Why Doesn’t the New York Times Have a Democracy Desk?

The warning lights are flashing. The paper of record has the reach and resources. Will it help readers track, and have the language to discuss, the rise of authoritarianism in the US?

An Open Letter to the Editors of The New York Times

Dear Editors,

I read your paper every day, and I’ve had a front-row seat to the rise of authoritarian governments around the world. Orbán in Hungary. Erdoğan in Turkey. Modi in India. In covering these regimes, you describe clearly how authoritarian power works. But when you cover our own experiences here in the United States, that clarity tends to fall away and the framing tends to shift. Coverage of voter suppression or classroom censorship is more likely to appear under the familiar frames of “polarization,” “partisan rancor,” or “culture wars.”

When authoritarian power grabs abroad are called what they are, but the same maneuvers here are cast as ordinary politics, it’s hard for readers to see clearly that the US is no longer a liberal democracy. It has become some kind of authoritarian regime, according to a majority of US political scientists. If we can’t describe and name authoritarian actions clearly in our own country, democratic breakdown will become even more severe. And we may not be able to build our way back to liberal democracy.

That’s why I’m writing to urge you to create a Democracy Desk—a permanent section and beat devoted to covering democratic backsliding in the United States with the same seriousness you bring to the rise of authoritarianism abroad.

Why a Democracy Desk Matters

The communication scholar James Carey once said journalism works like a curriculum: it teaches citizens what to pay attention to, what matters, and how the pieces fit together. A desk is how a newsroom formalizes that curriculum. It gathers scattered stories, gives them coherence, and signals to readers: this subject is central, keep following.

That’s what the Times did with climate. The Climate Desk doesn’t just collect articles—it tells readers that climate change isn’t a niche science story but a crisis reshaping everything from the economy to foreign policy. It creates a throughline. It signals that climate is a matter of public concern that requires readers’ attention and focus.

Yet the Times is shaping a curriculum on democracy that fragments and obscures more than it illuminates. In July, Columbia Journalism Review faulted the paper for a story on Zohran Mamdani that leaned on hacked Columbia University data, a decision Margaret Sullivan said made the Times look like it’s “on a crusade” against the candidate. That kind of framing trains readers to treat a smear as politics as usual. Even Adam Liptak’s careful news analysis of the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering cases, while far from superficial, frames the story in terms of jurisprudence and partisan maneuvering. Readers learn about doctrine and political strategy, but the analysis doesn’t clarify how these moves serve an authoritarian project to entrench minority rule — or spell out how, case by case, the Court is eroding democracy itself. Watchdogs like Free Press warn that patterns like these normalize authoritarian threats.

History shows the danger. In 1919, Arkansas’s white elites unleashed the Elaine Massacre to crush Black sharecroppers organizing for economic independence and political power. Local editors, working with the governor and planters, cast the union as a “Negro uprising.” The New York Times echoed that false narrative, reporting an “insurrection” rather than a massacre. That journalistic curriculum taught readers to see racial terror as legitimate governance, helping to entrench Jim Crow authoritarianism in US Southern states for decades.

A Democracy Desk could correct today’s curriculum. It would gather stories on voter suppression, free speech violations, court rulings, disinformation, institutional sabotage (the rule of law, higher education, the press, foundations, the independence of the federal legislature), and more into a coherent field of coverage. And it would teach readers, day after day, that the stakes are not partisan advantage but the survival of self-government itself.

The Frames That Blur the Picture

Part of the problem lies in the frames that dominate U.S. political coverage. Three are especially corrosive.

The horse race. Politics as ESPN. A new voting law gets covered like a quarterback trade—who gains, who loses—rather than whether citizens get to keep their franchise.

Both-sides-ism. Balance is important as we age, but not in democracy coverage. If one party is curtailing rights and the other is trying to expand them, calling it “polarization” missing the point entirely.

Legalism. Court rulings dominate. It’s not that judges don’t matter. They do. But when law itself is used to erode democracy, treating every case as a tidy legal dispute misses the point. Legal does not always mean democratic.

Journalistic frames like these risk normalizing authoritarian maneuvers by folding them into the script of “politics as usual.”

What a Democracy Desk Could Do

Here’s how it could monitor and explain key events and issues, day after day:

• Report on federal government actions—executive orders, agency directives, Justice Department maneuvers, and threats to “crack down” on civic groups—that reshape democratic norms from the top down.

• Track how state-level authoritarian experiments—restrictions on voting, censorship of classrooms—spread across the country.

• Map the disinformation networks that sustain those efforts.

• Explain court rulings in plain language, showing how they strengthen or weaken the guardrails of democracy.

• Cover attacks on higher education, law firms, the rule of law, the press, and other institutions of accountability as part of a broader authoritarian playbook.

• Place U.S. developments in historical and global context, so readers see patterns instead of fragments.

Additionally, a Democracy Desk could help readers recognize the hallmarks of authoritarianism itself and track when government actions are pushing us closer to or farther from them. Here are some key hallmarks:

• Concentration of power in the executive

• Systematic attacks on independent institutions (courts, press, universities, civil service)

• Suppression of free speech and assembly

• Disenfranchisement or intimidation of political opponents and minority groups

• Manipulation of information through propaganda and disinformation

• Weakening of checks and balances, elections, and the rule of law

• Use of violence or threats to enforce political control

This is the connective tissue your readers need. And if the New York Times is still the agenda-setter it was across the 20th century, it is the connective tissue other independent, reality-based news outlets need.

The Predictable Pushback

Would you be accused of partisanship? Yes, no doubt. But news institutions should not treat democracy as a partisan issue. Democracy is the field on which partisanship is supposed to unfold. Covering its erosion is not “taking sides.” It is doing journalism’s most basic job: serving as a watchdog, exposing corruption, informing the public for the purposes of self-government, the very basis of democratic life. Again, Carey is helpful here.

For Carey, journalism and democracy were inseparable:

“The fate of journalism, the nation-state, and the public sphere are intimately intertwined and cannot be easily separated. In the modern world, in an age of independent journalism, this is a controversial assumption, for it seems to commit journalists to the defense of something, to compromise their valued nonpartisanship. It claims that journalists can be independent or objective about everything but democracy, for to do so is to abandon the craft. About democratic institutions, about the way of life of democracy, journalists are not permitted to be indifferent, nonpartisan, or objective. It is their one compulsory passion, for it forms the ground condition of their practice.” (emphasis added)

NYT reporters are world-class, and those covering politics are well-versed in history and political science. To run a Democracy Desk, they would need only to deepen their engagement with the fast-growing field of democracy studies. I suspect many already read the Journal of Democracy and others; your opinion pages regularly feature leading experts. The foundation is there. What’s missing is a dedicated structure that signals to readers: democracy itself is the story.

Turning the Lens Homeward

We are living through a period of rapid democratic backsliding in the United States. The New York Times—the nation’s paper of record—should not just chronicle the decline. It should connect the dots, refuse to normalize it, and make it impossible for readers to mistake authoritarian erosion for business as usual.

Sincerely, and with gratitude,
Kathy Roberts Forde
Professor of Journalism, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I speak for myself.