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research-article2018
EJC0010.1177/0267323118760318European Journal of CommunicationZelizer

Article

European Journal of Communication

1­–17
Resetting journalism in © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0267323118760318
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Barbie Zelizer
Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract
This article considers the lifeline of the Anglo-American imaginary in news. It tracks its evolution,
consolidation during the Cold War era and centrality in the UK/US coverage of Brexit and
Trump in 2016-2017. It argues that not only has the imaginary prevailed but it continues to shape
contemporary coverage to the detriment of public understanding of current events.

Keywords
Journalism, Brexit, Trump, Cold War, Anglo-American imaginary

Across much of Western journalism, a certain Anglo-American core – what I call jour-
nalism’s Anglo-American imaginary – has been central to its practice, offering a model
of inspired conduct conducive to establishing journalistic authority. But the events of
2016 and 2017 raise critical questions about the exceptionalism in the Anglo-American
experiment. Leaving two of the world’s oldest liberal democracies in uncharted waters,
the phenomena of Brexit and Trump highlight how similar the United Kingdom and the
United States are to every other location wrestling with nativism, populism, xenophobia,
racism, demagoguery and new strains of nationalism. They throw journalism’s Anglo-
American imaginary into disarray, with elitism, insularity and false confidence rendering
it unable to engage meaningfully with current events.
This article tracks the lifeline of this Anglo-American imaginary in news. It explores
its origin beyond and within journalism, addresses its consolidation during the Cold War
and considers how what solidified then parallels the journalism exhibited in response to

Corresponding author:
Barbie Zelizer, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA.
Email: barbie.zelizer@asc.upenn.edu
2 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

the phenomena of Brexit and Trump. In so doing, it shows how mindsets of the past undo
contemporary journalism’s ability to cover events of the present.

Origins of the Anglo-American imaginary

The Anglo-American imaginary rolled into existence on the back of a repair to enmity.
Embodied in America’s original sin of revolt from England, ideals of democracy, equal-
ity and freedom faced off against European ideologies of aristocracy, colonialism, feu-
dalism and socialism. American enmity towards Britain exhibited a classic us/them
binary of enemy formation – where the attributes of one side were positioned as the
faults of the other (Finlay et al., 1968). Because the United States lacked what David
Kennedy (1997) called a ‘well-stocked cupboard of cultural images of foreign people’ (p.
347) who might perform as enemies, enduring hostility towards Great Britain set in:
Britain was, in Kennedy’s view, ‘a real enemy – an opponent in a shooting war, and a
distinct other against which the very idea of America was newly defined’ (p. 346).
The British had little trouble maintaining their end of the binary. As the upstart
nation settled in across the Atlantic, scare rhetoric began to circulate about growing
American influence, with William Stead’s (1902) book The Americanization of the
World playing on a term that had proliferated in Great Britain since the early 1800s.
The British were beset by a combination of envy and contempt, as characterizations of
the Americans as ‘shallow, naively optimistic, barren and without ideas’ generated a
sense that ‘American society had a great deal to learn from Europe’ (Brogan, 1959:
4–5). Enmity between America and Great Britain was not just geographic but also
normative, pointing ‘to a disparate set of values and attributes [and emphasizing]
antagonistic ideals and patterns of behavior’ (Pells, 1997: 3). Such sentiments helped
rationalize British ambitions in the new world, with early British policy tasked with
‘limiting the political and economic autonomy of the North American colonists’ and
with trying thereafter ‘to undermine the American experiment in self-government’
(Heideking, 1997: 92, 93).
Because enemy formation is never very distant from alliances between friends, such
enmity lingers even today, centuries later, at the core of the US/UK notions of themselves
and of each other. As early suspicions pitted recklessness against stodginess, immaturity
against decadence and megalomania against over-encumberedness, what Freud (1991
(1930)) would come to characterize as the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ helped to
entrench residuals of hostility and rivalry between the two nations, even when their rela-
tionship seemed to be oriented in a different direction.
In fact, obvious signs of enmity between the two countries disappeared with unprec-
edented speed and ease. By the time that Time magazine publisher Henry Luce (1941)
referenced ‘the American century’ in 1941, a US/UK alliance was on its way to forma-
tion, with America in its lead. Emerging as British power diminished and US power
intensified,

the improvement of Anglo-American relations and the fading away of the image of an English
enemy went hand in hand with the decline of British power, the dissolution of the British
empire and the rise of the United States to superpower status. (Heideking, 1997: 107)
Zelizer 3

