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One of my students recently requested an interview with a scientist at one of America’s national labs about the scientist’s published research. Normally, such a request might spark an offer of a brief interview, or at least a note begging off for lack of time. But the response to my student, Sofia Alvarado, was different—and ominous.
“I’m sorry it has taken me a little bit to respond to your inquiry,” the scientist wrote. “I had to forward it to our media office to get guidance from them. Unfortunately, due to the current administration’s executive orders on climate change, I am not able to talk to you about this article.”
Getting stiffed by sources is nothing new for student journalists. Mine often struggle to reach the three sources I require for most of their stories, especially when that story is a class project with no guarantee of publication. But that’s “I won’t talk to you.” This was “I can’t.”
How can I hope to train the next generation of journalists if their sources are too afraid to talk to them? Especially scientists, who I’ve always found to be approachable and enthusiastic about being able to tell a curious reporter about their work. They dedicate their careers to endeavors that may seem arcane to outsiders, and many of them know that a reporter can translate their work for a general audience.
In just a couple of months, however, the Trump administration has put that partnership at risk. The new administration is trying to censor topics from the national conversation on many fronts, including bans on hundreds of words from government websites—from “climate science” to “diversity” and “equity.” The administration is also slashing funding for research that crosses its fuzzy lines of prohibition, and its point man on health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is muddying the waters on accepted science, like vaccine safety and even the value of fluoridation. Many researchers say they are now working under a “climate of fear,” according to a recent open letter, with some “removing their names from publications” out of concern about losing their jobs or funding.
The fear about speaking openly is not limited to hard sciences. Here in Texas, the legislature has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in hiring and admissions at the college level, and vocal members of the legislature want to extend that ban into classroom discussion of these topics. Another of my students, Oliver Engel, recently interviewed a professor on the topic of teaching, who mentioned that she uses “a diverse range of course materials” so that a broad array of students might find something in the readings that connects to them. “As soon as she said that,” he told me, “she immediately asked me to take it off the record and requested that I do everything I could to avoid including the word ‘diverse/diversity’ in the story”—even though the word was in a context completely outside of the realm of DEI. Another interview source he spoke with referred to “a diverse group of languages” when discussing artificial intelligence. After saying the phrase, Oliver said, “she also backtracked and mentioned that she would prefer a different word be used in its place.” This anxiety about the use of a single innocuous word put Oliver in a bind. “I don’t want to perpetuate the political narrative that ‘diversity’ is a dirty word, but I also have to think about protecting my sources and their employment,” he said.
Of course, silence from sources isn’t unique to student reporters. Businesses and politicians have always tried to shape their own narratives and freeze out the press—although it seems to be getting worse. The White House has driven this disdain for the press, with spokespeople who are unlikely to comment or to find new ways to be obnoxious about it. In response to a New York Times reporter’s request for comment last month about the possibility of shutting down vital observations of carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to comment, writing in an email, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.” In this, the White House may be taking its cues from Elon Musk, who, after buying Twitter in 2023, set the company’s public relations email address to auto-respond to press inquiries with a poop emoji. (That policy ended the same year; in response to a request for clarification, John Stoll, a spokesman for X, the current name of the company, told me via email, “Poop emojis are only by request now 🤓.”)
So maybe I am preparing my students for reporting in the real world after all. I’m telling them to fight the silence by doing what we journalists know how to do: to be politely persistent and to keep going after those sources, to broaden their search and, as I say in class, “bring the butter”—that is, to butter people up a little. In a broader sense, I am trying to get my students ready for a tumultuous journalism environment—which also includes the collapse of advertising, the ailing newspaper business, and the rise of well-funded propaganda outlets.
I started teaching journalism at the University of Texas at Austin four years ago, after nearly forty years as a reporter at the Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. My last beat at the Times was climate change, and one of my courses helps students climb the learning curves of science and policy to cover the environment, climate change, and other intimidating topics, and to find ways to write stories that connect with readers on a personal level. I wasn’t expecting to be teaching them forbidden knowledge. After all, the science is clear, even if the politics is murky. These pressures add to the burdens for those who want to learn the craft of journalism. Isn’t having to learn AP style hard enough?
Still, I’ve got a feeling my students will rise to these challenges. During a recent Zoom visit with my class, Dana Hull of Bloomberg said being shunned by Tesla, the core of her beat, made her work harder but also better. “Many large corporations have big PR teams who field inquiries from reporters, dole out ‘exclusive’ interviews with executives or hand out news ‘under embargo,’” she told me in a follow-up email. “But Tesla disbanded its communication team in late 2019. That’s meant that the beat reporters who cover Tesla have to dig harder to find stories, and the documents that support them.” Hull has unearthed some great scoops, including a recent story about Musk secretly building a gigantic battery to feed power into the Texas grid.
This I know: These students are smart. They are remarkably resilient. They got through COVID. They are dealing with the chaos of the Trump administration. They are interested in understanding and dealing with crises like climate change that affect us all. They give me hope.
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