By Chris Satullo

It’s been a hard slog, this 2020 – from impeachment to outbreak to lockdown to recession to more outbreak to George Floyd to martial law to more outbreak to election panic to the Night of the Red Mirage to the clown coup to a Pearl Harbor’s worth of deaths per day as the mad emperor whines and his people prepare nooses to punish the patriotic.

We all need help keeping our bearings and staying sane.

Don’t know about you, but I rely heavily on good journalists to give me that help.

Today, I’d like to thank some of them who helped me handle 2020, while spelling out why I think their work is so worthy of your attention. 

First mention of course goes to my “landlord” here, Dick Polman.

I suspect some of you, his readers, might not grasp how grindingly hard it is to do what my friend Dick does here on National Interest every week – without ever seeming to break a sweat. He turns five-to-six pieces of hot-off-the-news political analysis that crackle with wit and insight – and benefit from a seasoned grasp of the cycles of American politics and history that is beyond the ken of the relative children whom many news organizations now dispatch to cover campaigns.

Now, onto some of my other favorite guides for navigating the blasted terrain of this annus horribilis:

COVID-19 posed unprecedented challenges for journalists. It was a situation where the lives of one’s readers literally could depend on whether you could make swift sense of a daily deluge of contradictory findings, heart-wrenching details and self-serving bombast from politicians of all stripes. And it was a learn-as-you-go situation, staying one frantic step ahead of your audience. Epidemiology 101 is not on the core curriculum of any journalism school I’m aware of.

Here are some sources I’ve been able to count on to consistently give sound advice on the pandemic:

The Atlantic deserves the public service Pulitzer Prize and a grocery cart full of other awards for the way it has covered the pandemic from every conceivable angle – with clarity, accuracy on the science, investigative passion, helpful wit and above all an unerring sense of the questions that an intelligent but alarmed reader would want answered at that very moment.

All of the Atlantic writers working on the virus are good (yay, Ed Jong), but two in particular have fed my brain while calming my anxiety:

Dr. James Hamblin (even though he looks about 12 in his headshot) reliably demystifies the medical science and turns it into workable advice for daily behavior.  

Dr. Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard, won my heart early in the pandemic by calling foul on other public health voices for issuing confusing or counterproductive advice. She combines a grasp of the science with an understanding of human psychology and the principles of effective messaging that eludes some other oft-quoted experts.

I can’t imagine that Atul Gawunde gets more than two hours of sleep a night. He’s a surgeon at one of America’s top hospitals, leads two health innovation organizations and is a staff writer at the New Yorker, having turned his work there into four books. Nobody writes about health care with more holistic, deeply informed good sense. When he writes about the COVID-19 epidemic, he leaves the reader sobered but hopeful: Yes, this is serious and scary, but we CAN find our way through.

The Trump era was designed to scramble journalists’ wits, to send them chasing after McGuffins, to trick them into spreading poison even when they were trying to counteract it with sunlight. So let’s hail some political journalists who reliably steered a steadier, more independent and useful course.

A question: Would you tell the truth even it was going to cost you many of your friends and some of your main sources of income? That was the choice facing conservatives who from the jump grasped the amoral, authoritarian awfulness of Donald Trump.  

Two people – Charlie Sykes and Jonathan V. Last – found themselves in that no-man’s land. They chose to stay on that turf and build a palace of nonaligned political commentary. Sykes used to be a popular conservative talk-show host.  JVL, with whom I worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, worked at The Weekly Standard until it folded. 

Together, when America needed it, they built up a new site, The Bulwark, as a redoubt for the Never Trumper movement.

Throughout this election, The Bulwark graced my in-box each day with sharp, funny, quotable dissections of the Trumpian madness and eviscerations of his unprincipled apologists who expect one day to be forgiven because, deep down, they really did know he was bad. I couldn’t have survived the home stretch of the election without those two reassuring me daily that principled conservatism hadn’t disappeared from the land.

So many more: George Packer, more than any other American journalist, can grasp the scope of an American calamity and distill it into a few thousand memorable words.  He did so with the Iraq War and now he regularly does so on the Trump catastrophe, writing for The Atlantic. His latest – “A Political Obituary for Donald Trump” – is succinct, brilliant and persuasive.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is quite frankly my journalistic hero. I unabashedly admire his moral compass, his reporting courage and his ability to see issues simultaneously with global scope as well as firm roots in the Oregon soil where he grew up. No matter the topic, there’s no columnist deeper or more authentic.

Jamelle Bouie has brought a fresh, crisp, Black perspective on politics to the Times op-ed page, far less prone to predictable bombast than some others in that paper. I loved him at Slate and hope he has a long run at the Gray Lady. Gail Collins’ deft, hilarious skewering of the pomposity and hypocrisy of the political animal always has me hunting her byline. (Fun fact: Many decades ago, at a Connecticut alternative weekly newspaper, Dick Polman was her editor.)

Also, a word in defense of the two nerdy Nates, Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Cohn of the Times’ Upshot column. Once again, now that the votes have been counted and it’s clear to all who aren’t brainwashed that Joe Biden won comfortably, their analyses of the polls have been proved far more on point than first-blush hysteria imagined. They got the final electoral map pretty much right.

Kara Swisher, prolific in print and now with a great new podcast, understands and demystifies tech and the business of tech better than anyone else I’ve read. Her nicely modulated, deeply informed rage at how Silicon Valley’s self-righteous greed wounds our democracy and society is something to behold.

Matt Taibbi is iconoclastic, sometimes over the top and occasionally needs help with anger management (don’t we all?). But whether he’s writing for Rolling Stone or his own blog, he has the guts to say exactly what he thinks, beholden to no one, afraid of no one, in prose that crackles like a July 4^th fireworks finale.

Finally, not a specific writer, but a website that is an emanation from the mind of a very fine journalist, Ezra Klein’s Vox. Its ability to distill complex issues and policy debates for the busy reader is unparalleled. (Could do without all that yellow, but you can’t have everything.)

Even Vox has just scratched the surface of what a solid grasp of digital user- experience design could do for explanatory journalism.  But in scratching the surface, Vox gives glimpses of the riches that await, if only we learn to dig deeper.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.