Truth is a thing. And the truth is, we are all boiling frogs.

A few days ago, I ended a conversation with a friend by saying, “Thank you for being in the same reality.” As soon as I wrote the sentence, the realization of its truth hit me hard.

That’s what we are all struggling with in today’s world, the untethered feeling that reality is not the same for everyone in the U.S. What’s more, we are daily battered to give up reality for consensus. Not by MAGA types, but by people we once trusted, by institutions in which we have put our trust.

In the last four decades we have gone from “abortion is medical care” to “abortion should be safe, legal and rare” to “don’t tell anyone you had an abortion or you will be judged” to “some guy in the 16th century who wrote lovingly about torturing women said abortion is wrong, and so we must use that as a Constitutional basis for overturning the right for women to have one.”

In the last three decades we’ve gone from an assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban that reduced deaths during the 10 years it was in force to an immediate skyrocketing of firearms deaths when that ban ended to a Supreme Court decision puncturing 70 years of jurisprudence that the Second Amendment was about regulation, to another Supreme Court decision holding that states can’t regulate firearms. (Though, New York is fighting back.)

In 1972, Thomas Eagleton had to pull out of the vice-presidential race because he had gotten treatment for depression. A decade and a half later, journalists went through presidential candidate Gary Hart’s trash because he may have been dating a woman while he was separated from his wife. Now, we have an immediate ex-president who admitted he sexually assaulted women and a press corps who is too afraid to call out his obvious mental health issues.

And I can’t help but wonder if we are a bunch of frogs living in a nation of boiling water.

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, in his book On Tyranny, calls out journalists who, in 2016, salivated over hacked DNC emails that mysteriously showed up in their inboxes, when the real story was how those emails came to be in the possession of those who sent them.

He does not mention the New York Times, or Michael Schmidt, who broke those stories. But let’s contrast what the Times did 45 years earlier, with the release of the Pentagon Papers. Reporter Neil Sheehan met with whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, verified that Ellsberg was credible, went through the papers with his editors, locked himself in a hotel suite with dedicated staff who vetted every word, ran the story past legal counsel. In 2016, Schmidt was covering a historic presidential race. Just days before the hacked emails landed in his inbox, one of the candidates was caught on tape admitting to sexual assault. The day after that, that same candidate asked Russia - in a press conference - to “find the emails.” And then suddenly, Schmidt gets a dump of leaked documents and doesn’t think where they come from might be the bigger story?

In the summer of 2018, the world looked on in horror as children were torn from their parents as they were seeking asylum from failed-state violence in their countries. When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez likened the action to concentration camps, the press’ reaction was to zoom in on stories about whether or not she was correct to use that term. With some exceptions - PBS being one of them - the national press was far more concerned with someone saying “concentration camps” than the U.S. actually running facilities where babies and toddlers were housed without parents and where older children were alleging sexual assault.

I was hosting a radio show in Madison, Wisconsin at that time. The day before Trump announced he was ending the separation policy (which turned out to not have ended, but that’s another story), he tried to give a justification for why it was legal. He also tweeted an assertion he had made the month before, that Central American asylum seekers were “animals,” which stoked outrage for sounding like the exact same dehumanizing rhetoric that led to concentration camps in Germany in the 1940s.

Many on our team wanted to use the tweet of him calling people animals. Our young and inexperienced executive producer didn’t want that. I had come, at that point, to realize that Trump told his truth on Twitter - not THE truth, a verifiable truth, but what he believed. But I told the executive producer that if she didn’t want to feed the outrage machine, I would back her on that.

The ED wanted to use the tape of Trump “sounding presidential,” justifying the separations. I looked at the video and saw the same sorts of tells I had seen other times Trump lied - or at the very least covered up that he didn’t know what he was talking about. In this case, that justification had already been debunked, and I vetoed the idea of putting tape of him on the air saying something that wasn’t true.

“But,” she pressed. “A lot of our listeners believe him.”

“Our job isn’t to cater to what listeners believe, our job is to the truth. Truth is a thing,” I answered.

This back and forth went on for a while, as she kept pushing that we should represent the views of the men who would regularly call in and be so vile and racist, they would make the call screeners cry.

I found myself saying, “What if these people wanted to take my children away from me because I’m queer? Should I, as a host, entertain that idea on the air because some people believe that?”

She was silent. Alarmingly so.

Here’s a good yardstick: If you are asking your journalists to betray their own humanity in reporting or analyzing the news, you are working in or running a biased news organization.

We didn’t run the tweet or the tape.

A week later, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban. The guest we booked the next day, said the producer working on the interview, was “straight down the middle, leaning toward libertarian.” When I asked the guest on the air how the decision would affect how the world sees the U.S., he answered that the U.S. was now diminished in the world’s eyes, and would be for some time.

In our post-show meeting, the executive producer said, “Well, he said the U.S. will be diminished in the world’s eyes, so now we have to find someone who says it won’t.”

I had a physical reaction to that. “You picked a guy who is straight down the middle. He told the truth. And truth isn’t relative.”

Now that person is running the network that I left because of its unstable relationship to truth.

Just after the 2016 election, ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky put out a tweet that became my north star: 

We journalists need to get comfortable real quick w/ idea of being seen as fighting for something. And that something is democratic values.

Not that long after, The Washington Post added “Democracy Dies in Darkness” under its masthead.

I think we’ve been boiling in the stew of the death of democracy for some time. And I think it has been aided and abetted by journalists who don’t think their allegiance is to truth.

We have, in the past couple of decades, lamented the loss of local journalism. But honestly, much local journalism long ago snuggled into the access lane rather than the defiant “truth to power” lane. And to many of today’s journalists, “truth to power” sounds biased.

Chapter 10 in Snyder’s On Tyranny is simply titled, “Believe in truth.” For far too long, the ethos among U.S. journalists was to abandon that they had any connection to truth, that it was for readers or viewers or listeners to decide truth by listening to both sides - but only the two sides chosen by the journalists to put forward.

Trump may or may not be indicted. People responsible for trying to overthrow an election may or may not pay a price. Our democracy may survive for a little while longer. But the damage cannot be undone unless our journalism class wakes up to the idea that truth is a thing, a thing without which democracy cannot survive.