Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a tour through Europe

, warning American allies that they faced a stark choice: They could reject the efforts of Chinese firms to wire up their 5G telecommunications networks and remain squarely within the American defense umbrella, or they could welcome the Chinese technology and risk losing access to sensitive American intelligence and perhaps American military bases.

Barely one year later, Pompeo found himself back in Europe — and this time he was backtracking. His ultimatum had failed. 

, insisting that they could continue to let firms like Huawei — the Chinese national champion — into their networks and still manage the risk. In a confused series of statements, he and other administration officials continued to warn of the dangers but insisted that key intelligence relationships with American allies 

The change in tone was a belated recognition of reality. Over the course of that year, global consensus had turned decisively against the Trump Administration’s push to keep Chinese-made technology out of the West’s 5G networks. When Britain’s prime minister issued his long-awaited Huawei decision, allowing the company to build parts of the nation’s networks, it was evident that Washington and its allies had dramatically different views of the risk. By the spring of 2020, 

Germany seemed about to follow in Britain’s footsteps

 India had already decided to allow Huawei to participate

 in the country’s upcoming 5G trials, the precursor to a potential future role in that nation.

Global consensus had turned decisively against the Trump Administration’s push to keep Chinese-made technology out of the West’s 5G networks.

American officials still insist that their effort to persuade allies is not over. And it remains unclear how successful China will be in dominating the construction of the world’s next-generation networks — the new highway that will connect not only people, but the internet-of-things. If it lives up to the promise and the hype, 5G will speed the arrival of a vast new array of technologies, from self-driving cars to sensor-driven “smart” farms to — many fear — autonomous weapons. 

So the struggle over 5G is about far more than trade or technological advantage. It is about the power to control a nation’s infrastructure — and, in time of conflict, to cut off an adversary’s ability to communicate. And that makes the geopolitics as important as the technology. 

Until Pompeo’s tour through Europe, most American allies had been treating the building of new cellular networks largely as a procurement decision. While they had heard warnings that installing Chinese-made equipment in their networks could give Beijing a foothold to install “backdoors” that could allow their intelligence agencies to read, divert, or halt digital traffic, these security issues had been considered background noise, not a festering national security crisis. European officials were shocked to find that Pompeo was suddenly presenting 5G as a loyalty test.

The U.S. argument boiled down to this: If Chinese firms — led by Huawei, China’s national telecommunications champion and the world’s second-largest cell phone maker — were allowed to install the hardware and software of the next-generation networks, the Chinese government would gradually amass an unprecedented amount of control over a vast array of infrastructure.

“It’s not just the communications,” one of the officials who conducted classified briefings for European leaders warned. “It would be the gas pipelines, the water supplies, the factory floors, the ‘smart cities’ of the future.” 

Yet there was no smoking gun. So the U.S. had to focus on the potential threat: Under a series of recent Chinese intelligence and cybersecurity laws, they argued, 

 are required to comply with any request from Chinese intelligence services to access or create a “backdoor” into another nation’s communications networks. This would allow them to spy or — more ominously — use that power in times of conflict to turn off the networks of their clients.

It was a dire picture. But, the Europeans argued, it was an entirely speculative one. So far, there was scant evidence that China had used Huawei for nefarious purposes. And so by the end of 2019, the score looked much as it had at the end of 2018: Only Australia had formally announced that it would ban Huawei components in its 5G networks — though New Zealand and Japan had effectively done the same without mentioning the company by name.

Instead, Huawei steadily picked up more customers around the globe. 

The company announced in February 2020 that it had amassed ninety 5G contracts,

 just under half of which were with carriers in Europe. While a number of these countries promised to keep Huawei technology out of their core switching systems —and said they would seek Western suppliers for these critical central components — the tide had clearly turned against the Trump Administration. At a moment when America’s influence around the globe appears waning, allies were essentially looking into a crystal ball to discern which of the world’s two largest economies would be more critical to their future.

