Journalists must enlighten, not just inform, in a world darkened by Trump

[Commentary] The Donald Trump presidency, dominated by images of decline and threat, “American carnage” and bad, bad people, has presented any number of challenges to the US press, whose instinct, after all, is to go dark itself. But President Trump has taken that impulse and supercharged it, creating yet another conundrum for reporters tasked with making sense of where we are: Is it possible, in this age, to be too bleak? Is the unremitting negativity of the news itself part of Trump’s approach to destabilizing the news business? Has this negativity in fact helped to facilitate Trump’s rise to power? Is it possible, or even plausible, to modulate the negativity in some way? New outlets should be the breeding ground, not of the type of alarming stories that create a yearning for a strong political hand, but of the knowledge of human imperfection and a way through or around it that puts a modest heroism within reach of the everyday reader.

[Lee Siegel is a New York City writer and cultural critic]