Day: July 31, 2026

In his White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026, President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the “failing” New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn’t smile enough. He dismissed the award she received at the dinner as “fake” and celebrated the recent firing of top CBS News employees.

Such ongoing extreme hostility from the president has contributed to Americans’ loss of faith in the news media, which has plummeted to an all-time low.

While the situation is in many ways unique to this moment, a perceived crisis around the very notion of “objective reporting” – and presidential use of that idea to denigrate and delegitimize the press – has a long history.

Nixon administration played hardball

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, for example, attacked coverage of police brutality at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention as one-sided in favor of antiwar protestors. Once in office, Nixon deployed Vice President Spiro Agnew to verbally assault journalists for their putative bias and elitism.

In an infamous 1969 speech, Agnew denounced TV newsmen – they were, indeed, mostly men – as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” hostile to the president and therefore out of touch with average Americans. Agnew singled out NBC anchorman David Brinkley for his claim that “objectivity is impossible” and that “fairness” was a more reasonable objective. Like many journalists, Brinkley understood “objectivity” as implying an almost mechanical delivery of pure facts, while “fairness” was more realistic, an earnest effort to be judicious.

Agnew concluded with a challenge: People should “let the networks know that they want their news straight and objective.” He framed this populist turn as an alternative to government interference. But journalists felt the looming threat of censorship.

Brinkley’s statement was not impudent. It was realistic: an acknowledgment that journalists are humans with preconceptions and values, but that their professional mandate is to strive for impartiality.

Carefully balanced reporting was not only the baseline of journalists’ training but also a business imperative. There were only three national nightly news shows, all seeking the widest possible audience. Moderation was more profitable than swinging hard left or right.

Although frustrated with journalism in general, Agnew zeroed in on TV in his speech because it had displaced print as Americans’ leading news source. And the reality of Federal Communications Commission licensing, whereby a federal agency determined who could use publicly owned airwaves, made broadcasters vulnerable to the actions of a vengeful president.

The licensing issue still resonates. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel, a frequent Trump critic, had his show briefly suspended by ABC after angering the president’s supporters.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” FCC chair Brandon Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Kimmel survived this attack largely because public support surged, and he continues to satirize the White House. Others have been less fortunate.

Journalists fought back

Struggling to compete, newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s could have easily downplayed Agnew’s criticisms of a rival medium.

Instead, they stood up for TV. In the course of my research, I’ve found that not only in publicly accessible material but also in unpublished archival papers both broadcasters and newspapers consistently understood an attack on one media outlet as an attack on all, a lesson that holds true in 2026.

One of Agnew’s “snobs” was the liberal New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Wicker was on Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he voiced concerns about not just Nixon and Agnew but also more generally about the very notion of objectivity.

Agnew raised hackles across the American journalism community. But Wicker’s reactions stand out in particular, because he was employed by what was then known as “the paper of record,” whose grandiose credo had long been “To Give the News Impartially, Without Fear or Favor.”

In a column published on Nov. 16, 1969, Wicker granted that it was legitimate for Agnew to ask “how the power of that extraordinary medium (TV) can be most equitably controlled and exercised in the general public interest.”

But Wicker underscored that Agnew “couched his argument in direct political attack on those who differed with Mr. Nixon” and “came close to claiming immunity from criticism for Presidential utterance.”

Taking on ‘objectivity’

Two years after Agnew’s “effete snobs” speech, Wicker wrote an essay for Columbia Journalism Review objecting to journalism’s “tradition of objectivity” and “orientation toward nationalism in politics and toward establishmentarianism in other areas of society.”

The consequence, he wrote, was a heavy and generally uncritical reliance on official sources, all in the name of a spurious notion of objectivity.

Deeply offended, New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal sent a confidential memo to publisher Punch Sulzberger.

“In essence,” Rosenthal wrote, “what Tom’s piece adds up to is a public statement by … a well-known columnist of the Times … that objectivity and comprehensiveness, the journalistic foundations of this paper, are no longer valid and that the kind of paper the Times is now is no longer meaningful.”