Inside the Trump administration, there was also significant infighting over how to deal with Beijing. A cluster of powerful China hawks, led by Pompeo, made the case that banning Huawei was non-negotiable. But 

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin took a more benign view

 of China’s intentions. President Trump vacillated. At times, he described 5G as a critical national security issue, and declared he would ban the export of sensitive American technology to Chinese manufacturers. At other times, he suggested he might be willing to walk back the bans, presumably in pursuit of a trade deal with China. 

The result, not surprisingly, has been confusion among American companies and American allies about what the United States really cares about. And the absence of a clear administration strategy has contributed to a fear that the United States is falling behind on a critical technology. 

A Core Debate: 5G and the Future of the Internet

The question of how China’s central role in 5G technology may shape the internet’s future looms larger than any specific debate about whether to let their firms build the telecommunications infrastructure of the Western and Asian allies of the United States. It has also sparked competing visions of what the internet will look like in a few years. 

Those in the first camp argue that the controversy surrounding the deployment of 5G networks is part of a larger trend that is leading inevitably to the creation of a new Berlin Wall — a barrier that would stretch around the globe and divide the world into two internets. On one side would be the familiar anarchy of the Western internet, awash in constant commerce, largely free speech, and the inevitable abuses and chaos that come with a vast, unregulated space. On the other would lie a Chinese-controlled “authoritarianet”— a cyberspace in which content is controlled by the government, facial recognition is employed to tighten the ruling party’s control, and artificial intelligence is deployed to sniff out dissent. 

These two worlds are already taking shape. But critics of the first vantage point observe that any “cyber wall” is highly permeable. In order to communicate and to conduct business globally, the world will still have to exchange data at blinding speeds — traversing free and authoritarian internets, and secure and less-secure environments. Thus, data remains vulnerable, even if Huawei and other Chinese firms are banished from the United States. 

Sue Gordon, then deputy director of national intelligence, put it bluntly

: “You have to presume a dirty network,” and adjust accordingly. Her meaning was clear: The nation that dominated the world of communications since Alexander Graham Bell must accept the reality that it can no longer control its digital environment. 

The absence of a clear administration strategy has contributed to a fear that the United States is falling behind on a critical technology.

Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former telecommunications executive, described the change to his colleagues this way: “We are accustomed to a world in which America invented the internet, set the standards, and manufactured all the key parts. And that world is going away. It’s not coming back.”

But are we destined for a forever-war between two technological giants, whose battleground will be network control, rather than geography? Or is there room for accommodation of a rising technological power — even in the West’s networks — and the potential to craft rules of the road that might exempt the most critical communications networks from the daily, low-level cyber conflicts that major states are fighting every day?

When the world embraced 3G and 4G technologies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, it was joining a system that was essentially designed, built, and controlled by the West. The technology was dominated by American makers: The wireless systems were heavily dependent on switching systems built by Cisco, and wireless radio technology designed by Qualcomm, among others. The West was able to define the technical standards and promote their versions of devices and regulations, granting it a significant competitive advantage.

The Chinese understood quickly that 5G was their moment to catch up. They invested heavily in 5G research and development, licensing some of the technology from American makers (though not always paying for it). Huawei, which began as a domestic telecommunications firm launched by the famously reticent former People’s Liberation Army engineer Ren Zhengfei, became the symbol of China’s global ambitions. By mid-2019 

 of the world’s telecommunications equipment market.

Yet few in the United States saw this Chinese initiative coming. Huawei was founded in 1987, but it hardly seemed a threat for its first two decades. By the mid-2000s, the company’s successes set off at least a few alarm bells in the ranks of the U.S. government. And by 2012, Huawei was frozen out of U.S. government supply chains following a congressional report warning that 

installing Huawei gear in the U.S. would be tantamount to letting the Chinese Communist Party wire up the country

Huawei has always maintained that it is privately owned by its employees. But public reporting on the company has revealed a very close relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government. It thrives largely because of a tight web of state-backed financing, government clientele, and a talent pool with overlap in the military and intelligence services. Yet the U.S. has never been able to prove — at least in the unclassified world — that Huawei is an instrument of the Communist Party, or of the People’s Liberation Army, in which Zhengfei served as a young man. Instead, t

he Snowden revelations in 2013 exposed that the U.S. government was boring deep inside Huawei’s technology

 to extend its own intelligence-gathering capacity — essentially convincing Beijing that the United States was doing to China exactly what American officials charge Huawei would do to the United States.

