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Without good reporting, negligence and abuse would go unchecked, and corruption’s roots in democracy would be deeper and wider.
On May 2, New York Magazine’s Ben Terris penned a bombshell exposé that profiled Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s struggles with mental health, his maltreatment of staff, and his pervasive support for the genocide in Gaza, among other concerning discoveries. The coverage was extensively sourced and researched, and many of the revelations Terris uncovered were previously buried by stakeholders who counted on the Pennsylvania seat to hold blue. This sort of fearless and intrepid journalism, unattached to political or partisan interests, is a crucial requirement for our democracy to maintain a shred of integrity.
The shocking disclosures made in Terris’ piece did not all occur overnight—these indications of Fetterman’s inability to appropriately serve in the Senate date back years. The senator’s mental health, as described by his closest advisers in the coverage, has been detrimental to not only his ability to represent the people of Pennsylvania but also to his own well-being and the health of his family. All parties privy to any of this information would have had every reason to bury any trace of the senator’s behavior, except a reporter brave enough to tell the story.
Now more than ever, we need truth tellers who are willing to be uncomfortable.
Sen. Fetterman’s win in 2022 delivered Democrats the majority they needed to control the Senate. Per Terris’ reporting, that majority came at a cost. The standard that our partisan system places on individuals who will hold great power is dismal, including the lowest bar possible for a commitment to human dignity as represented in Fetterman’s consistently violent comments on the genocide in Gaza.
In a two-party system that continues to compromise below bare minimum standards for human rights to make partisan gains, there has to be a robust media ecosystem that uncovers those compromises. Just days before the Fetterman exposé, The Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul released a year-long investigation covering former Rep. Yadira Caraveo’s (D-Colo.) significant struggles with depression, mental health, and alarming concerns from staff. Rep. Caraveo lost a razor-thin general election in November and is now seeking to regain her seat in 2026. With a swing district like Colorado’s 8th, the Democratic Party would gain nothing from being forward about Caraveo’s mental health status. Colorado needed this investigation by Paul to make an appropriate decision about who represents them in Congress. Rep. Caraveo’s party needed this investigation to hold them accountable for their dismissal of concerning behavior when a candidate seemed electable. Democracy needs more of this.
The far-right, including the Trump White House, continues to challenge the trustworthiness and ethics of our media landscape. Media conglomerates are constant in their pursuit of cutbacks and layoffs as an editorial recession continues to toxify the spaces where news is created. An estimated 1 in 10 editors and reporters have lost their jobs over the past three years. The future of traditional media is dark, as print, broadcast, and digital media continue to lose subscribers, make detrimental cuts to staff, and face continued attacks from political stakeholders. The decay of American media is concerning for a plethora of reasons, but most importantly because pieces like Terris’ and Paul’s would never have seen the light. Negligence and abuse would go unchecked, and corruption’s roots in democracy would be deeper and wider.
Now more than ever, we need truth tellers who are willing to be uncomfortable. Willing to negate personal political interests in pursuit of a story that loses a congressional race but holds power accountable and raises the bar for who power is afforded to. The Fetterman exposé is not an easy read, but democracy doesn’t need more fluff pieces.
One critic said the Salvadoran president "wants to silence" the acclaimed digital news site El Faro "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration."
An internationally acclaimed digital news outlet in El Salvador said Monday that the administration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is preparing to arrest a number of its journalists following the publication of an interview with two former gang leaders who shed new light on a power-sharing agreement with the U.S.-backed leader and self-described "world's coolest dictator."
"A reliable source in El Salvador told El Faro that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General's Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro," the outlet reported. "The source reached out following the publication of an interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on Bukele's yearslong relationship to gangs."
"If carried out, the warrants are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors," El Faro added.
Bukele responded to the interview in a Friday evening post on the social media site X that read in part, "It's clear that a country at peace, without deaths, without extortion, without bloodshed, without corpses every day, without mothers mourning their children, is not profitable for human rights NGOs, nor for the globalist media, nor for the elites, nor for [George] Soros."
While the pact between Bukele and gang leaders is well-known in El Salvador, El Faro—which has long been a thorn in the president's side—was the first media outlet to air video of gangsters acknowledging the agreement.
As El Faro reported:
At the heart of the threat of arrests is irony: El Faro was only able to interview the two Revolucionarios because they escaped El Salvador with the complicity of Bukele.
One, who goes by "Liro Man," recounts that he was taken to Guatemala, through a blind spot in the Salvadoran border, by Bukele gang negotiator Carlos Marroquín; the other, Carlos Cartagena, or "Charli," was arrested on a warrant in April 2022, early in the state of exception, but quickly released after the police received a call at the station and backed off.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Salvadorans were being rounded up without due process, on charges of belonging to gangs.
The video interview explains the dichotomy: For years, Salvadoran gang leaders cut covert deals with the entourage of Nayib Bukele. In their interview with El Faro, the two Revolucionarios say the FMLN party, to which the now-president belonged a decade ago, paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014 campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled communities, on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador mayor and Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president.
"This support, the sources say, was key to Bukele's ascent to power," El Faro noted. "'You're going to tell your mom and your wife's family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don't do it, we'll kill them,' Liro Man says the gang members told their communities in that election. Of Bukele, he added, 'he knew he had to get to the gangs in order to get to where he is.'"
