Working through the hour of maximum danger

Toward the end of his inaugural address, President Kennedy observed that, “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” He proved right that his own time, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was such an hour. Ours, I believe, is another, with the threat now from within.

In our hour, 2026 now looms as the critical moment, the time in which we will continue to have free and fair elections or not, will continue to have courts that uphold the rule of law or not, will continue to enjoy constitutional rights of citizenship and free speech and free press or not. For all Americans, very much including for journalists, the question for the year ahead is whether we will rise to the occasion.

So far, while the signs are mixed, I find them encouraging. You can nitpick coverage in even our best outlets, but I do think we have, as an industry, done a decent job of informing the American people about what is happening around them. Most of them, signs increasingly show, do not like it.

The task before us seems to me largely the same as it has been for more than a year now: to do our work with courage and clarity; to prepare to defend our rights when they are challenged, including to band together in the effort (as was done effectively at the Pentagon recently, and less so at the White House when the AP was attacked for a Stylebook choice earlier this year); and to draw distinctions between news and noise.

This last is the most challenging. If we tell readers, listeners and viewers that the sky is falling every day, we should not be surprised if they fail to react qualitatively differently if it really does fall one day. The year just ending is littered with examples: Greenland, Panama, Portland, many more.

Nor does it help when we fail to acknowledge that some things are more complicated than the nattering nabobs of cable television would have you believe. Thus, while Trump’s obliteration of the White House East Wing was brazen and gross, and while the corruption of financing its replacement is a significant story (even if a small piece of rampant crookedness, from crypto to abuse of the FCC to pardons seemingly for sale to prosecutions based solely on vengeance to no accountability for taking a bag of cash), the loss of the East Wing is not terribly significant historically, and the White House complex was long sorely in need of a larger auditorium.

There may come a day, even in 2026, when the President and his cronies seek to impose something like martial law, or to defy a clear final ruling of the Supreme Court, or to prevent the people from exercising their sacred franchise. All of our work in journalism should, in an important sense, be preparing ourselves and those we seek to inform for this moment, both by charting events compellingly, and doing so in a manner that enhances credibility.

If it does not come to any of this, if freedom’s current hour of maximum danger passes less dangerously than it did in 1862 or 1942 or 1962, so much the better. I will be delighted to be told I was unnecessarily worried. At least we will have been ready.