On the day after Kamala Harris lost her historic bid for the presidency, my student journalists and I greeted one another with an affirming silence as I entered the Morehouse College classroom. It’s a space we occupy twice a week on the grounds of an institution founded to educate men who were formerly enslaved.

“Nothing is required,” I eventually told them, borrowing a line from a therapist whose even-keeled mannerisms I deeply respect. The line allowed me to cut through the stillness and signal to the students that they were free to lead a conversation we understood to be necessary at this moment.

One by one, they talked about where they were and what they were recording, writing, or watching when the press began calling Trump the next President-elect, how it made them feel — and most importantly — in the context of their studies, what a second Donald Trump presidency will mean for the Fourth Estate.

Prior to Election Day, they’d imagined this through their long-distance course with their Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones. The New York Times journalist and 1619 Project creator encouraged them to explore the significance behind major news organizations’ decision to forgo a presidential endorsement. The unprecedented move rejected decades-old tradition of the press acting as a check on government by distilling for readers which political choice might best serve the electorate. Facts gleaned from newsroom coverage helped shape these endorsements. The decision unfolded in an era in which many of the nation’s largest publications are now owned by those with business interests dependent on the outcome of the race.

The editorial boards of publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and USA Today — to name a few — declared they wouldn’t endorse any candidate. In an editorial, billionaire Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended his decision by claiming “Our profession is now the least trusted of all” by audiences, and that the decision was an attempt to restore said trust.

In each case, the news organizations lost plenty. Columnists and other staffers quit in protest, and legions of readers canceled subscriptions amid questions of who and what influenced the owners’ decisions to pull the plug on the endorsements. (After the election, Bezos offered Trump a “big congratulations” and success in “uniting the nation, while one of his Amazon executives tweeted he looked forward to working with the president-elect on important issues.)

Despite the potential to restore baseline civility to the highest office of the land, America found it too big a pill to swallow if it meant elevating a Black woman to do the job.

There are journalism leaders who maintain that the only role we have to play is to dig for and present information, walk away and let the audience decide what to do with it. The truth is we make and have always made powerful decisions about how to frame facts, and that framing impacts the way our audiences process and act upon the information we’ve presented.

As I often tell my students: “Facts are non-negotiable, but framing is a choice.”

There are stark differences between the immediate framing of a second Trump presidency in the headlines of mainstream news outlets, and those owned or operated by leaders of color.

Capital B News: A Trump Win, Against the Will of Black Voters

The New York Times: ‘Trump’s America’ Victory Changes Nation’s Sense of Itself

The Mississippi Free Press: Trump Wins White House, Promising to Wield Power as a Dictator and Send the Military After ‘The Enemy Within’

The Washington Post: Trump retakes the White House, How he changed strategy to pull off a remarkable defeat of Harris

The Emancipator: Democracy in darkness: American voters choose Donald Trump, again

USA Today: Donald Trump wins the election in stunning political comeback

President-elect Trump has and will continue to target the news media with vitriol, declaring journalists as enemies of the people that his following should despise. It is imperative that we study how the historic Black press has muscled through similar times when power sought to reshape reality through mainstream media, launch hateful attacks against racial and ethnic minorities to block their access to the ballot, and foment violence through their words and actions to destabilize communities.

The historic Black press can serve as a guiding light for practicing journalism in pursuit of a healthy democracy — or, at least, survival and community. They most often achieved this by opting against adopting a false neutrality and poor framing, opting instead to tell the truth in the plainest terms.

The Freedom’s Journal, which in 1827 became the nation’s first Black newspaper, famously declared that “too long have others spoken for us.” That meant even well-intentioned abolitionists had to step aside and allow those closest to the injustice help lead the narrative.

Editors John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish were also responding to the power of Mordecai Noah — the White sheriff, playwright, diplomat, judge and publisher whose widely circulated newspapers spewed racist tropes about Black people.

In the pages of the New York Enquirer, Noah wrote about Black people as indolent and uncivil, underscoring the power of the freedman’s voting bloc. In writing reviews about a “peculiar people,” Noah used his columns to convince the masses that free Black people were dangerous and without the intellect needed to vote.

During New York’s state political convention in 1821, Noah leveraged his power and influence to successfully advocate for Black voter suppression.

The Freedom’s Journal and subsequent Black media countered those narratives with columns endorsing emancipation and full citizenship rights of the Negro, along with reporting that accurately depicted the breadth of White-led crime vis-á-vis false narratives about overt Black-led crime.

Frederick Douglass would emphasize in his publication, The North Star, that the type of full citizenship that the Black press advocated for could only happen with access to the ballot box. The journey to securing those voting rights would prove to be a hard fought battle spanning well over a century from the founding of the nation’s first Black newspaper.

