Good news: Not all journalism outlets suck

Legacy media are failing us, but ProPublica and others give us hope

As the New York Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream news outlets often fail to hold right-wing extremists to account, you may get so frustrated with the American news industry that you consider walking away.

Please don’t. Shared facts – the product of quality journalism – are necessary for the existence of a free society.  

And some people out there are doing a solid job. ProPublica, for example.

This nonprofit news outlet uses investigative reporting to expose abuses of power by government, business, and other institutions. I worked with some of its journalists when we were colleagues at the Chicago Tribune, and let me tell you, they’re among the best.

It was no fluke that ProPublica won the Public Service award at this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for its revelations about how right-wing billionaires secretly lavished expensive trips on Supreme Court justices.

The unethical conduct by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito could have been exposed by other outlets if they’d only looked. But major media’s coverage of the Supreme Court has been a scandal over recent decades. National Public Radio’s legal affairs reporter, Nina Totenberg, was a close friend of one of the justices she covered, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And the Washington Post was so lax that even when it found out Alito and his wife had an upside-down American flag flying at their home after the Jan. 6 coup attempt, the Post decided it wasn’t a story and didn’t tell its readers. ProPublica, on the other hand, has aggressively examined how the court has protected its status as an unaccountable institution.

ProPublica conducts high-impact investigations of other aspects of our political system too – including the far-right Project 2025 to build a force of bureaucratic shock troops that would impose radical religious restrictions on American citizens. 

Despite Donald Trump’s obvious connections with Project 2025, he has tried to distance himself from the effort since it attracted negative attention. Politico helped in this downplaying effort with its recent story that called Project 2025 a “shoestring operation” and a “mirage.” It is neither.

People who dismiss fears about a potential Trump dictatorship like to note that the worst didn’t happen during his previous term in office. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Trump faced pushback by civil servants and was hampered by his own mistakes. And – reality check – he tried to overturn a fair election. His intentions were clear. Project 2025 wants the right wing to keep fine-tuning its attacks on democracy. 

Over this past weekend – just a week after Politico’s story – we learned that the Project 2025 “mirage” came with alarming training videos. ProPublica and the Documented investigative journalism project got ahold of the videos and published their contents.    

The videos train would-be government officials to avoid putting their plans in writing in order to keep them secret from journalists and the public. They call for MAGA bureaucrats to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” As if denying climate change will keep the polar ice caps from melting.

Beyond its national role, ProPublica also makes major contributions to local reporting, partnering with newsrooms across the country that have been badly depleted by staff cuts. Northwestern University’s State of Local News Project says the country is approaching the point where it will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. (I helped sound the alarm about this distressing trend when I was website editor for Northwestern’s Medill Local News initiative a few years ago.)

While ProPublica provides a valuable service, its mission is investigative journalism, not breaking news. And breaking news is where the American public is especially ill-served. Corporate media have learned little in the last nine years of relentless lying by Trump, and Republicans remain highly successful at getting breaking news editors to swallow nonsense and process it into helpful headlines.

I wish the list of news sources that are thriving both journalistically and financially was longer. But here are some bright lights in news and commentary that deserve our attention:

• Greg Sargent’s reporting for The New Republic is an essential, fact-based look at our current political crisis. 

• Media Matters for America tracks right-wingers’ rhetoric in the most persuasive method possible – by documenting their own words.

• It should embarrass U.S. publications to be routinely outdone on coverage of American politics by Guardian US, part of a British-based news organization. 

• When MSNBC isn’t lame (Katy Tur, Andrea Mitchell, etc.), it can be excellent (Ali Velshi, Nicolle Wallace, Lawrence O’Donnell, etc.). O’Donnell’s monologue about how journalists botched coverage of Trump’s news conference last week is well worth watching.

• Margaret Sullivan’s deep experience in news equips her well to critique media coverage in her American Crisis newsletter.

• Heather Cox Richardson brings a historical perspective to her enormously popular Letters from an American newsletter. 

• Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice newsletter often identifies news angles that others will write about days later.

• The Washington Post and New York Times have deep problems, but they boast some excellent op-ed writers, including Karen Attiah and Jennifer Rubin of the Post and David French and Jamelle Bouie of the Times. 

• Oliver Darcy’s Reliable Sources newsletter has been a highlight for CNN. Last week Darcy announced he was striking out on his own with a startup called Status to track the news industry. 

• Among the finest columnists at mainstream outlets are Rex Huppke of USA Today and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Jennifer Schulze’s opinion pieces for Heartland Signal are terrific. 

• Molly Jong-Fast’s podcasts on Project 2025 are superb.  

• Steven Beschloss’ America, America newsletter offers an inspiring, pro-democracy take on the news.

• And I’d be remiss if I didn't mention my fellow newsletter writers with Courier Newsroom: Kyle Tharp, Keya Vakil, Melissa Ryan, and Nina Burleigh. Newsletters are an excellent way to get information that’s not moderated by bad actors like Elon Musk.

I’m sure I’ve overlooked other worthy journalists on this list. If you want to highlight them, cite them in the comments.