As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his return to the White House, media experts are sounding the alarm over the potential consequences for press freedom.
In the latest episode of “The Poynter Report Podcast,” Kelly McBride, Poynter senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, outlined three ways Trump could “intimidate or destabilize the environment in which reporting happens” during his second term: influencing federal regulations to target media owners, leaning on the Department of Justice to go after anonymous sources and leveraging the Sedition Act to prosecute government leakers.
“This will both hurt those individual reporters and those organizations, and it will have a chilling effect, because it will make sources less likely to come forward, and it will make other journalists less likely to push hard on vigilant coverage,” McBride told Poynter senior media writer and podcast host Tom Jones.
Ren LaForme, Poynter’s managing editor, acknowledged the concerns. “I’m nervous,” he said.
“The business of journalism ain’t good,” LaForme said. “We write about that every day, right? There are some bright spots. There are some folks coming up, nonprofits. It’s local folks who really care, who are doing great work. But overall, the structure that underpins some of the legacy news organizations is looking pretty rickety, and I think we’ll see some of it collapse.”
Despite the threats Trump poses to press freedom, McBride and LaForme said that the media performed reasonably well in its coverage of the 2024 election, with McBride suggesting a “B to B-minus” grade.
“I would have given them maybe a B-plus, A-minus, except for how they used polls,” she said, noting the media’s overreliance on polling data often missed the mark.
LaForme agreed that the press did a “pretty good job” of covering the candidates. “I don’t think there’s a person in America who didn’t know who they were voting for, at least if they were voting for Donald Trump,” he said.
However, both identified areas where the media fell short. LaForme pointed to the press’s tendency to focus more on the “many, many concerns people have about (Trump)” rather than exploring what appeals to his supporters. He also highlighted a recent Poynter article by faculty member Fernanda Camarena that criticized the media’s treatment of Latino voters as a “homogenous block,” failing to recognize the diversity within that demographic.
McBride said the press often covers political candidates as characters rather than exploring the specifics of their policy proposals.
“We the media cover political candidates like characters and, and in some ways, the public votes on them as characters. ‘Who do I like better? Who gets me better?’ ” McBride said, pointing out that this happens partly because media coverage doesn’t often provide details about candidates’ policies.
McBride and LaForme both argued that the media must put work into building trust and fostering media literacy among the public as the industry navigates the challenges posed by Trump’s comeback.
“This is a pivotal moment for mainstream media, because they are going to have to either declare that they are only after one audience or the other, or they’re going to have to demonstrate their relevance to the entire political spectrum,” McBride said.
Listen and subscribe
Follow “The Poynter Report Podcast” on your preferred podcasting app (and don’t forget to leave us a rating and review):
Previous episodes
- Episode 4: PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders predicts a long road ahead for election fact-checking
- Episode 3: NBC News and MSNBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki on the state of polling and America’s election systems
- Episode 2: Poynter president Neil Brown on a new report that highlights some bright spots in the business of media
- Episode 1: NPR TV critic Eric Deggans on what the media gets right and wrong about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
Credits
The Poynter Report Podcast is produced by the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg
- Host: Tom Jones
- Executive Producers: Elliott Wiser and Ren LaForme
- Producers: Madilyn Siner, Noah Chase and Tom Jones
- Director: Christopher Campbell
- Special thank you: Neil Brown and Dr. Mark Walters