This alliance was set by the second half of the 20th century, when ‘America became
the yardstick with which Europeans measured both their economic progress and the pres-
ervation of their idiosyncratic social and cultural institutions’ (Pells, 1997: 154). Using a
common language and intersecting via the exceptionalist conceit of what the BBC later
called the ‘“city upon a hill” meets “this sceptred isle”’ (Bryant, 2017), both countries
found it easy to disseminate their culture and influence, sharing the goal of building a
liberal, democratic enterprise whose aura was expected to permeate various institutions
on both sides of the Atlantic. From the late 1940s onwards, enmity was replaced with the
notion of an Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ (Dimbleby and Reynolds, 1988).
Reflected in entities like the Atlantic Charter and Pax Americana or myths of Anglophilia
and the American Dream, the US/UK alliance was supposed to meld the best of new and
old worlds: innovation and tradition, vision and experience, youth and maturity, inno-
cence and wisdom.
Extensive scholarship tracks how this imaginary played out in news. Work by Lee
(1976), Tunstall (1977), Schudson (1978), Chalaby (1998) and Deuze (2002) chronicles
the emergence of news across the 19th and 20th centuries as primarily an Anglo-
American invention, one that saw itself as a model for journalism everywhere. Patching
two separate claims to exceptionalism into one curious alliance, this imaginary circum-
vented all kinds of incongruities.
The legitimacy and moral import attached to the news mostly came from the British
– where an elitist claim to responsibility helped cast journalists as moral guardians,
determining what others needed to know. According to Hampton (2004), this educational
or liberal idea of the press – most pronounced in Victorian England, where it was embod-
ied in the London Times and Manchester Guardian and foregrounded the eventual arrival
of the BBC and public service broadcasting – drove expectations of journalism as a high-
toned and responsible moral arbiter. Even when it gave way to what Hampton called ‘a
representative ideal’ – where journalists were thought to speak for the public rather than
educate it – the notion of the public remained high-minded. As articulated in the writings
of Habermas, Arendt and Anderson, journalism was expected to engage with a reasoned,
articulate and mostly stable public invested in public events, able to discern and eager to
understand – not, as in so many other places, a public disinterested, censored, silenced or
repudiated.
At the same time, the models for journalistic form primarily came from America.
Echoing the spirit of American exceptionalism – whose melting pot formation privileged
a can-do model of engagement that claimed to neutralize diversity – here projected an
optimistic, if naïve, faith and confidence in crafting progressive enterprises from anew
(Murray, 2013). This helped make the United States first with the format of the modern
newspaper and its mix of reportage, photographs, comic strips, columns and advertise-
ments. It was first with the ascent of TV news, at a time when the public was still listening
to radio elsewhere. It was first in broadcasting directly and quickly via international satel-
lites and cable TV, reaching a global audience without intermediaries. And it was first
with the Internet, opening pathways to a broader and potentially more representative set
of news stories and publics, at odds with the idea of a reasoned, stable collective.
Underlying much of this progression were journalism’s commercial business models,
which stretched from ad-laden bundling in print, through cable deregulation and onto the
4 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

ensuing competition for eyeballs across media platforms. First too was American journal-
ism’s specific notion of how to see the news, what was worthy of coverage and in which
ways. Pushing aside its own histories of literary critique and political opinion, American
journalism’s simple and direct language, play to solemnity, separation of fact and opinion,
deference to officialdom, moderation and euphemism became widely adopted.
Cobbled in between Britain’s high-mindedness and America’s pragmatic altar to
objectivity, however, was a grey area populated by aspects of the news that would not
make it into the default imaginary. Central here was the British partisan press, whose
irrepressible and often raucous insistence on perspective and partisanship muddied the
idea of Anglo-American news. Although in between 1945 and 1979 the partisanship of
print journalism became more muted, it nonetheless prevailed as its precondition for
engagement (Curran and Seaton, in press). Also in this grey area were multiple kinds of
power attachments – to government and the market – that complicated claims to neutral-
ity. As American power consolidated and strengthened, particularly from the 1940s
onwards, American journalists stayed in step by accommodating a growing insider sta-
tus, often acting as spokespeople for US policy and talking to the public rather than lis-
tening to what the public had to say to them. In both cases a non-idealized public
– disinterested, silenced, repudiated – rarely conformed to what either side of the imagi-
nary envisioned. This grey area remained apart, appearing infrequently in discussions of
what kind of journalism the Anglo-American core inspired.
Instead, its imaginary both gave the idea of journalism in the West moral legitimacy,
answering the question of what journalism is for, and provided material forms that
answered the question of how journalistic coverage would look. Its invocation elsewhere
by journalists in Africa, Asia and across many places in Europe kept the idea aloft, even
if the conditions to which it was applied were so different as to mute its relevance.
For from the beginning, as Curran and Seaton (in press) argue, the Anglo-American
core of news was more imagined than not. Real differences separated them from each
other on the question of how journalism was to reach its lofty position of prominence.
Different ideas about accommodating perspective, power and access complicated journal-
ism’s ability to claim neutrality or work effectively on the public’s behalf. Because many
types of news always exist in any one location, as Curran and Park (2000) and Hallin and
Mancini (2004, 2012) have separately shown, the ability to identify an imaginary that
worked for all was hampered. More fragile, less relevant and more strategic than given
credit for, this rhetoric of affinity thus rarely matched its realization in practice. Although
it did little more than teeter back and forth across the Atlantic in shoring up authority, its
applicability to other nations kept getting rehearsed rhetorically, if not substantively.
It thereby stands to reason that the Anglo-American imaginary has not necessarily
produced journalism in line with its assumptions. Yet it remains. Although its workability
has been repeatedly challenged – coverage of the so-called War on Terror is one example
– an earlier challenge that unfolded during the late 1940s and early 1950s offers a clear
historical parallel to the circumstances of today. That parallel is rooted in the Cold War.

Cold War as historic parallel

The Cold War is useful to consider because by its early years the post-war US/UK alli-
ance was powerfully entrenched, its leadership shifting decisively towards the Americans
Zelizer 5

and the institutions relevant to its spread, including journalism, pragmatically and ideo-
logically hopping on board. The post-war period offered an antidote to the instability of
the two world wars, one that suggested an appealing, though forced, nostalgic return to
the mythical tranquilly and stability of the so-called long peace between 1815 and 1914.
Not everyone was happy, of course, with the power-brokering that took place. Italian
journalist Luigi Barzini (1953) presciently noted that those ‘who get out of bed only for
the greatest crusades – to change the face of the world and to right all wrongs forever –
are reluctant to accept everyday, non revolutionary tasks’ (p. 123). His book, aptly, was
titled Americans are Alone in the World, a title driving straight to the darker side of the
Anglo-American link: It underscored the hostility, rivalry and enmity on which the alli-
ance first took shape and the frailties of the imaginary connection between the United
States and the United Kingdom that could not be totally accommodated.
The late 1940s and early 1950s and the eruption of the Cold War gave these frailties
new meaning. Crystallizing hierarchies of what would matter over the following four-
plus decades, the Cold War unfolded with frightening speed and intensity, as many of the
ideals undergirding the Anglo-American imaginary – moral superiority, liberalism,
democracy, a stable public – capitulated in the United States. The ‘Special Relationship’
between the two countries coalesced via twinned managed economies and hope for the
defeat of Soviet Communism. Though ‘its most common invocations – shared values,
shared history, shared language – arguably reflect sentiment and wishful thinking as
much as the real world of material interests’ (Dumbrell, 2009: 64), its coinage by
Churchill in 1946 and consolidation at the beginning of the Cold War etched in place a
deep alliance expected to be long-standing. This period, however, was also one of the
all-time lows for American journalism. Because the British invested efforts in cheerlead-
ing American Cold War aims, it was not that great of a time for British journalism either.
The 1950s were a time of conformity, homogeneity and restraint (May, 1990). Fear
and doubt were everywhere – underlying rigid family life, firmly marked gender roles,
uniform standards of fashion, homogenized popular culture and acquiescent and hostile
politics. It was a time in which individuals showed caution when taking risks or causing
offence. Journalism was not immune to such impulses (Aronson, 1970), and the Cold
War’s prosecution depended on repeated and continuous journalistic representations of
enmity and alliance, with conformity the rule.
Helping to establish the United States as a superpower, the Cold War infected relevant
institutions with its own flavour of xenophobia and supremacy. Internationally, it was an
ideological war primarily between the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics that could not be prosecuted or seen on the territory of its proclaimed antago-
nists, setting aside the conflicts that took place at the time in Asia, the Middle East and
Central/South America but were conveniently left out of the label. Domestically,
McCarthyism came to emblematize the worst of Cold War aims thrust inwards: distrust,
polarization, negative stereotypy, black and white thinking, deindividualization, demoni-
zation (Adler, 1991). Building on the irrational fear of an internal enemy embodied by the
House Un-American Activities Committee from 1938 on, it pushed a certain form of
admissible news and subjected journalists (and others) to increasingly punitive measures
in its witch hunt for communists: loyalty oaths, subtle censorship and red-line news edits,
job dismissal and termination, and prison (Barnheisel and Turner, 2012). Because these
circumstances piggybacked on long-standing journalistic practices of access, sourcing,
6 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

framing and beat assignment, they played out easily. Although they did so lightly in
Britain, which did not have the repression associated with McCarthy, its version of control
was emblematized by the Information Research Department, the D-Notice Committee
and other arrangements that instilled a sense of politically appropriate news (Defty, 2004;
Jenks, 2006). On both ends, the ‘Special Relationship’ between the United States and
United Kingdom fostered the development of covert, non-attributable and mostly non-
governmental information, otherwise known as propaganda, for widespread dispersal.
The war’s international and domestic contexts should have raised for American jour-
nalists the larger question of what journalism was for, but rather than rise to the occasion,
journalism shrank to the smallest possible version of itself. Particularly in response to
McCarthy, journalists focused on sustaining the mechanics of news relay – how journal-
ism would look – without remembering to ask why it mattered. One irony here was that
at the precise time that US power crystallized, the authority of its journalism – by being
too uncritically linked to power – shrank.
Thus, under the idea that journalists were American before all else, as the trade jour-
nal Editor & Publisher declared in 1948 (Editor & Publisher, 1948), there was an extraor-
dinary closing of ranks around norms of deference and moderation, objectivity and
neutrality, balance and impartiality, where journalists cowered behind a reporting from
nowhere. They developed a stream of forms that subscribed to that aim: the language of
euphemism and understatement; false equivalences between binaries, whatever their
nature; timidity about the topics broached and excessive deference to officials; qualified
observations of what they thought they saw; and moderation (Zelizer, n.d.). Despite the
acute dependence of the Cold War’s prosecution on mediated presence – without journal-
ism, there would have been no Cold War – journalists acted like exterminators going
after the wrong insects, trying to get rid of any evidence of their own perspective, bias or
opinion so as to do what they claimed was their job.
This would have disastrous effect. Slow to recognize McCarthy’s (1951) impact, jour-
nalists initially dismissed him with labels like ‘dipsy-doodle ball’ (Time, 1951: 21) or
‘Senator McThing’ (Markel, 1953: 1). As late as 1955, the American Society of
Newspaper Editors voted McCarthy one of the most overplayed stories of the preceding
year (ASNE Bulletin, 1955). Even as they recognized McCarthy was not disappearing,
journalists could not get on top of their game. And that was because they could not aban-
don their fixation with familiar journalistic forms. If McCarthy said it, recalled one
Washington columnist (Charles Seib in Broder, 1987: 138), ‘we wrote it’. Although there
were exceptions – I.F. Stone and Edward R. Murrow, among others – there was little
consideration of the grey area in the imaginary, those aspects of journalism that might
have helped complicate its path of action: perspective and partisanship, an investigation
into collusion with power, thinking about different publics. And most important, that
critical question of what journalism is for received no attention at all. Instead, journalists
sidelined the meanings of the events being covered and failed to give the public what it
needed to know – when people still cared and it still might have made a difference.

Cold War redux: The age of Brexit and Trump

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. For how journalists of the Cold War era rational-
ized their news-making – accepting dogma, underestimating impact, pursuing value-free
Zelizer 7

coverage while claiming consonance with an imaginary core – is very much at play in
coverage of the phenomena of Brexit and Trump. Buttressed and sharpened by ongoing
structural changes – in ownership, regulation, arrival of cable, the collapse of old busi-
ness models, ascent of new media – this mind-set has continued unabated more or less
since the Cold War, surfacing in critical incidents like the Vietnam War or the War on
Iraq, and then settling in again for the long haul.
The mind-set’s current resurfacing is critical when considering how much today’s
institutional environments have changed. Serious questions linger about checks and bal-
ances and, in the United States, the two-party system, about the divides between left and
right, liberal and conservative. There is yet no clear response concerning rogue institu-
tional players, foreign intervention, democratic backsliding or an asymmetrical link
between politics and journalism. The stakes are raised even more by intense echo cham-
bers in commercial and social media that have created two separate news empires ped-
dling true and fake news as neighbours and a disinterested and disenfranchised public
that is profoundly angry and distrustful of the very tools and expertise of all institutions,
including journalism. All of this underscores the need for an evolving answer to what
journalism is for, not one lodged firmly in the past.
But that was not to be. The temporal proximity of the Brexit and Trump phenomena
makes 2016 and 2017 one of the worst periods in recent memory for Anglo-American
news. Offering two unexpected but profound disruptions of the elite consensus on which
much of Anglo-American journalism rests, British and American journalists responded
as if from a play book straight from the 1940s and 1950s. Just like during the Cold War,
they neglected to consider the question of what journalism is for. And just like then, they
overthought how to provide coverage. In doing so, they failed again to serve the public,
which did not receive the information necessary to take part in the important civic activ-
ity of a national referendum or a presidential election.

US coverage of Trump
Undercutting US coverage of Trump was journalists’ response to outrage. First they nor-
malized outrage, making it seem smaller, and then they capitulated to it, allowing it to
become larger. Trying to offset outrage at first seemed to be a useful course of action to
follow, because doing so could suggest continued agreement over the terms of the debate,
central to notions of consensus as the bedrock of democracy. Thus, when Trump engaged
in various modes of democratic backsliding, such as chipping away at the news cycle by
hijacking it through Twitter, journalists were slow to label it over-the-top behaviour.
But Trump’s violations of expectations that US institutions work for the good of the
polity – exemplified when CBS admitted that Trump ‘might not be good for America, but
he’s damn good for CBS’ (Bond, 2016) – kept growing, and they were soon spread across
US institutional culture: his eager play to the market, justified by the financial gain that
kept putting him in the camera’s eye for free; his assault on widely shared American
norms – the presidency, the press, legitimate elections; his embrace of anti-democratic
ideals – intolerance, name-calling, bullying, disregard for conflicts of interest, false-
hoods, extremism, self-aggrandizement; his refusal to engage in the ordinary connectors
of media and government – press access, press pools, press conferences, press briefings,
press banter, even libel laws. Normalization was everywhere. Time at first evenly noted
8 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

after the election that ‘Donald Trump Won’t Meet the Press Just Yet’ (Miller, 2016),
while others rushed ahead with hopeful lexicons of new rules for coverage: The
Washington Post offered a style guide on ‘how to cover Donald Trump fairly’ (Petri,
2016), and Politico displayed its ‘new rules for covering Trump’ (Shafer, 2016).
The rules that most news outlets offered, however, were hardly new. Instead, journal-
ists turned to tools that they had used in the past to mute outrage – objectivity, balance,
impartiality, and the euphemism, moderation and deference that they spawned. Drawing
from tools set firmly in place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, journalists again used
moderate, euphemistic language that failed to call things by name, while their timidity
and deference to officialdom encouraged tepid responses like asking questions only once
or shutting down when ridiculed.
There was also little camaraderie across the news outlets that were singled out for
being at odds with Trump’s agenda. When the New York Times decided in September
2016 to label his lies ‘controversies’ (National Public Radio (NPR), 2016) and was then
ridiculed by Trump, the Wall Street Journal criticized the moral judgement of doing so
(Pompeo, 2017) – though it thereafter recanted (The Wall Street Journal, 2017). After the
election, when certain news outlets were barred from press briefings, others went ahead
and attended rather than take collective action against the ban (Farhi, 2017). Instead of
taking clear steps to confront outrage, journalists set up false equivalences, themselves a
form of untruth: equating Trump’s conflicts of interest with Hillary Clinton’s emails
(MacNeal, 2016) or equating the claims of right-wing ideologues with truth-based news
and opinion (Alterman, 2017).
Even Trump’s fundamental but childish response to nuance – flattening it into a state-
ment of either friendship with him or enmity against him – passed by largely unattended.
Instead, every time Trump lied, it became a story, allowing him to drive the news cycle
by doing the opposite of what journalism’s imaginary would have had him doing.
Although The Atlantic first noted in September of 2016 that ‘the press takes him literally,
but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally’ (Zito, 2016), not
much changed after that observation was aired. All of this was consonant with what
Banet-Weiser (2015) called the economy of Trump’s visibility, an economy in which
even the critique of what he said repeatedly validated the necessity of his being seen.
As time wore on, the normalization of outrage thus helped foster its ubiquity. Although
across 2017 journalists made attempts to counter outrage, for the most part they did little
more than lament its presence. As Trump repeatedly violated tenets of institutional cul-
ture, usually timed to offset policy changes in the background, by the summer of 2017
much of the news media had whined so often that they were being counselled to seek
another mode of engagement: Talking Points Memo called on them to ‘pull out of
Trump’s dominance rituals’ (Marshall, 2017), while Salon.com advised them to ‘stop
fainting every time Trump says something inflammatory’ (Devega, 2017).
Across outrage’s normalization and intensification, US journalists repaired to an
imagined middle, a stand-in for the legitimate centre of the democratic process (and of
the Anglo-American imaginary). When during the election the Columbia Journalism
Review noted that ‘CNN [had] stacked its panels full of pro-Trump analysts in order to
exude objectivity’ (Uberti, 2016), CNN’s response that it needed to show both sides went
no further than a simple call to balance. Similarly, when the issue of fake news initially
Zelizer 9

erupted, the response of The Hill was to further entrench journalists in the occupational
morass they already inhabited: Under the title ‘‘Fake News Isn’t the Problem –
Mainstream Media with an Agenda Is’ (Young, 2016), it positioned journalistic perspec-
tive as a worse villain than fake news, echoing the grey area surrounding partisanship.
Almost nowhere was there discussion of the broader degradation of institutional culture
exemplified by Trump’s actions.
With some differences, this repeated what had happened during the late 1940s and
early 1950s. To be sure, there were, as then, exceptions to the rule: As time wore on, the
Washington Post, New York Times and Buzzfeed were among those picking up the slack
alongside long-form journalism, such as The Atlantic or Politico. But how many
Americans read long-form journalism? All of this meant, not for the first time, that the
American public was badly served.

British coverage of Brexit

British coverage of Brexit offers a rich parallel to the US example. Because it embraced
both the high ground and the grey area of the Anglo-American core – its impartiality and
partisanship, its high-mindedness and collusion with power – it offered a productive
though more troubled view of journalism. That was because neither set of British options
worked.
Here too, journalists initially normalized a sense of outrage and then capitulated as it
intensified. Playing to long-held conventions consonant with US journalism, British
broadcasters attempted to stay true to the high ground of the Anglo-American imaginary.
But their fierce embrace of due impartiality, artificially requiring a range of views even
if it were not to be found (Jackson et al., 2016), made obscuring the presence of perspec-
tive an end in and of itself. It also made for problematic news judgement that both nor-
malized and yielded to outrage. Exemplified by the BBC – when Newsnight interviewed
in March 2016 a scientist favouring the Leave campaign or when it was accused of
mainstreaming Nigel Farage’s ‘lies, cants and manipulations’, enabling him, in The
Guardian’s sharp rebuke, to act as ‘television’s default resident troll’ (Malik, 2016) –
broadcasters were criticized from both sides of the political spectrum. The Financial
Times categorized Brexit as the ‘biggest challenge ever’ to broadcasters’ neutrality
(Mance and Pickard, 2016), while the New Statesman called on them to ‘take some
responsibility’ for a ‘sour and tawdry’ campaign (Mosey, 2016).
Normalizing and capitulating to outrage were evident beyond the actions of broad-
casters, however, as multiple lies and falsehoods surfaced across Brexit coverage: The
Leave campaign’s claim that the European Union (EU) received £350 million a week
which could be shifted to National Health service (NHS) was a case in point (BBC News,
2016), but more important was the fact that no journalists challenged it, only Remain
campaigner and Labour MP Angela Eagle. This circumstance – noted by Cushion and
Lewis (2017) as the rule, not the exception – underscored how much capitulation
remained the resonant response to outrage. It not only paralleled US journalists’ response
to Trump, but it was also a repeat of the 1940s and 1950s.
In the print media, partisanship remained more of a central playing ground than did
due impartiality. Here outrage seemed to reign uncontested, as a skewed version of
10 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

events, seen largely through the eyes of party operatives, offered the predominant view.
Print media coverage – largely aligned with the Leave vote (Levy et al., 2016) and char-
acterized as ‘divisive’, ‘acrimonious’ and ‘overwhelmingly negative’ (Moore and
Ramsay, 2017) – displayed multiple shortcomings: not providing enough hard informa-
tion, not constructing enough thoughtful context, not sparking public trust, peddling too
many false alarms. Falling short on the mandate to inform, print journalism offered little
more than what Cushion and Lewis (2017) characterized as a ‘statistical tit for tat
between rival camps’. This inability to accommodate complex reasoning helped orient
coverage to a gaming or horse race narrative (Levy et al., 2016). Although here too
exceptions existed, such as The Guardian or Channel 4 News, the coverage of Brexit, in
many ways like that of Trump, underscored colossal changes in institutional culture that
should have promoted adjustments on the adjacent news landscape. The implications,
then, of focusing on method and failing to ask what journalism is for were enormous.
Similar problems continued to haunt coverage past the referendum. While broadcast-
ers slightly shifted aspects of the 2017 post-Brexit election coverage from what had been
evident during the referendum, they remained in step with familiar methods from the
past: an embrace of due impartiality alongside periodic shows of bias, shaping the 2017
election as a simple contest between Labour and Conservatives and focusing on person-
ality rather than policy. Blumler (2017: 11) held that the BBC ‘pulled up its public ser-
vice socks’ – reporting on wider angles of the post-Brexit election, making fewer attempts
to uphold due impartiality, using special correspondents to cover contested issues,
attempting to intervene in a more hard-hitting way and fact-checking – but others were
less complimentary: Banaji (2017: 24), for instance, noted that the print media ‘deliber-
ately undermined’ Jeremy Corbyn’s image, with even the liberal media remaining
‘demonstrably more hostile’ to him than to other political leaders and portraying him as
a bumbling politician past his prime (also Loughborough University, 2017: part 4).
Deliberate misrepresentation – evidenced in a doctored photograph in The Sun that
seemed to show him dancing next to a World War II veteran (York, 2016) – was more the
rule than the exception.
Negativity in the print media also largely persevered across 2017, where ‘the most
partisan newspapers gave greater editorial focus to attacking the party/parties they
opposed, rather than advocating the party they supported’ (General Election, 2017: part
4). When popular broadcaster Jon Snow began his post-2017 election news of Labour’s
revival with the admission that ‘I know nothing, we the media, the pundits and experts,
know nothing’ (Sommers, 2017), it was yet another example of journalistic practice
drawn more from the past Anglo-American imaginary than from a reinvented path of
journalistic action.
Both Brexit and Trump coverage thus emblematized journalism’s failure to serve the
electorate by not providing necessary information. In both cases, this was exacerbated by
a mechanistic fixation with method, collusion with power and an uncritical attempt to
hide either behind reporting from nowhere or reporting too much from somewhere. The
comparisons and contrasts across the Anglo-American alliance, where multiple kinds of
journalism in both countries failed, go far: American coverage showed a surplus of
experts (pollsters, big data), British coverage, their absence; Americans attempted an
absence of perspective, British print media, an excess. Trump’s coverage was helped by
Zelizer 11

market pressures, Farage’s by conventions of due impartiality and broad balance. Such
comparisons, however, are like siblings fighting over dessert when there is no dinner.
The very fact that there was a multitude of failed practices suggests that something
deeper was awry.
That something deeper has to do with Anglo-American journalism’s insular and elitist
mind-set. For coverage of Brexit and Trump unfolded by shrinking the imagined public
to its smallest possible size. Whether it was the post-industrial towns of Northern England
and the poorer parts of Wales or the Rust Belt and so-called flyover zones of the United
States, journalism in both countries failed to reflect the public – with its multiple varia-
tions, complexities and contradictions. The combination of these failings – not serving
and not reflecting – is enormous, for it suggests that Anglo-American journalism has
been doubly out of step with the public in whose name it presumably works.
This suggests a source of inspired conduct that, though seemingly irrelevant, has not
gone away. The coverage of Trump and Brexit made visible the bubble in which journal-
ism lives. As Glenn Greenwald (2016) commented, in both cases ‘elites [were] telling
each other how smart they were’. This meant that ‘the people supporting Brexit and
Trump weren’t really ever heard from; they were just talked about in contemptuous tones
… sort of looked at like zoo animals, like things you dissect and condemn’. Though not
the only source of journalism’s present disarray, its Anglo-American core is consonant
with a deeply entrenched and largely uncritical regard for who and what matters as news.
And just like during the Cold War, journalists learned that they could sidestep its implica-
tions by hiding behind questions of method.

Back to the 1950s

Not all observers closed their eyes to the need for fundamental changes in journalism in
the age of Brexit and Trump. In the US case, for instance, media critic Jim Rutenberg
(2016) argued early on for a retirement of US journalism’s old normal, arguing that it
was time to ‘throw out the textbook that American journalism has been using for the bet-
ter part of the past half century, if not longer’. In early 2017 Reuters dispatched a missive
to its reporters that they knew how to cover the Trump administration, for they did so
every day in authoritarian regimes around the world (Reuters.com, 2017). But neutral-
izing the old normal was difficult for it played into larger notions of sovereignty that
drove both the coverage of Brexit and Trump: Making Britain or America great again is
rhetoric worth pondering if for no other reason than that it forces a look backwards to
when greatness presumably settled in.
Which past has inspired the heart of Brexit and Trump? Not surprisingly, it is the
1950s, a time of imagined social cohesion and stability, the very period in which the West
would recover from its two world wars, reinstate tranquility and ignite an Anglo-
American alliance. Backgrounding the ascent and entrenchment of the US/UK ‘Special
Relationship’, it set both nations on the road to consolidating democracy and legitimat-
ing themselves.
The details of this past are worth considering. Brexit repaired to British mastery
before the EU, when it enjoyed, despite its empire’s dismantlement, major economic and
military power across the Commonwealth. As The Daily Express noted in defending the
12 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Leave campaign, the EU was taking away Britain’s ‘hard fought freedom’; it would thus
‘save democracy’ by leaving the union (Maddox, 2016). Similarly, Trump longed for the
unrivalled US leadership of the West afforded by the Cold War, offering what George
Will (2016) called ‘A Plan to Make America 1953 Again’. In The Atlantic’s view, Trump’s
promised ride back to the 1950s was ‘shorthand for this now glamorized period of plenty,
peace, and the kind of optimism only plenty and peace can produce’ (Bloom, 2015: para
7), unrolled, of course, with no mention of the high taxes, strong unions and big govern-
ment that came along too for the ride. Even vis-a-vis current acts of looking inwards –
where, much like the Cold War, ‘being great’ on the homefront has meant closing ranks
on questions of identity, immigration, race, ethnicity, religion and class and emblematiz-
ing the so-called traditional values – the past of Trump and Brexit hearkens to a period
in which Anglo-American collaboration and its form of inspired conduct was first aired
and consequently rode high.
But the period was a troubled time for journalism. As the playwright David Hare said
almost a decade ago, the 1950s offered a ‘return only to repression and hypocrisy’ (cited
in Kynaston, 2009). By repairing to a deep-seated spirit of collaboration that harnessed
journalism, the Anglo-American imaginary accommodates formations of enmity and
alliance that have hidden its grasp of the world as a natural opposition between Us and
Them. Celebrating an imaginary that underscores an entity larger than either of its two
constituent parties has brought back a shared sense of their entitlement. This suggests
how intricately hostility, rivalry and enmity lurk inside imaginary alliances, and how
much they allow distant temporalities to take the place of real time-driven collaboration.
Although the Anglo-American imaginary feeds what the New York Times called ‘the
desire to feel exceptional, entitled, in short, to be great again’ (Buruma, 2016), what has
remained unclear is at what expense.
This helps explain why there has been little that hints of adaptation or change in US/UK
coverage of the Trump and Brexit phenomena. With the familiar contours of institutional
environments gone, the much-invoked claims of ‘it can’t happen here’ do not make sense
on any grounds other than those of the Anglo-American imaginary. That idea continues to
fuel a largely irrelevant but easily invoked timeless rationale for journalism’s continuity as
is, lodging answers to the question of what journalism is for firmly in its past.
No surprise, then, that attempts to make sense of Brexit and Trump have reinforced the
‘Special Relationship’ between the United Kingdom and United States – what The
Economist characterized as a ‘transatlantic echo’, a ‘lockstep’ march with the ‘same gurus,
same intellectual circus, similar styles and temperaments’ (The Economist, 2016). Already
from the early days of his administration, Trump tweeted his support for the two coun-
tries’ ‘Special Relationship’ (York, 2017), while Time magazine predicted that the ‘UK
could make more rapid progress with the US than on its own’ (Westmacott, 2016). Across
2017, every ripple in US–UK relations – Theresa May’s invitation to Trump to visit the
United Kingdom or the results of the 2017 election – was discussed in terms of its impact
on the two countries’ long-standing alliance (The Economist, 2017; Usborne, 2017)
This has had alarming effects on journalism. For rather than look to each other in the
aftermath of Brexit and Trump, journalists in both countries need to double down domes-
tically to figure out what they missed close by. The list of corrections is enormous: listen-
ing more actively, treating class and race as more than disruptions, developing social
Zelizer 13

