Guest Essay

Joel Simon: We are playing defense

Lessons from the 2025 Local News Summit

By Joel Simon

February 21, 2025

This essay is part of a series on the 2025 Lenfest Institute-Aspen Digital Local News Summit, an annual convening of the country’s leading journalists, publishers, funders, news creators, and other industry professionals. It was originally published in Columbia Journalism Review.

Journalists are not going to save democracy.

We are not going to save Trump voters from themselves.

We are not going to stop disinformation—and frankly we should stop using the term, which was never great and today has been weaponized against us.

We are not going to expose Trump and end his political career with some Watergate-like scandal.

On a national and local level, journalists and media organizations have less power and diminished influence. We know this. Much of the population gets its news elsewhere—from online influencers and podcasters whose audiences dwarf most traditional media outlets’. From the ether. From nowhere. From President Trump himself. We have to come to terms with this reality.

It’s equally obvious that as journalists and news organizations we still matter. In fact, we matter enormously—perhaps more than ever. We matter to our audiences. We matter to the culture. We matter to history. But we need to think differently about our role. We are not on offense—fighting to change the narrative. We are playing defense, fighting to protect our rights.

For many years I ran the Committee to Protect Journalists. What I saw as I traveled to support journalists under threat around the world was that journalists and media organizations nearly invariably lost out when they tried to confront the authoritarian directly, believing that ignorance was the enemy and could be defeated with the truth. It doesn’t work that way. What allows journalists to resist repression and fight censorship is not the law, or the norms. It’s power. Once that dynamic shifts, autocratic leaders invariably try to rein in criticism. The media becomes a target.

In this country, President Trump has said he is coming after us. We should believe him. Forces are being marshaled. Kash Patel could be running the FBI soon. Social media is now in the hands of Trump allies—or, in the case of Truth Social, Trump himself. Trump is filing private lawsuits against the media. NPR is on the chopping block.

Playing effective defense is not a retreat. In fact, it’s not going to be easy to hold our ground. If we succeed, we will be defending not only our own rights, but the rights of all Americans—to be informed and to access information they choose, to be full participants in their own future and that of the country. Journalists can’t save democracy. But we can serve it. We can do so by defending our rights effectively, keeping our people safe, and delivering the news and information that our audiences and communities need and deserve.

For more, read an essay, “Preparing for the Onslaught,” that Simon published in the Columbia Journalism Review.