Rosenthal said Wicker’s public expression of these thoughts was “bad for the paper” externally and “bad for morale” internally.

Regardless, such disputes at The New York Times were always waged behind the scenes. The gold standard for journalism was – and remains, whenever possible – to tell the story, not be the story.

Denouncing bias as deflection

Today, by contrast, it is widely known that the CBS News division “is on fire,” as longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley said, shortly after he was sacked.

Newly installed CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, who has no broadcast experience, positions herself as an advocate for “free speech and free thinking” and her Free Press newsletter as a reclamation of objective reporting. Yet at CBS she has made editorial choices, including killing a story highly critical of the Trump administration, that consistently favor the White House.

Like Agnew, in other words, Weiss appears to cloak uncritical acceptance of presidential positions as a battle against “bias.”

Denouncing “bias” is usually an attempt by those in power to deflect from what reporters have uncovered – from Vietnam to Watergate to Iraq. It is thus startling for someone within journalism to use the establishment’s word – bias – to self-censor.

The apparently deliberate imploding of CBS News and its flagship investigative journalism program “60 Minutes” is all the more shocking when you consider the network’s past triumphs in serving the public interest while angering politicians and presidents.

Holding government accountable

In 1971, for example, the Army and the Nixon administration attacked “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a CBS documentary about military public relations activities. Officials charged that the editing had been misleading and malicious, and the U.S. House of Representatives subpoenaed CBS journalists’ raw footage.

This congressional investigation ended as a victory for the press and the public’s right to know. CBS refused to share its outtakes, and the network’s president risked going to jail for contempt of Congress.

In his column, Wicker declared the documentary excellent, and he correctly painted the subpoena of CBS materials as resulting from White House pressure.

That same year, The New York Times and The Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers, revealing that the government had been misleading Americans for years regarding Vietnam. The two newspapers were briefly silenced by the White House, which persuaded the courts to order them to cease releasing the documents, and then were vindicated when the Supreme Court barred the government from restraining publication.

Wicker argued that “no statute exists that says government officials must be protected from the exposure of their follies or misdeeds,” and that the Pentagon Papers’ culprit was the government, not the newspapers.

Here, Wicker made a fair, if not strictly objective, evaluation.

Such opinionated defenses of the press still ring true today. Agnew repeatedly attacked naysayers as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” but journalism serves a positive function in particular when its stories are negative.

That’s how the public is able to hold government accountable, and accountability is crucial to the fight for democracy and against censorship and authoritarianism.

Heather Hendershot does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, its citizens commemorate a democracy more diverse, free and inclusive than it’s ever been. The path to this milestone was imperfect and paved in blood and suffering. Still, few of the revelers will likely pay heed to the anniversary of another historic event: the 150th anniversary of the July 1876 Hamburg massacre.

The massacre, which took place in Hamburg, South Carolina, began as a dispute between a local Black militia and two white citizens over whether the latter could cross the group’s centennial Fourth of July parade. The militia leader, Doc Adams, was later charged with blocking a public highway.

At his court hearing, Adams was met with a white militia – part of the white supremacist Red Shirts – which then pursued the Black militia on their retreat to their weapons arsenal. After a firefight, the Red Shirts captured several Black militiamen, marched them to a nearby site and executed at least four people.

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Union veteran Daniel Henry Chamberlain, described the event as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.” Yet no one was convicted after the attack. In fact, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders would instead rise to the highest offices in the state.

Corey Rogers, an organizer of the 150th anniversary Hamburg commemoration, recently called this massacre “the seminal event that began to change the trajectory of African Americans.” The repression and inequality that would define the next 100 years of U.S. history, in other words, was born at Hamburg.

As a scholar of domestic terrorism, I study the long history of white supremacist and far-right violence in the U.S. My research shows that the Hamburg massacre was not just characteristic of a broader violent moment, but also that the echoes of such violence ring loudly today.