media accountability, bonding together, seeking out alternative political sources, devel-
oping new beats, improving local news, newsroom diversity, media literacy and fact-
checking. Repair is also overdue in journalism’s mind-set: getting rid of condescension
or understanding that anger at elites includes them. In British journalist Tom Ewing’s
words, moving ahead requires checking the arrogance implicit in working around demo-
cratic institutions while ‘leaving democracy formally intact’ (Ewing, 2016: last para). To
again cite Greenwald (2016), in logic reminiscent of the writings of Chomsky and
Herman, Bagdikian and McChesney,

the West’s establishment credibility is dying … The solution is not to subserviently cling to
corrupt elite institutions out of fear of the alternatives. It is, instead, to help bury those
institutions and their elite mavens and then fight for superior replacements.

Continuing to repair to journalism’s Anglo-American imaginary without recognizing

what it silently entrenches is dangerous. The massive failure of journalism’s imagination
that helped usher in Brexit and Trump makes a strong case for journalism’s necessary
and immediate reset. Neither Trump nor Brexit is an anomaly. They are a farewell bid to
institutions as they exist today, to a textured institutional culture invented two centuries
ago that for better or worse has supported the core of the Anglo-American imaginary as
a source of inspired conduct for too long. As Mark Twain is often reported to have said,
‘history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes’.
Imaginary alliances are, in the end, little more than forms for managing hostility,
rivalry and enmity. Recognizing that should facilitate too the recognition that there is
nothing exceptional any longer about exceptionalism. The challenge facing journalism
today is not, as Jay Rosen (2016) observed, how to cover stories but ‘how to recover
conditions in which anything journalists do make a difference’.

Acknowledgements
In writing this article, I received valuable input from many scholars: I thank Sarah Banet-Weiser,
Jay Blumler, James Curran, Larry Gross, Amy Jordan, Amy Kaplan, Monroe Price, Michael
Schudson, Howard Tumber and Robin Wagner-Pacifici for their comments. I also thank MECCSA
for hosting its presentation in January 2017 and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Israel
Science Foundation’s workshop on Public Time and Media Temporalities in an Age of Acceleration
for similar hosting in March 2017. Finally, I thank Peter Goulding and Stephen Coleman who
solicited the manuscript for EJOC. The article draws from my book manuscript in progress, How
the Cold War Drives the News, and was developed while I was a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies, Finland.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
14 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

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