Finally, in 2018, Congress formally banned much of Huawei’s gear from government use. And in December 2018, the chief financial officer of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou — Zhengfei’s daughter — was arrested on charges of violating sanctions against Iran by shipping it Huawei technology. The Chinese cried foul, arguing that Meng was being held in Canada merely for leverage by President Trump. And 

 by suggesting she might be let go if there was a good enough trade deal — thus mixing trade, national security, and the integrity of the American justice system. 

In sum, it appeared to many critics that the Trump Administration seemed to have settled on a new strategy: Using legal and security mechanisms to stunt Huawei’s rapid growth — including draconic export-import bans, attempts to limit Chinese access to American technology, and the 

announcement of several racketeering charges against Huawei

, some of which are more than a decade old.

While dozens — if not hundreds — of recently published articles talk about the need for the U.S. to “win the race to 5G,” the conversation rarely focuses on what 5G actually is, what it promises, or what a technological lead might look like.

The real promise of 5G lies not in its speed, but the future applications that speed allows — and the ability to exploit it to usher in new technologies. Previous generations of network connectivity were generally designed for consumers, and network traffic consisted primarily of calls and data. 

5G is different: It is designed for machines talking to machines (the “internet-of-things”) and will enable connections between the billions of sensors, robots, autonomous vehicles, and other devices that will continuously feed one another vast amounts of data in the coming years. The implications for industry, national security, and human welfare are revolutionary in scope.

But the question of whether or not the U.S. is in a good position to collect on these benefits of 5G is hotly debated. Key leaders in Congress, the executive branch, and private wireless carriers argue frequently about it. Many of these leaders are asking whether — Huawei aside — the U.S. is actually on track to deploy its own networks in a competitive manner. 

Defense Innovation Board made a convincing case

 in 2019 that the United States cannot depend on stumbling its way to a lead in 5G deployment merely by assuming that the wizards of Silicon Valley will stay ahead. “The country that owns 5G will own many of these [critical] innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world,’’ the board concluded. “That country is currently not likely to be the United States.”

One key concern is technical: The U.S. has selected a different part of the wireless spectrum for its 5G than much of the rest of the world, 

a decision that could lead to significant interoperability problems

 and undercut U.S. industry’s ability to compete globally. Another fear is the persistent local backlash against the installation of 5G small cells across the United States. These frictions are based on both aesthetic and purported health concerns, and they 

 in a series of decentralized legal and regulatory battles.

But more broadly, the laser-like focus on Huawei technology obscures the other cybersecurity challenges of 5G, including an increased attack surface — both physical and cyber — caused by the increased density of small cell placements, the accelerated pace of software updates, and the geometrically-increasing number of devices connected in the internet-of-things.

Given the challenges and the high stakes at play, what elements might combine into an effective national 5G strategy? Here are four ideas:

1) Threatening allies doesn’t work. Devising a credible alternative might.

Unsurprisingly, other governments don’t like to be threatened, and many see resisting Washington on this point as a way of pushing back on an “America First” agenda. But NATO allies, and allies in Asia, seem more likely to respond to a positive incentive: A Western supply chain with the reach, effectiveness, and affordability of Huawei.

There are many ideas floating around about how to do this. One is to combine Nokia and Ericsson, two European suppliers that do not enjoy Huawei’s market reach, to create a more competitive alternative. A second is to combine them with an American partner — or even acquire a controlling American stake, as 

was recently floated by Attorney General William Barr

. Congress also seems to be moving this way, including with t

he recent introduction of a bill by Senators Warner and Burr

 that calls for a fund designed to develop “5G alternatives to Huawei.” But whatever the corporate configuration, it is clear that the United States and its partners need a Western champion of their own. 

NATO allies, and allies in Asia, seem more likely to respond to a positive incentive: A Western supply chain with the reach, effectiveness, and affordability of Huawei. 