For decades, post-enslavement mainstream periodicals aided and normalized lynchings by publishing false narratives about dangerous Black people to excuse White vigilante mob justice. Chronicling how Black men were not, in fact, rapists on a spree to conquer White women, Ida B. Wells’ investigations properly debunked one of the most common falsehoods being spread through newspaper accounts. Using quantitative data methods, Wells’ journalism shifted the narrative to shine light on the fact that White women were having consensual, interracial sexual relationships and that was why these Black men were often left hanging from trees.

Alex Manly, editor and publisher of Wilmington, North Carolina’s The Daily Record, eloquently countered the same tropes by writing about consensual, interracial sexual relationships, and daring to expose the sexual assaults Black women faced at the hands of White men. In 1898, though, a White mob burned Manly’s Black daily newspaper office to the ground as part of an insurrection, massacre, and a stolen election that put an end to Wilmington’s multiracial democracy, laying the groundwork for the segregationist rule of law that kept Black people from the ballot box for generations to come.

During and after World War II, federal authorities threatened Black publishers for investigating and printing what the mainstream press failed to acknowledge — that Black servicemen and women faced Jim Crow discrimination within the ranks of the U.S. military. There were race riots and segregated blood supply. Through the “Double V” campaign, the Black press questioned, “How were we to fight the good fight of democracy in other nations, when our own could not live up to those principles?”

Then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to charge publishers with espionage as installations moved to ban copies of the Black newspapers from being sold at military posts. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had the president’s ear, advocated for truth-tellers in the Black press. The press corps cut a deal with the acting attorney general and avoided trouble in exchange for a promise to end their critical coverage of the war. The Justice Department and U.S. Supreme Court thwarted Hoover’s efforts to continue his attack against the Black press well into the mid-1940s.

Charles Loeb, a Howard University premed student turned journalist, reported from the ground in Hiroshima and was responsible for debunking the U.S. government’s propaganda denying the human effects of atomic bomb killings. While we can call that denial “the Atomic Bomb Lie” in a headline decades later, such was not the case in mainstream media when it mattered the most.

Some of the mainstream press’ shortcomings, like the failure to publish their investigation outlining a full account of Emmett Till’s murder, are being corrected more than half a century later. Newly unearthed evidence supports the reporting and concerns of Black journalists at the time that there were multiple killers involved in the boy’s execution. Archives of the St. Louis Argus discovered by a Florida journalism student in 2013 show images and stories exclusive to the Black press that help shape a complete narrative of the killers’ trial. And of course the world would not know the brutality Till suffered without the open casket photo taken by David Jackson and published in Jet, a move historians credit with spurring the Civil Rights Movement.

Without the clarity and remonstrance of the historic Black press, we don’t have a full account of accurate American history. The Black press created a blueprint by which we can understand how to recognize racial undercurrents in how narratives shift with language, hard facts and the urgency and courage to report these things in plain sight with the immediacy that they require.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for us to report what we clearly see and outline the hypocrisy without defaulting to performative neutrality. We do this by pretending that Trump must confirm or clarify what happens before we can determine it to be true.

We often adopted the hijacked language of “woke” without asking politicians what they meant by the repeated use of the word as a derogatory adjective. We continuously questioned the identity of an accomplished Black woman who’s never been confused about her identity in a nation that concocted a one-drop rule. As we often do on scale, we allowed Trump’s ridiculous accusation to lead coverage rather than offering the historical context to the overt racism behind the question.

In too many instances to count, we in the press amplified disinformation and harmful rhetoric — irresponsibly covering a nation’s leader who has so often broken every baseline rule of civility and decency expected of the highest office of the land.

Beyond the candidate, we must examine what his influences have meant to our society in a journalistically sound approach that prioritizes facts over the chaos of rhetoric and lies.

We have models of what pro-democracy reporting in the spirit of the historic Black press looks like, and it’s often overlooked in the modern version.

When the Amsterdam News investigated the bail reform industry, its journalists centered the data on racial disparities in the pre-trial justice system to get us to the fullest origin story.

When MLK50: Justice Through Journalism formed a new, Black-led newsroom in 2017, it didn’t shy away from defining its mission as one in pursuit of eliminating racial inequity and socioeconomic inequality. Their clear stance cements the idea that a form of resistance is indeed practicing journalism and fact-finding. That has led to investigations that relieved the impoverished of millions in predatory hospital debt, a lawsuit settlement that forced the release of records in the public interest and a report that reveals the price Black journalists have paid to engage in this sort of democracy work.

This sample of good reporting is not a Black thing or a partisan thing. It’s just a truth thing. News media has often misrepresented, misframed or simply omitted America’s raw and uncomfortable truths from its coverage. While the historic Black press didn’t have to contend with our tech-savvy war on reality, they understood how disinformation wages war on the truth and the quality of our lives. They confronted that, not with a false sense of neutrality, but with the courage to resist dismissing the reality of the moment by laying bare what’s before us. We must do the same if there is still time to atone for our collective coverage mistakes.