better. We’re doing that work. You can find us if anybody’s interested. We really need faculty and staff to join StandTogetherHigherEd.org.
Bacon: Great. And can you say it one more time because somebody is asking?
Forde: Stand Together for Higher Ed is the name of the nonprofit, and we are www.standtogetherhighered.org. All right, great. Kathy, it’s a great conversation. Thanks for joining me.
Forde: Yeah, it was great.
Bacon: And thanks everybody for watching, and we’ll be back next week.
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