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Press Onward To journalists everywhere: fight like hell Dan Rather and Team Steady Dec 29 October 1, 2025, New York City Credit: Getty Images As Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked him what kind of government had been established. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he famously and presciently answered. A republic is a form of government in which power is held by the people, who elect representatives to exercise that power on their behalf. Our republic has survived civil war and world wars. It has withstood economic depressions and deadly pandemics. It has persevered in the face of scandals and political assassinations. For 238 years, the Constitution, buttressed by the rule of law, has been our bulwark against tyranny. But now we are faced with a cult leader-cum-authoritarian hell-bent on destroying it. As we look back on 2025, we’re hard-pressed to find a corner of society more tormented than th...

Today in Politics, Bulletin 79. 2/25/25 Ron Filipkowski Feb 26 ∙ … WH Press Sec Karoline Leavitt notified reporters that she will decide who gets to attend briefings from now on: "For decades a group of DC based journalists, the  White House Correspondents' Association , has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore." …  Jacqui Heinrich , Senior WH Correspondent for Fox: “This move does not give the power back to the people - it gives power to the White House. The WHCA is democratically elected by the full-time WH press corps. WHCA has determined pools for decades because only representatives FROM our outlets can determine resources all those outlets have - such as staffing - in order to get the President's message out to the largest possible audience, no matter the day or hour.” … At yesterday’s briefing, 10 of the 18 reporters Leavitt called on were from pro-Trump right-win...

  The Corporate Media Continue to Ignore That Trump Is an Explicit Threat to Democracy Somebody should tell the New York Times and others that it is, in fact, their job to treat one candidate with pronounced alarm when the threat posed is as clear and severe as this. Donald Trump and many of his supporters have explicitly promised to overturn American democracy, using Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” Hungarian model — where the press is controlled, political opposition sidelined or imprisoned, and oligarchs run the government — as their model. But you rarely hear that from our media. Back on May 5th, Semafor’s Ben Smith  interviewed  New York Times Editor Joe Kahn, who echoed a perspective that seems widespread across America’s mainstream media newsrooms: that their job is to report what they consider “news,” but not to defend democracy itself. His exact quote was: “One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people c...