Part of the deal was a tacit "no body, no crime" policy under which gang leaders agreed to hide their victims' corpses as Bukele boasted of a historic reduction in homicides in a country once known as the world's murder capital.
"We've wanted to talk about this for a long time, for the simple reason that the government beats their chests and says, 'We're anti-gang, we don't want this scourge,'" Liro Man told El Faro. "But they forgot that they made a deal with us, and you were the first to get this out."
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration deported gang members from the U.S. to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison who faced federal indictments that could have resulted in their testifying in court about the pact with Bukele.
Responding to the possible arrest warrants for El Faro staffers, Argentinian journalist Eliezer Budasoff said on social media Sunday that "it's clear" that El Salvador's leader "wants to silence" the outlet "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration, simply with more journalism."
The Bukele administration's attacks on El Faro include falsely accusing the outlet of money laundering and tax evasion, banning its reporters from press briefings, and surveilling its staffers with Pegasus spyware. El Faro has remained steadfast in the face of these and other actions.
"Every citizen must decide for themselves whether they want to be informed, or whether they prefer the blind loyalty this administration has demanded of its supporters since its first day in power," the outlet's editors wrote in 2022. "We don't have that choice. Our job is to report. We can't change the news, and we never will."
Rational arguments, fact-checking, and the forced “neutrality” of “both sides” journalism are now being drowned in the waves, currents, and whirlpools of half-truth, disinformation, and bullshit.
If you hit a wall with a sledgehammer with enough force there is a good chance you can eventually bring it down. If there is water behind that wall, that sledgehammer does nothing to stem the tide. You can flail away, but, at best, all you will become is tired and wet.
At worst? You drown.
Journalism and political opponents are still using the sledgehammer of facts, reason and logic, thinking that this will weaken, crack, and eventually destroy the dangerous political movement we are seeing in the U.S.
The problem? Trumpism-MAGA isn’t the wall. It’s the water.
You can’t defeat antidemocratic water by hitting it, but you can keep it back by building robust barriers in the form of laws, regulations, and rights.
The belief that a sustained appeal to facts, reason, and ethics was sufficient to undermine antidemocratic forces of the type led by U.S. President Donald Trump was charmingly romantic. It illustrated a commitment to the journalistic ideals of holding power to account, and the notion that politicians and their supporters would have enough shame and dignity to take responsibility for lies and corruption.
But it was, more importantly, dangerously naïve and irresponsible. It was precisely the belief that Trump could be treated like any other politician, and MAGA like any other political movement, that led media in the U.S. (and abroad) to mainstream and sanitize what was very clearly not a normal politician nor a normal political movement.
No matter how many times Trump’s lies, corruption, or incompetence were exposed during his first term, he maintained his popularly among Republican politicians and core voters. There was the clear sense that the hammering not only didn’t hurt Trump, it made him stronger. The liquidity of MAGA seemed obvious, yet journalism and political opponents continued to hammer away as if he were a solid. former President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 seemed to offer proof that the hammering had actually worked. The façade had cracked, and MAGA was crumbling. The old order of walls had been restored.
But the radicalization of the Republican Party became even more apparent under Biden, and the 2024 election created not a tide of anti-democracy, but a tsunami. Rational arguments, fact-checking, and the forced “neutrality” of “both sides” journalism are now being drowned in the waves, currents, and whirlpools of half-truth, disinformation, and bullshit. MAGA flows and morphs daily.
Make no mistake, it’s important that journalism fact-checks things like Trump’s tariff percentages or Vice President JD Vance’s claims about freedom in Europe versus the United States. Citizens need to know the truth, and journalism must provide it. But we can no longer assume that exposing lies or debunking numbers is sufficient in the defense of U.S. democracy, because there will be no consequences.
So, if the institutions of journalism and politics operate on behalf of citizens in the service of democracy—and that is what both institutions claim to do on a regular basis—what is the response to a liquid threat?
Liquids cannot be fractured or broken by force, but they can be contained. They can dry up. For journalism, that could involve things like making a “Democracy” section of a newspaper in the same way that we have Sports, Culture, Travel, or Technology. To explain more regularly and in greater detail how laws work, and provide examples of how they can both protect and harm citizens. To cover more local politics. To give grassroots political or social movements the same volume of coverage given to the release of a new iPhone or an Elon Musk tweet. To not engage in “both sides” reporting when one side is attempting to undermine democracy (journalism has no obligation to amplify antidemocratic forces). To cover the power of media itself as a news story.
These things—understanding the law, understanding how democracy works, understanding how policy works, understanding citizen engagement, understanding rights, understanding media power, understanding the role of money in politics—help to stem the flow by creating dams. They encourage the idea that there are elements of democratic society that need to be protected. You can’t defeat antidemocratic water by hitting it, but you can keep it back by building robust barriers in the form of laws, regulations, and rights. Behind that barrier, exposed to the warmth and light of day, the liquid may evaporate over time. The first step in that building process, however, is awareness and understanding.
Journalism matters now more than ever. It just needs to distinguish between solid and liquid.