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The Media Today

The Big Chill

The press anticipates Trump’s imminent return to office.

January 20, 2025
A MAGA hat pictured ahead of a Trump rally in Washington, DC, on January 19, 2025. (Photo by Aashish Kiphayet/NurPhoto via AP)

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A little over a year ago, Iowa held its presidential caucuses on the Republican side, and it was really, really cold. Various news outlets used the weather as a metaphor for the state of the race (sample headlines: “Deep Freeze”; “In Iowa, a campaign season frozen in place”; “Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman”). As I wrote at the time, the cold also seemed to symbolize a lack of media enthusiasm as events were canceled and reporters milled around looking to fill the time until Trump inevitably won and they could go home. Almost as soon as voters showed up to caucus, major news decision desks called Trump as the winner; in response, Ron DeSantis (remember him?) accused the media of being “in the tank for Trump.” Eventually, Trump spoke, and various pundits noted his newly gracious tone. He also claimed the 2020 election was rigged and invited onstage a man dressed as a border wall. MSNBC refused to air the speech. CNN cut away before it was done.

Today, Trump will return to the White House, and it is really, really cold—so much so that Trump announced, in a social media post on Friday, that his inauguration will be moved indoors. It will now take place in the Capitol Rotunda instead. “This will be a very beautiful experience for all,” Trump pledged, “especially for the large TV audience!” Nonetheless, Politico’s DC Playbook newsletter declared “the media” a “loser” of the switch. “No formal plans have yet been announced, but it’s hard to see anything more than a small portion of the credentialed media being allowed in the room to personally witness the oath of office,” the outlet wrote on Saturday; plus, “freezing your butt off at a presidential inauguration is a rite of passage for many junior Washington reporters.” (We will, at least, be spared the tedious litigation of how many people showed up. Not that we’re necessarily being spared Sean Spicer.)

So far, I’ve seen fewer cold-based metaphors in the coverage than in Iowa last year—though the chill is once again a convenient symbol of how many journalists and their bosses are feeling, albeit, this time, more out of apprehension than lack of enthusiasm. (Though the latter feeling is palpable, too.) Reaching for a geological, rather than meteorological, metaphor, the media reporter Paul Farhi noted in Vanity Fair last week that journalists are “sensitive to even small tremors” emanating from Trump’s orbit at the moment; among other things, they’re wondering whether the new administration might throw disfavored reporters—or, perhaps, all reporters—out of the White House briefing room, replacing them with pro-MAGA outlets and influencers. (“I don’t think he intends to pack reporters off to Guantánamo,” one cable news veteran told Farhi, “but who the hell knows.”) Also writing last week, David Enrich and Katie Roberston, of the New York Times, reported that newsrooms are already preempting even starker threats: upping their use of encrypted communications to protect reporters and their sources against subpoenas; evaluating whether their libel insurance is sufficient to cover a wave of suits from officials; making sure their tax and visa paperwork can withstand politicized scrutiny. The Associated Press assessed how much latitude Trump might have to “capture” Voice of America, the US-backed international broadcaster that is supposed to be editorially independent. (The verdict: potentially quite a lot, despite legal safeguards.) Reporters Without Borders perhaps put it most succinctly when it noted that American journalism is about to enter a period of “unprecedented uncertainty.”

Not that we’re entirely in wait-and-see mode: in recent days, various Trump critics have argued that sections of the media have frozen at his chilling touch even before he retakes office, citing everything from individual cable scheduling decisions (last week, the media reporter Oliver Darcy scooped that CNN’s Jim Acosta, a perpetual thorn in Trump’s side during his first term, might be moved to a graveyard slot on the network despite scoring strong ratings) to ABC’s move, before Christmas, to settle a libel suit that Trump brought, even though many observers felt that it was eminently defensible. (On Friday, the Wall Street Journal added grist to this mill when it reported that executives at Paramount Global—which owns CBS News, and is pursuing a merger that will require the new administration’s approval—have discussed settling a different Trump suit that is less eminently defensible than absolutely risible.) Nor is this observation limited to Trump critics. Spicer (yep, him again) suggested to the Times that the “massive” “corporate media” “resistance” that marked Trump’s first entry into office has melted away. Per the same paper, Trump himself “smells” the media’s “weakness.”

This is clearly a moment of disorientation for the mainstream press, one that predates Trump’s reelection and has only deepened since then, with the outcome—and its apparently unavoidable corollary that, if not a majority, then a plurality of Americans totally disregarded traditional media efforts to hold Trump accountable for obvious wrongdoing—triggering an avalanche of self-doubt and introspection. In recent weeks, this feeling has seeped awkwardly into the sort of honeymoon coverage that presidential victors tend to enjoy—surely mixed up, too, with fear as to what sort of vengeance Trump might now wreak on the press. At the executive and ownership level, there have, indeed, been worrying signs of obeisance in advance. (Probably the most visible example: Jeff Bezos—the owner of the Washington Post, who is generally said to be a hands-off figure but did spike the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris right before the election—will attend the inauguration today alongside other tech titans, even if the imagined visuals of this scene have been scrambled by the weather.) As I see it, though, claims of a broader pro-Trump vibe shift in the mainstream press are complicated: not only because there continues to be sharp coverage of his incoming administration, but because Trump coverage was, on the whole, hardly a profile in clear-eyed courage before he won reelection. (See: his gracious tone in Iowa a year ago.) 

Rather than a wholesale wilting, we are entering, as I see it, yet another iteration of the perennial how to cover Trump debate. In recent days, ink has predictably been spilled on this question, too. Various media bigwigs have projected steadfastness in the face of Trump’s threats. (“I think, to some degree, we should be self-critical, but we should stop apologizing for everything we do,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, told the Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr recently. “I think that journalism during the first Trump administration achieved an enormous amount in terms of its investigative reporting. And if we’re going to go into a mode where we’re doing nothing but apologizing and falling into a faint and accepting a false picture of reality because we think that’s what fairness demands, then I think we’re making an enormous mistake.”) Others have proposed changes to the way we do things: broadening the lens beyond Trump and his rhetoric to pay more attention to his deeds and those of his appointees; assigning reporters to cover MAGA media full time; deemphasizing pundits and spending more time in the country. Others still have recommended restraint and a resistance to hyperbole or undue negativity, offering Trump praise when it’s merited and covering his administration through “as conventional a lens as possible.” Jim VandeHei, the CEO of Axios, told Vanity Fair’s Natalie Korach that his outlet will proceed “clinically, fearlessly, not emotionally.” Unlike outlets that fanboy Trump—or, conversely, treat his presidency as a “crime beat”—“we’re not hyperventilating, we’re not trying to put our fingers on the scale,” VandeHei said.

Again, this all looks to me like an old debate cycling around once again, albeit on new political terrain. In many ways, it’s a debate that can now feel pointless, or like a relic of times past: viewed one way, it can seem moot given Trump’s clear victory; looked at another, it can seem trivial in light of the concrete harms he might now visit on the press. But I think, without having much desire to relive it, that the debate is destined to recur and continue recurring, because it is fundamental to the relationship between Trump and the press. At the very least, it will be inseparable from the story of his efforts to chill the press in his second term; going forward, the task of working out what media behavior constitutes frightening new obeisance and what is just standard-issue Beltway bullshit will be an important one, and not always straightforward. And—if Trump does appear to be squatting, imperially, athwart the political landscape for now—I don’t see that lasting very long. The “resistance” to his politics is not as dead as some current reports would have you believe. The question of whether the press is resisting—should resist, what resistance means anyway—surely isn’t dead, either.

