ON THIS FINAL DAY of the decade I’m responding to a repeated call from the insistent Jill Goodman. Jill, of course, is one of my interlocutors – along with Marshall Miles – in the weekly Public Radio version of this column, which has been airing consistently throughout that decade and longer. (Our first broadcast together was in fact way back in 2007.)

On the air Jill has constantly demanded that journalism do its job of ‘connecting the dots’. This very day our national media, and even more the local media of my New York home-area, have been forcefully highlighting the horrific attack on a rabbi, his family and congregants in Rockland County, NY. These outlets are all doing, in their different ways (example, above left. from the New York Post), the job we’d expect from them.

But I want to pick another dot on the information landscape – one of huge importance but, I would say, insufficiently emphasized by most media outlets. 2019 was the year when a radical change of direction was forced upon the Department of Homeland Security, now spanning nearly two decades of existence. Its main targets have had to shift from Islamic jihadists with origins abroad, to home-grown, primarily white-supremacist terrorists. In September the current (and in Trumpland that means, as so often, ‘Acting’) Secretary for Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan presented his new policy under the operational title: ‘Strategic Framework for Combating Terrorism and Targeted Violence.’

MacAleenan professed he wanted to be:

“… direct and unambiguous in addressing a major issue of our time. In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation”.

Violent nativist terror tactics are far from new in the US; the same goes for the media’s innate tendency toward ignoring their source. I well remember 1995 when I was on assignment in Cyprus, an intelligence listening-post for western security services (the “Five Eyes” alliance and others) who monitor the Middle East, when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. All my intelligence sources were horrified at the media’s immediate knee-jerk attribution of the attack to ‘Arab terrorism’ – which they confidently knew had no connection with the explosion … and sure enough it turned out that the perpetrators were rightist, would-be militiamen Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, respectively of upstate New York and Michigan.

Several times over during the ‘90s I found myself among the too-small number of journalists who sounded the alarm (without myself being over-alarmist, I hope … though history will be the eventual judge of that) in making documentaries about American neo-Nazis and under-reported off-shoots of the Ku Klux Klan. These were gathering force in the heartland, and included one especially disturbing KKK resurgence that spread from Indiana through Ohio to Western Pennsylvania.

Pressure on the DHS has been building through this past decade from security practitioners on the ground for greater official recognition of the internal right-wing threat. We can only hope that its new focus now can be effectively and successfully maintained by Secretary McAleenan  – who is under fire, of course, from his boss in the White House – a man creepily uncomfortable about confronting white terror – remember his mealy-mouthed whimper about “very fine people on both sides” after the Charlottesville killing of the anti-racist Heather Heyer in 2017?

THERE MAY SEEM SOME EMPTY DISTANCE between DHS’s avowed new policy and the bloody knifing of Jewish victims in a New York suburb. But there is a forest of salient features on the landscape that incisive journalism needs to be mapping and connecting. Not least the fact that in New York State alone police have recorded thirteen anti-Semitic attacks within the past three weeks – let alone the fatal attack at a kosher market in nearby New Jersey which left four victims dead, including a police detective. National monitoring by the Anti-Defamation League has noted a 21 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents over the space of a single year. The FBI, too, reported hate-crimes of all types reaching a 16-year peak last year.

And besides the salience of actual “incidents”, to use the flat language of the police-blotter, there is that other feature in the environment that needs to be included: the climate of the country.  Less easy to record in detail, but quite palpable in our everyday experience, has been rampant, loudly-expressed intolerance and demeaning of minorities of all kinds, on the worldwide web and in real life too. In line with the old adage that society, like a fish, will rot from the head, honest journalism can hardly deny that our current President of the US has been both a symptom and an accelerant of this rising bigotry.

And a journalist need not be classed as a partisan propagandist for fully quoting – and I’d hope clearly amplifying – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo when he labeled that latest attack in one of his counties as “domestic terrorism”, and went on to say:

“This is an intolerant time in this country. We see anger, we see hatred exploding. It is an American cancer in the body politic.”

American journalism has a duty in our coming decade to play an active role in counteracting that cancer.