The question is whether the U.S. is  ready to go further than simply protecting companies from takeover to assure that the country’s own technological base is not hollowed out? For decades, such “industrial policy” was a political issue that divided Democrats and Republicans. 

Of course, the United States has never been as hands-off as it advertises. DARPA has long financed promising defense technologies. In-Q-Tel has long served as a small-scale venture capitalist for the intelligence community. Defense Innovation Unit (formerly Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, or DIUx) has been particularly successful at finding commercial firms and products that could be useful for warfighters — and it has invested in a few. 

Yet all these have survived by flying under the radar. Their work has not been tied together as part of a national strategy. 

2) Learn to live in a world of “dirty networks.’’

No one knows what the internet will look like in a decade. Yet even if the United States is wildly successful — if it keeps Huawei and other Chinese firms out of the core of its 5G networks, and if it builds a Western champion of its own to compete — that won’t be enough. China didn’t need 5G to steal the plans for the F-35. It didn’t need it to steal the most sensitive personal information of twenty-two million Americans — including our country’s national security elite, military, top academics, and contractors — which was contained in security clearance files held by the Office of Personnel Management.

Even if America learns to lock down its domestically-held data, we will need to learn to live with dirty networks. 

What does that mean in practical terms? It requires developing a strategy for keeping the most sensitive defense data inside national networks — with better technologies for walling them off — and developing far more reliable encryption technologies for even routine communications going around the world. 

Such a policy, however, would require the administration to revise its views on encryption. After the Snowden revelations in 2013, a commission appointed by President Obama and composed of intelligence officials, industry executives, and 

academics called for the United States to greatly strengthen encryption

. The Obama Administration never acted on this recommendation.

Under President Trump, Attorney General William Barr has argued that law enforcement agencies need to maintain a legal “backdoor” to any encrypted system. He did not explain, however, how to manage the risk that any skilled foreign power — starting with China — could leap through that backdoor.

3) Exploiting national security issues for trade concessions is bound to backfire.

When President Trump hinted that he might intervene in the case against Meng Wanzhou, if it would help him win trade concessions from China, it fed into the Communist Party’s narrative that Meng’s arrest was a political move. When he issued an export ban of sensitive U.S. technology to Huawei and then walked it back, he undercut not only his stated rationale for having blocked the technology in the first place but turned national security into a pawn in the larger trade game.

As former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission T

, “The Trump administration’s focus on Huawei equipment is not a cybersecurity strategy, and by melding trade policy with cybersecurity, damages each.”

4) Standards-setting and supply chains are boring. And they matter.

It is easy for national security officials to map China’s expanding presence in the South China Sea. But only recently did government officials begin to appreciate how Chinese engineers were flooding the zone of standards-setting meetings, looking to set the parameters of how internet-of-things devices will communicate with 5G networks. 

As Beijing moves to tilt the playing field in the other direction, maintaining U.S. technological leadership in global standards-setting won’t be easy. It will require the U.S. government to display both leadership and flexibility. But it is well worth the relatively small cost. The most immediate action should be to recommit to assertive diplomacy at the standards-setting bodies: That is, moving U.S. and allied representatives into key leadership positions and advocating strongly for U.S.-patented technologies to be adopted as standards.

As Beijing moves to tilt the playing field in the other direction, maintaining U.S. technological leadership in global standards-setting won’t be easy. 

Manufacturing the parts that fit those standards comes next. Here, the answer seems straightforward: Building Western systems on a foundation of untrusted parts defeats the purpose of the exercise. Just as the U.S. has trusted suppliers for the F-35, it cannot depend on components, or software, of uncertain origin.

The battle over 5G is only a small part of the broader effort to manage the rise of China. But it has become both technologically and symbolically important. It gets to the heart of who will control the systems that make our societies tick. And it will be key to the perception of who holds the levers of global power. We have one last shot at getting it right.

David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent and a senior writer at 

. In a 37-year reporting career, he has been on three 

 teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting on Russia’s cyber activities surrounding the 2016 presidential election. His newest book, 

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age

, examines the emergence of cyberconflict as a primary way large and small states are competing and undercutting each other, changing the nature of global power. 