From Hamburg, across the South

According to one estimate, the 12 years of the Reconstruction era, during which the Union attempted to construct a racially diverse democracy in the wake of the Civil War, saw over 2,000 Black citizens murdered in “racial terror lynchings.” Another estimate, from 1895, more starkly claimed that as many as 53,000 Black Americans had been murdered in the 30 years following the Civil War.

By intimidating Black voters and galvanizing white Democrats who sought to undo the results of the Civil War, this violence served to effectively kill Reconstruction and the tangible promises of Black emancipation.

What happened in Hamburg provides a particularly egregious example of such racial terrorism catapulting political triumph. After that tragedy, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders went on to successful political careers, with two of them becoming U.S. senators – one of whom, Benjamin Tillman, also served as South Carolina governor.

As Jenny Heckel, then a Clemson University graduate student, noted in her 2016 master’s thesis, it was “not in spite of the white Carolinians’ participation in the murder of six black men, but because of it, they won election to political offices.”

In South Carolina’s 1876 gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Confederate veteran Wade Hampton III, emerged triumphant and reinstated white supremacy as the fulcrum of state governance. His name had been put forward by former Confederate major general Matthew Butler, who had represented the two white farmers before the Hamburg attack and who himself went on to serve in the U.S. Senate.

In 1895, South Carolina held a constitutional convention, spearheaded by the aforementioned Hamburg massacre ringleader Tillman, and adopted a new constitution that effectively ended the Black vote in the state.

An enduring threat

In the 1890s, renowned abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white vigilantes offered three justifications for the lynchings of Black Americans: stamping out alleged race riots, protecting the white vote share and protecting white women from alleged sexual crimes by Black men.

The first two were front and center in the Hamburg massacre. In fact, as Heckel reflected a decade ago, “white Carolinians blamed the black militia for starting the riot, and Southern white newspapers created images of riotous blacks to contest black descriptions.”

Since the massacre, racial violence has had a long echo in the United States. And in many cases, the same justifications elucidated by Douglass remain.

Both the Tulsa race massacre and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, for instance, were sparked by false accusations of sexual harassment or assault made against young Black men.

The violence persists today. In June 2015, just 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Hamburg, a white supremacist gunman entered the historically Black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

In May 2022, a white supremacist killed 10 Black Americans at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.

Both gunmen made multiple references to the same conspiracy theories Douglass identified, with the Charleston domestic terrorist going as far as to praise segregation as “a defensive measure” while criticizing the “historical lies, exaggerations and myths” of the historical record of slavery and its aftermath.

Still, there are key differences between the attacks at Charleston and Buffalo and their Reconstruction predecessors. The political violence that tainted the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era clashes with traditional definitions of terrorism, which typically targets a power structure that such violence seeks to upend.

Instead, attacks like the one in Hamburg, which sought to proactively protect the rights and power of white Americans – and which were often endorsed by state and local governments – have more in common with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not only did the scale of the broader violence across the South indicate a campaign to mass-murder an ethnic subgroup for political purposes, but Tillman, perhaps the most infamous of the Hamburg murderers, never denied the attack’s goals.

“We are not sorry for it,” he would proudly recall before the U.S. Senate in 1900. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”

‘A painful duty’

Attempting to commemorate all such anniversaries is an impossible task, simply because of the sheer volume. For example, September marks the 150th anniversary of the Ellenton Riot. In that massacre, Black South Carolinians were systematically hunted throughout their community over an alleged attack on a white elderly woman, which was later proved false. The death toll may have eclipsed 100.

Countless similar incidents have plagued U.S. history.

In my view, to tell the story of America’s founding without referencing these profound scars is akin to deceit, if not complicity. Civil rights leader and journalist Ida B. Wells put it this way in 1895: “It becomes a painful duty … to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.”

Or, as a local retired pastor said of Hamburg commemorations, “We want to keep it burning so people won’t forget what transpired.”

Jacob Ware does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation