Welcome back to our holiday series, Best of The Free Press—your essential guide to all the stories you need to read before the year’s end. Each day this week (except Sunday—that’s for Things Worth Remembering), a different Free Presser will nominate a handful of the illuminating, challenging, or just plain delightful pieces we published over the year, and explain why it’s time to revisit them. Yesterday, Suzy Weiss wrote about the stories that gave us hope in the midst of the chaos. Today, Olly Wiseman nominates seven stories that cut through the chaos in pursuit of one thing: truth.
It’s tempting, as a journalist, to try fitting a helter-skelter political year into a single narrative. I’m not sure that’s possible with 2024, but if I had to pull one lesson out of all the craziness it’d be this: Don’t lie.
Because the hinge moment in American politics this year was the evening of June 27, the night of the first—and last—2024 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It was the moment the current president of the United States—and everyone around him—got caught in a lie.
It was shocking. The White House had insisted that Biden was fit to serve another four years. And then we all saw for ourselves that wasn’t true. I suspect we’re still only beginning to understand the scale of the White House cover-up. (Just last week, The Wall Street Journal released a damning report on how Biden’s decline was handled from day one of his presidency.) But the really troubling thing we already know is how many people in the media aided and abetted it.
A related lesson: Don’t help people lie.
Just weeks before the debate, lauded reporters at mainstream outlets were peddling the idea of “cheapfakes”: Biden is fine, they told us, the videos are just being edited to suggest otherwise. And after much of the press was caught in the lie, they hardly changed their ways. When Kamala Harris was nominated, it was all: No, it’s not strange that we don’t know what a presidential candidate thinks on a whole range of policies. Stop asking weird questions.
This approach didn’t go well for the Democrats.
Your gran was right, honesty really is always the best policy. It also happens to be our business model here at The Free Press. And one we’ll be sticking to as we prepare to cover the next administration, and whatever else 2025 holds. But before we get to that, here are seven stories from the past year about why truth matters. Not your truth or my truth, but the truth.
First up, Bari Weiss on “The Era of the Noble Lie,” which said a lot of what I just said, only better. I’m kicking off with this story because I want a raise—just kidding! It’s great because it gets to the heart of what went wrong for the media, and elites more generally, this year. “What’s become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately described as a crisis of trustworthiness,” writes Bari.
How did this happen? “Too many of the ideas dismissed as the province of nuts have turned out to contain more than a kernel of truth.”
I wish more people at the top of our most important institutions understood this. I also wished they realized how straightforward the solution is. Bari’s prescription? “Stop spinning, stop lying, and stop the condescension.”
Where did we go so wrong? Matti Friedman, our man in Jerusalem, has an idea. In his remarkable essay “When We Started to Lie,” Matti reflects on a time 10 years ago when he covered “an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now.” Working for The Associated Press, he noticed how many of his fellow reporters saw themselves as “activist-journalists”: When Matti asked, “What’s going on?,” they asked, “Who does this serve?”
This instinct to prioritize an agenda over the truth now defines so much of our journalism. “Israel was just an early symptom,” Matti writes. “This is why the growing derangement about Israel and the plummeting credibility of the press have progressed in tandem over the last decade: These are related phenomena.”
Of course, sometimes the truth gets you chucked in prison. That’s what happened to Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who refused to stop speaking out against Vladimir Putin despite an assassination attempt—and who died in February in a Siberian gulag.
One of the most extraordinary things we have run this year is an exchange of letters between the imprisoned Navalny and Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician who spent more than his fair share of time as a political prisoner.
It began after Navalny managed to get a copy of Sharansky’s prison memoir, Fear No Evil, which inspired him to write to the author: “I want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot.” The two began to correspond. The Letters from the Gulag are an astonishing piece of history. Both Navalny and Sharansky exemplify the credo of another great man who was sent to the gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
It’s amazing what happens when you’re committed to just telling the truth, and not to advancing a particular agenda. For evidence of that, look no further than the work of my brilliant colleague Peter Savodnik. Sometimes good journalism gets stuck in your head, like an earworm. And so it was with “The Great Scramble,” for which Peter spoke to scores of voters who defy easy definition—and who feel politically homeless—such as the lesbian trucker who voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
The title of the piece has become a shorthand for me and my colleagues when talking about the weirdness in our politics. And as you’ll find out when you read it, it is in part the tale of what happens to our politics when so many people feel they have been lied to.
I can already hear the objections. If the truth matters so much, then how come America just elected a man who says six untrue things before breakfast? Good question. Eli Lake answered it in a revelatory episode of Honestly, “Trump and the Art of the Bullshitter.”
Eli dives into the past to explain why America often tolerates—nay, loves—a bullshitter, which, crucially, is not the same thing as a liar. As the comedian George Carlin put it, in one of the many memorable lines you’ll hear in this episode, “The American people like their bullshit out front, where they can get a good, strong whiff of it.” And say what you will about Trump, he certainly gets his bullshit out front.
Listen to the episode here, or read Eli’s essay on the same subject here. And then share it with your MSNBC uncle next time he complains “They’re not eating the cats!”
Some of the most dangerous lies are about the past. And sometimes the simplest way to counter them is simply by telling the truth.
In September, Tucker Carlson invited a pseudo-historian named Darryl Cooper onto his podcast. Cooper—with Carlson nodding along—presented a frankly batshit interpretation of the Second World War in which Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the real villain, and the Holocaust was kind of an accident, the result of Germany taking too many prisoners of war. When this very bad history was spreading like wildfire, we called a very good historian to set the record straight.
Thank you to Victor Davis Hanson for reminding our readers of “The Truth about World War II.”
Without good journalists, the truth is in trouble. And if you want to know how to get good journalists, look no further than this essay by The Free Press’s resident oversharer, Joe Nocera. In it, he describes how he squandered his time in college but went on to find success as a reporter by learning, often painfully, on the job.
Today’s media landscape would be unrecognizable to a young Nocera. But the qualities that made—and make—Joe a great journalist still count today: ambition, humility, an appetite for hard work, an intolerance for sloppy thinking, and a willingness to slay sacred cows.
Beyond the Best of The Free Press, here’s what summed up my 2024. . .
Best thing I read this year: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, though I don’t recommend reading about the Great Terror immediately before bed.
Best thing I watched: A game of international cricket, on American soil. Read all about it here.
Best thing I heard: Anything on the Apple Music Classical app, which I started using last month.
Best thing I bought: A new suit.
Best thing I ate: The disgusting amount of fast food that powered me through election week.
Biggest regret of the year: A total lack of progress on my 2024 New Year’s resolution to dunk a basketball.
Best thing that happened: The arrival of Alice Wiseman, on December 21, just in time for Christmas.
New Year’s resolution: To dunk a basketball. I mean it this time! (Plyometrics experts, hit me up.)
What I am most looking forward to, in 2025: Debuting my new suit, maybe as I dunk a basketball, while holding my newborn child in the other hand.
Gracias!
Are we just gonna report that our two astronauts are stranded in space until who knows when or might we suggest that our space program is the s____s . Elon to the rescue