Mary K. Brooks is an associate producer at Ark Media on the team making the forthcoming HBO documentary“The Perfect Weapon,” based on David Sanger's book of the same name. Ms. Brooks, a 2017 graduate of Harvard College, worked as a researcher on Sanger's book, focusing in particular on China’s role in shaping the internet. She was previously employed at a Washington-DC-based human rights law firm, advocating on behalf of political prisoners.

This piece is an adapted and updated version of a chapter written by David E. Sanger (“Managing the Fifth Generation: America, China, and the Struggle for Technological Dominance) for T

he Struggle for Power: U.S.-China Relations in The 21st Century

, a collection of essays assembled by the 

 –  Leah Bitounis and Jonathon Price –  for permission to do so. 

Cover Photograph: U.S. President Donald J. Trump and President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, meet on June 29, 2019 at the G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan.  (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.)

48162296516_26d84ac774_o.jpg

Are the U.S. and China destined for a forever-war over network control?   

Battlefield 5G

The First Amendment is First for a Reason

Two years into Donald Trump’s first term, in 2019, I was out to dinner on a Saturday evening when a 

 colleague called to tell me the President of the United States had accused me of a “virtual act of treason.”

The story that prompted this outburst, which I wrote with fellow 

 how the United States was putting malware into the Russian utility grid—computer code that it fully expected the Russians to discover. The idea was to send a warning to Vladimir Putin: if his cyber forces activated a similar code that Moscow had placed in the American grid, it would be shut down. 

“Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia,” Mr. Trump 

,  now known as X. It wasn’t clear how much the President knew about the operation before we published our story. His national security staff knew the story was coming and raised no national security concerns about its publication since the code was designed to be discovered. Instead, the President reached immediately for wording that appeared intended to intimidate, charging that a free and independent press was not only inimical to the United States, but that reporters were guilty of the highest crime described in the Constitution. 

In newsrooms, all of us would be wise to reflect on why there is such a huge gap between the job journalists believe they are performing for a democracy and our readers’ perceptions. 

With President Trump’s return to power, he has vowed again—in campaign rallies and statements—to use the power of his office to take on the news organizations and other media he has long sought to discredit. He is acutely aware that America’s once-fulsome trust in traditional news organizations, and in the very idea that the press is a critical and independent arbiter of facts, is at an all-time low—lower, in fact than the trust in media operating in some of the world’s most repressive governments. It has not helped that the news environment has been polluted by sources not rooted in reporting or fact-checking at all; endless streams of partisan posts, manipulated photographs, and misleading clickbait have been confused in the minds of the public with news generated by real news gatherers committed to unearthing fact. 

And who can blame them? At first, Facebook said it was more like a giant pipeline of messages and images but not an arbiter of their truth. Then, after the 2016 election, it hired armies of fact-checkers. More recently, it got rid of them, returning to the 

 that somehow “community notes” on posts will serve the same purpose. No reporter, no editor, no publisher can ignore the reality that most Americans don’t understand what constitutes a media outlet these days. Many readers don’t understand the difference between what reporters do—unearthing evidence, testing it, conducting scores of interviews—differs from what partisans or commentators do. They do not understand the crucial role of editors. 

But in newsrooms, all of us would be wise to reflect on why there is such a huge gap between the job journalists believe they are performing for a democracy and our readers’ perceptions. It is also moments like this—moments of change in government mixed with the potential for intimidation—that call for journalists and journalism to focus on independent reporting more than ever, and to embrace old values: stories that dig deep, that surface facts and back them up with evidence, and that give citizens a view of their government that they won’t be getting from the White House, the Congress or the bureaucracy. American democracy depends on that kind of journalism at all times, but it is particularly vital whenever control of the White House and both houses of Congress are in the hands of a single party. In such conditions, Congressional investigations fall off, and the need for outside examinations of how government power is employed is greater than ever. 

None of this means it is time for a partisan or adversarial press. The best reporters I know realize that a new administration brings with it new ideas and approaches. Journalists, like the public, need an open mind to the possibility that many of those ideas are constructive, and may work. But openness can exist alongside healthy reportorial skepticism for the official story, in which government pronouncements are examined with an eye toward who benefits and who loses. Almost every important policy initiative I’ve encountered in 30 years of reporting in Washington has an interesting origin and an intriguing back story. If, for example, environmental regulations are being curtailed or secret deal-cutting is underway with Russia and Ukraine, or if a president sounds like he may want to redraw the international boundaries of Greenland or Canada, it’s time to examine the reason, the logic, and the approach. 

This tension between government officials and independent reporters and news organizations is not a bug in the American system, it is a feature as central as the push-and-pull among the president, Congress, and the courts. It makes democracy work. 

That isn’t treason. It isn’t espionage. It isn’t disloyal—far from it—and it shouldn’t be considered partisan. It is reporting, and it is the core of what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the 

, and what the Supreme Court had in mind when, in the 

 decision, it determined that the government could not exercise a prior restraint on what will be published. 

Unsurprisingly, part of Mr. Trump’s strategy—a strategy he has described himself in years past—is to fuel the existing distrust in the media. He has made clear his belief that if he undercuts the public’s perception of the media’s trustworthiness it is easier to challenge stories that take on his facts, or his narrative. Thus, Mr. Trump’s somewhat brilliant hijacking of the term “

”—which before 2016 was a term used to describe, say, Russian and Chinese propaganda. More disturbing is his use of the term “enemies of the people” to describe journalists doing their jobs. It comes right out of the history books, often used to cast independent reporting as undermining the state, rather than strengthening it. And it can incite violence.

No one knows how this animus toward an independent press will unfold in Trump 2, but there are some clues. Kash Patel, his nominee to run the FBI—the agency that usually handles leak investigations—

 before the election that the Trump administration would “come after the people in the media.” The expected incoming head of the Federal Communications Commission has raised the possibility of revoking Federal broadcast licenses for television stations that it views as biased against conservatives. 

News organizations are amassing the cash for prolonged legal challenges in case they are plunged into a new era of conflict with the executive branch: leak investigations, libel suits, license challenges, and tax investigations. Of course, as a nation we have been here before: When John Adams wanted to suppress critical coverage, he embraced the 

. Woodrow Wilson did the same, under the cover of protecting state secrets in World War I, with the 

. (Elements of the Espionage Act gave rise to some of the charges against 

 for his publication of Pentagon and State Department cables.) Richard Nixon had plenty of journalists on his enemies list. While Democrats often don’t like to hear it, there were more leak investigations under the Obama administration than in most modern presidencies combined. 

So, there is nothing new in the tension between the First Amendment absolutism often heard in newsrooms and the government’s desire to control the discourse—for national security reasons, for partisan reasons, or both. In nearly 43 years at the 

, I’ve been through many tense conversations with government officials about plans to publish stories about sensitive national security issues, from intelligence collected from Russia to US efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. More than one government official has asked some version of “Who elected you?”—a way of saying that reporters and editors, who do not have access to classified information, have no way of judging what harm they may be doing. My colleagues and I are open to reasonable arguments, and we have, after careful discussion with editors, delayed some stories or omitted some operational details that would put the lives of government sources or officials in danger. But rarely, if ever, have I seen a story outright killed. 

That kind of self-censorship can prove as damaging as the government seeking the same kind of editorial power. And it is a warning to us all: in an era of intimidation, it is tempting to hold back, and not challenge the government.

It is worth remembering that the idea that the American experiment requires a free and independent press outside of government control was fundamentally uncontroversial for most of the past half-century, at least since the age of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. For decades after the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case, enabling the 

 to publish a secret military history of Vietnam that exposed the hypocrisy and lies of generals and politicians who misrepresented the state of the conflict, few questioned the underlying logic that a true democracy requires a system in which the government does not get to preview, or control, what the populous reads. If it is wrong, libelous, or the result of an illegal leak—there are many, many 

 leaks—it should get sorted out after publication.