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In the days after Trump won again, I offered some thoughts on how we ought to think about covering his second administration. I won’t recapitulate those at length here, but I do think it’s worth saying again that, while the result demands humility—or, at least, curiosity—from the traditional press, it doesn’t negate the need to hold Trump accountable, or require forgetting the things he did that demanded accountability before, or even seeing them in a new light. (Of all the disorienting media moments of the transition period, perhaps the most jarring came two weeks ago, on January 6, when you could almost feel major outlets working out how to cover Trump sailing through the mundane process that he shamelessly disrupted four years earlier.) It’s also worth noting again that, from this day forward, there’s no contradiction between focusing more on Trump’s actions and sharpening coverage of his words—in my view, still the most persistent failing of the wider Trump era. (Early headlines previewing Trump’s “unity” message in his inaugural address today don’t fill me with hope.)

As well as being Inauguration Day, today is Martin Luther King Day—a holiday that, last year, happened to coincide with the Iowa caucuses. Yesterday, Politico’s Playbook newsletter shared a newsy nugget (from a new book by one of the outlet’s reporters) about that day: an adviser reportedly proposed at the time that Trump appear publicly in front of an image of King being arrested that would “dissolve” into an image of Trump, a stunt that would underscore Trump’s supposed persecution by the criminal justice system and, the adviser hoped, “blow the media’s mind.” In the end, this didn’t happen. But the context for the proposal hasn’t just gone away, even if most of the criminal cases against Trump literally have. The attention-grabbing impulses of Trumpworld haven’t changed either: for all that Trump might want to chill media coverage, he also, in a larger sense, depends on it (and might even use the media as a vehicle for chilling other constituencies). It’s been suggested that his new administration will quickly execute immigration raids this week, at least in part as a “shock and awe” play for media attention. In some ways, it’s not such a far cry from pulling onstage a man dressed as a border wall. The stakes, of course, are now vastly higher.   


Other notable stories:

  • For CJR, the photojournalist Alan Chin reflects on documenting the campaign season that led Trump back to the White House, and speaks with colleagues about how they see what happened. “Americans are told almost every four years that the current presidential election is the ‘most important one of your lifetime.’ It’s hard to avoid concluding that the photojournalism covering this past high-stakes cycle—capturing one important moment after another—helped lead to the outcome,” Chin writes. As Trump returns, “it’s worth considering how we choose the images we shoot and publish…. How photojournalists cover these next four years will be as critical as the past eight. Because 2028 will once again be the most important election of our lifetimes—and the ways that Americans look at ourselves will continue to be decisive.”
  • On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled, as expected, to uphold a law passed last year banning TikTok in the US in the event that its Chinese owner didn’t divest the app, paving the way for the ban to come into effect yesterday. The outgoing Biden administration suggested that it wouldn’t enforce the ban, effectively punting the problem to Trump, but as yesterday dawned, TikTok nonetheless took itself offline. Hours later, access was restored after Trump pledged to sign an executive order delaying enforcement to give TikTok’s owner more time to divest (and not to punish any tech companies supporting the app prior to the order being signed)—though Trump’s order could face pushback in the courts or from Congress. Stay tuned.
  • Also on Friday, a jury in Florida found against CNN in a defamation case brought by Zachary Young, a security contractor, over a 2021 segment on the network about the high costs of evacuating people from Afghanistan after the country fell to the Taliban; at one point, the segment displayed Young’s face on-screen at the same time as a graphic referencing “black markets” (even though the voiceover did not make the same link). The jury awarded Young five million dollars and moved to add punitive damages on top—though CNN settled before those could be outlined. CNN defended its journalists but pledged to take “what useful lessons we can” from the case.
  • And Tom Goldstein—a prominent lawyer who cofounded and publishes SCOTUSblog, a widely respected source of information and analysis about the Supreme Court—was indicted last week on charges including “tax evasion, assisting in the preparation of fraudulent tax returns, failing to pay taxes and false statements to mortgage lenders,” the Post reports. The indictment alleges that Goldstein was “an ultrahigh-stakes poker player” who incurred big losses and didn’t always report winnings—and that, at one point, he carried nearly a million dollars in cash in a duffel bag on a flight from Hong Kong to DC. (His lawyers contest the claims against him.)

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.