Announcing a professional move from the Atlantic to the Brennan Center for Justice, longtime former Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman writes on X, "I've decided to get off the sidelines. I have resigned from The Atlantic and joined the leadership team at the Brennan Center in the fight for democracy."
That formulation made me chuckle for several reasons.
First, who thought that The Atlantic, in its current hyper-activist anti-Trump instantiation, was on "the sidelines"? Editor in chief Jeff Goldberg, my former Forward colleague, is a journalist, not a politician or a lobbyist, but one of his many talents is to place himself and his team's journalistic work right in the center of the action, not on the sidelines.
Second, a journalist getting "off the sidelines" might typically be leaving to join a political campaign, or to serve in the government. Gellman is leaving to join a 501c3 nonprofit organization with roots at NYU Law School. Sure, the c3 also has a c4 and it discloses some lobbying expenses, but even so.
Third, very few people at least in America openly pronounce themselves as anti-democracy. Even those who want to keep Trump off the ballot and thus deny voters the choice to re-elect him portray themselves as pro-democracy. And Trump sympathizers view the weaponization of the Biden Justice Department against Trump and his supporters as antidemocratic. So the idea that there is a "fight for democracy" has almost become nonpartisan, though the definition of the fight and what victory might look like is contested.
None of this is to cast any aspersions on the Atlantic, on Gellman, or on the Brennan Center. It's just to say that to a lot of people, the line between advocacy journalism and a progressive nonprofit may be a little less crisp and more blurred, with neither the Atlantc nor the Brennan center necessarily either on the sidelines or right in the center of the action.