Without question, this approach to free speech—barring the government from stopping publication—sets American democracy apart. Britain has far more control over what gets revealed because of its 

, and a lower barrier to what is considered libel. Israel has a vigorous form of military censorship when it comes to writing about the work of the Israel Defense Force or its intelligence agencies. Australia and Japan have more restrictive laws, practices, and customs: During the six years I was a foreign correspondent in Japan, I was astounded by the degree to which Japanese news organizations self-censored. 

Groups of Japanese reporters from different news organizations covering the foreign or finance ministries or the Imperial Palace organized themselves in so-called 

. Rather than fully competing for scoops, they often colluded among themselves to keep some kinds of news from becoming public, in the interest of fostering good relations with their government sources. That kind of self-censorship can prove as damaging as the government seeking the same kind of editorial power. And it is a warning to us all: in an era of intimidation, it is tempting to hold back, and not challenge the government.

But I also found something else in Japan, and elsewhere: journalists worldwide admired the values behind America’s tradition of reporting, and, even if they could not articulate them in legal terms, the principles emanating from the Pentagon Papers case. They largely agreed that a truly vibrant democracy needed an equally vibrant press to keep the country’s most powerful forces honest. Many said their own society wasn’t ready for that, but it was an aspiration, a crucial part of what Joseph Nye, the famed Harvard political scientist, called our nation’s “soft power.” 

In short, a vibrant media was a symbol of the strength of American democracy. 

Now, however, the consensus that the country’s democracy relies on truly independent reporting is beginning to shatter. Not surprisingly, it is yet another victim of the partisanship of the era. The problem is not just animus from the new administration or those vilifying the media from the right. It is also coming from the left. As the war between Israel and Hamas grew more brutal in 2024, those protesting the scope of the killing in Gaza charged that the major media was reflexively pro-Israel; meanwhile, longtime supporters of Israel argued that the 

, and other traditional media, were recently pro-Palestinian. They pointed to the stream of stories from the ground that described scenes of civilians killed, left homeless, or in search of water or escape, arguing that news organizations forgot that these events were triggered by the October 7 terror attack. Both sides were certain that they saw bias in the coverage—they just vociferously disagreed about which way that bias ran. 

I only know one North Star to follow in such a world: Get out and do the reporting. Don’t worry about whose narrative it fits—that’s the job of partisans, not journalists.

As A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the 

 recently, “The newest dynamic—the most difficult to navigate—is that the posture of journalistic independence is now contested by nearly every group we cover on nearly every issue we cover. In just the last few years, the 

 has been called anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Inuit. Anti-Hindu, anti-Catholic, anti-Hasidic, anti-Africa, and anti-Europe. We’ve been called anti-public schools, and anti-Harvard. Anti-fracking, and anti-environment. Anti-CEO and anti-union. Anti-Elon Musk and Anti-Queen Elizabeth. Anti-crypto and anti-yoga pants. Sadly, that is far from a complete list.”

This is the new reality; it is the world journalists and readers now must live in. There is no easy answer and no way that a fractured readership, looking for reinforcement of its own narrative of events, will be satisfied. 

I only know one North Star to follow in such a world: Get out and do the reporting. Don’t worry about whose narrative it fits—that’s the job of partisans, not journalists. If government officials seek to win better coverage through acts of intimidation, stand up to them and expose them. And remember that, as an editor I deeply respected used to say when rallying his journalistic troops, the First Amendment is first for a reason. 

David E. Sanger, a former Distinguished Wilson Scholar, is a White House and National Security correspondent of 

, where he has worked for more than four decades. While at the Wilson Center, he published 

New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, with Wilson scholar Mary K. Brooks.

Cover photo: Members of Occupy Cincinnati display the First Amendment to the US Constitution on cardboard signs as a man enters the Hamilton County Courthouse, Tuesday, December 6, 2011, in Cincinnati, where courts were scheduled to begin hearing arguments on the legality of arrests made in a local park. AP Photo/Al Behrman.

Drawing on examples from across the political spectrum and throughout history, veteran New York Times reporter David Sanger writes about the importance of a free and fair press in supporting a vibrant democracy. 