International journalists are hearing echoes. From countries around the world that have witnessed the rise of autocratic and populist leaders, they are watching the U.S. and warning of a characteristic of wounded democracies everywhere: an endangered free press.
This issue of Nieman Reports features insights from nine journalists abroad, offering advice to American reporters on preparing for attacks on press freedom.
A few weeks before the U.S. election, I traveled to Wisconsin, the crucial battleground state some 1,500 miles away from what’s been described as a place where evil runs rampant, a place which also happens to be my home. El Paso felt very present in the Badger State — at least as the distorted, over-hyped version of an “open border” narrative that plays incessantly on local broadcast political ads.
I was in Wisconsin in part to understand how disinformation travels wide and far. The televised portrayal of my borderlands home was so downright scary that it kept me awake into the wee hours. But the loop of rapists, murderers, and fentanyl — monsters all — sneaking across from Mexico, day and night threatening America, was a reminder of the daunting task ahead.
I’m the executive editor and a correspondent for Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit online newsroom. My colleagues, Eduardo Garcia and Dudley Althaus, and I face the uphill job of challenging this border narrative, pushing back with facts on the ground. Puente’s mission is to support local newsrooms and to provide original, fact-based coverage stripped of the prevailing misinformation. Part of the strategy is to work with reporters in these border regions and place stories with local media outlets. The goal is to break the silence on immigration in the growing number of news deserts.
Few regions in the country have been more impacted by the collapse of local news than the U.S.-Mexico border. Ten of the 23 U.S. border counties now have either a single local news organization or none at all.
Some of those that still exist are “ghost newsrooms,” with neither an editor nor a publisher. They survive with little to no news-gathering staff and scant original reporting.
Puente’s task is to pursue stories that reflect the border’s reality and the people it affects. We serve audiences both at the border and beyond in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, or interior Mexican states such as Querétaro and Guanajuato.
Our task seems especially urgent at a time when many Americans are looking for an enemy within.
These Americans want it both ways, using the cheap labor that immigrants provide while loathing the unavoidable change that the newcomers bring. They want their crops harvested, hotel rooms cleaned, yards trimmed, and new roofs installed. But they also want to demonize the immigrants — legal and undocumented alike — who in many cases provide the backbone of the economy. And they take particular aim at Mexico, the country that’s now the United States’ leading trading partner.
After 30 years of free trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, industrial supply chains reach deep into the heartlands of all three countries, especially in the automotive industry. Mexico is a premier customer of U.S. grain and natural gas. About $800 billion in bilateral trade now crosses the U.S.-Mexico border annually, making each country’s economies deeply dependent on the other.
For nearly a week, Dudley and I traveled throughout Wisconsin, along the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan and down two-lane roads that cut into the state’s farmlands. We witnessed how newcomers are remaking century-old neighborhoods and small towns that were once home to immigrants from Germany, Poland, Serbia, Ireland, and elsewhere.
As I reported on their perceptions about the border, I also pushed back on the disinformation I saw and heard. I reminded Midwesterners that I traveled from one of the safest regions anywhere in the United States and that El Paso represents a peek into the future of changing economic and cultural forces. We talked about the people who come through the border with or without documents, and how our future is tied to theirs. We traded notes on products crisscrossing the border — everything from tractors to electronics to produce, and hundreds of other things trucks carry north and south. We swapped stories that provided a glimpse of hope in a divisive, polarized society.
The experience reinforced that we can — through stories — begin to humanize this complex issue and, in doing so, rebuild borderland newsrooms. Only then can the false narrative of the border be dispelled.
