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Dear Readers,
In his first administration, Donald Trump posed challenges to the press unlike any since the Nixon White House. When he returns, on January 20, 2025, those challenges are going to intensify.
The day after the election, CJR outlined what’s likely to happen in Trump’s second term: Justice Department leak investigations that will pressure journalists to disclose confidential sources, possibly under threat of imprisonment; the use of Federal Communications Commission licensing and antitrust laws to threaten networks and companies that are not to Trump’s liking; the denial of access to the White House, and to public records under the Freedom of Information Act; restrictions on how journalists cover mass protests, as well as border and immigration enforcement.
Attacks on journalists—rhetorical and physical—are going to increase. So will the denigration of the press as “fake” and irrelevant. There may be efforts to surveil journalists, to change defamation laws, even to block stories from publication. As I type, nonprofit newsrooms are gathering to understand whether tax law could be used to intimidate or even shut down independent media, as has occurred overseas.
Under my predecessor, Kyle Pope, CJR vigorously covered the first Trump administration, with special issues devoted to the threats facing journalists, disinformation, and the COVID pandemic and racial justice movement. We will carry on that work, with renewed discipline and purpose, over the next four years.
In rising to the occasion, we do not pretend that all is okay with the press. One week before the election we examined all the reasons liberals are angry with the mainstream media, on top of the perhaps more familiar charges of bias that come from the right.
Critics are already asking whether the press adequately covered the discontent that propelled Trump to a victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College; whether it continues to uncritically amplify falsehoods; whether it has gotten any better at reaching Americans who feel left out, left behind, or looked down upon; whether reporters are up to the job of covering a deeply divided society with profound regional, urban/rural, educational, class, gender, racial, and ethnic cleavages. Notably, this was an election in which both major-party nominees bypassed traditional news outlets, communicating to the public via podcasters, influencers, social media personalities, and talk-radio hosts.
We remain committed to serious, thoughtful criticism of the press. We will continue to ask hard questions about the media’s ability to be fair, relevant, engaging, and accessible amid a fragmented information environment and an ongoing blizzard of misinformation and propaganda. But we’ll do so from a place of wanting American journalism to be better—not tearing it down.
As we pursue this work, we won’t lose sight of the goals that I outlined when I started as editor, in September. The backsliding of American democracy is part of a global phenomenon, with establishment parties and incumbents under siege everywhere from Poland to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to India. We will focus on threats facing journalists working worldwide to cover illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. We’ll also focus on local news in the US, recognizing that it’s the area of journalism most trusted by Americans, and that the loss of it is directly correlated with apathy, mistrust, and polarization. And we’ll continue to focus on changing business models for news and on artificial intelligence, because independent journalism can’t survive without financial sustainability.
Donald Trump is one of twelve presidents we’ve covered since the magazine was founded, in 1961, the year John F. Kennedy took office. He won’t be the last. The press is the only profession explicitly mentioned in and protected by the Constitution; we will make use of that license, for as long as we can, in service of our democracy.
To fulfill its mission, CJR needs your ideas and feedback, so please feel free to share them by emailing our team at editors@cjr.org. As a nonprofit publication, housed at Columbia Journalism School, we also need your support to sustain our operations, so please consider a membership or donation today.
In service,
Sewell Chan
Other notable stories:
- Other media organizations are setting out their approaches to Trump’s second term. The Freedom of the Press Foundation listed ways in which Trump will try to destroy press freedom—and vowed not to let him. Stat, a site that covers health and medicine, noted that it had already doubled down on its coverage of DC, including by adding a full-time reporter to cover the Food and Drug Administration, and described this as a “seminal moment for science journalism.” Radhika Jones, the editor of Vanity Fair, promised fearless journalism, adding, “We believe in freedom, democracy, and decency. We oppose racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and fascism.” And Business Insider’s Lucia Moses obtained an internal memo in which editors at the New York Times urged the paper’s staff to be “unflinching in the face of intimidation, but also open minded and fair.”
- Yesterday, Trump made his first personnel announcement since winning office, tapping Susie Wiles, the head of his political operation, to be his chief of staff. Counterintuitively, perhaps, Wiles “keeps an extremely low profile and has little interest in appearing on television, where the incoming president likes to see people defend him,” the Times reports; when he gave his victory speech on election night, he tried to call Wiles to the mic, but she refused. This doesn’t mean that she has no relationship with the press, however—in a Politico profile earlier this year, Michael Kruse described her as “a maker and keeper of relationships with reporters, and a sly, subtle shaper of stories that help frame the political currents that can determine the difference between a win and a loss.”
- Also yesterday, Will Lewis, the publisher of the Washington Post, informed staff that they will be expected to transition back to working in the office five days a week over the next seven months or so, extolling the value of in-person “energy”; the union representing Post employees said that it was “distressed” by the edict, describing it as an “outdated” policy that “stands to further disrupt our work rather than to improve our productivity or collaboration.” Meanwhile, in the DC bureau of the Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, the long-serving bureau chief, told colleagues that she will step away in January, in order to spend more time reporting and writing. Politico’s West Wing Playbook has more details.
- Writing on Substack, Taylor Lorenz pushed back on the notion that Democrats will be able to build their own version of the network of podcasters and other influencers that have been credited with helping Trump win reelection, particularly by spreading his message to young men. Right-wing content creators have been boosted by a lavishly funded infrastructure on the right that simply doesn’t exist on the left and isn’t likely to, since billionaire backers are threatened by progressive policies, Lorenz argues. The Democratic Party establishment, she adds, seems to have no interest in filling the void.
- And the Baltimore Banner examines how David D. Smith—the chairman of Sinclair and owner of the Baltimore Sun, who has links to various right-wing causes—tried and failed to reduce the size of the local city council via a ballot measure that was voted down this week. Per the Banner, the Sun ran “a number of full-page ads in support of the measure” while a Sinclair station “took a literal soapbox around town and invited residents to bash city leadership on camera,” and yet, in the end, “Baltimoreans stood firm.”
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