Then-President Donald Trump holds up The Wall Street Journal as he speaks at the White House on April 19, 2020.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Heading into a second term, New Yorker editor David Remnick says Donald Trump’s anger “has been never so intense as it’s been against the press.” The president-elect has referred to the news media as the “Enemy of the American people,” has threatened retribution against outlets that have covered him negatively and has suggested that that NBC, CBS and ABC should have their licenses revoked.
Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, says he expects the incoming administration “to go after the press in every conceivable way … [using] every tool in the toolbox — and there are a lot of tools.”
“I think [Trump’s] salivating for the opportunity to prosecute and imprison journalists for leaks of national security information — or what they would call national security information,” Baron says. “I would expect that he would deny funding to public radio … and TV. And that he will seek to exercise control over the Voice of America and its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as he did in his previous administration, trying to turn it into a propaganda outlet.”
Remnick sees parallels between Trump’s approach to the media and that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both men, he says, challenge traditional notions of the truth. “The Putin regime shows us when there is no truth, everything is possible,” Remnick says. “Lying has come from White Houses for decades and decades. But Donald Trump has changed the game.”
Baron adds that Trump’s target goes beyond the press: “The objective here is to suppress free expression by anyone. … So this is just the first step. And I think people should keep that in mind.”
Interview highlights
On the Washington Post‘s announcement in the weeks before the 2024 election that it would not be endorsing either presidential candidate
Baron: I don’t think there’s any great explanation for this decision 11 days before the election [other] than that [Post owner Jeff Bezos] was yielding to pressure from Donald Trump on his other interests, which are substantially larger than The Post, particularly Amazon, which has many contracts with the federal government, particularly in terms of cloud computing, and Blue Origin, a commercial space enterprise that is essentially wholly dependent upon the federal government for its contracts. …
If this had been a decision that was made three years ago, two years ago, a year ago, maybe even six months ago, I would say fine. It’s not that important to me whether news organizations like The Post make a presidential endorsement. Of course, people can make up their own minds. They don’t need The Post to help them. But I don’t think there’s any logical explanation for this decision other than “Don’t poke the bear.” And I think this was an effort to not poke the bear. And I think it was notably unsuccessful, because nobody can reasonably argue that trust in the Washington Post today is higher than it was prior to this decision. It is substantially lower. I’ve never seen a reputation for a company so severely damaged in such a short period of time. And I think it was a regrettable and deeply wrong decision on [Bezo’s] part.
On the pressure media outlets are facing
Remnick: If you look at the waning influence of what’s called the mainstream press, and if you look at statistics about trust in the press and the ecology of the press, the combination of economic pressures combined with Trump’s pressures has been of immense concern to all of us who were involved in this activity. … These pressures are immense. And Trump knows it. And he knows how it’s affected his political fortunes in the most positive way.
Baron: When [Trump] talks about his triumphs during his first term, he’s cited the undermining confidence in the mainstream press — he’s called it one of his greatest successes. … It’s not the only reason the confidence in the press has declined. There are a variety of reasons. … But the big factors have been market fragmentation and the fact that people can find any site that affirms their preexisting point of view and any conspiracy theory, no matter how crazy it is, they can find somebody who says that’s true.
On the media’s responsibility in losing the trust of the people
Baron: I don’t think that we’ve accurately and adequately reflected the concerns of a lot of Americans in this country. I’ve often been asked whether we had failures in our coverage of Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016. And I say that the greatest failure came well before that in that we did not anticipate that this country could produce a candidate like Donald Trump. We did not understand the level of grievance and anger toward the so-called elites, including and maybe especially the press — although if you look at the salaries of most journalists, they don’t qualify as elite. And so I think we didn’t really do a good enough job of getting out in the country and really understanding the concerns of ordinary Americans. …
I’m concerned that a portion of the journalistic community, if you can call it that, have engaged in what I would consider to be advocacy and activism of a sort. That’s not true of everybody by any means, not even true of the majority of the journalists. But there’s a segment out there that believes in that. And I think that that has hurt us. And we should aim to be an independent arbiter of the facts, try to put them in context in an effort to get at the truth over time. And we should be more focused on the kinds of questions we want to ask and trying to get answers to those questions than thinking that we have the answers to those questions before we embark on reporting. Otherwise, the so-called reporting is merely an exercise in confirmation bias.
On how the collapse of local news contributed to polarized media
Remnick: There are all kinds of news deserts all over the country that have been created by this new news ecology, so that small newspapers and medium-sized newspapers have either shriveled to the point of disappearance or they’ve closed their doors completely. Newsrooms across the river here in New Jersey, for example, that used to have a couple hundred people in them have a couple dozen, at best. They’re hanging on by their fingernails. If that had been replaced by websites with equally aggressive, or even better, news gatherers, of reporters and editors, that would be one thing, but they haven’t.
Baron: Many people in communities, they’ve never even seen a reporter. They’ve never met a reporter. Their impressions of what journalists are is formed by arguments that they see on cable news, partisan arguments, what they see on cable news. And that is really unfortunate, because that is not the way that most journalists carry themselves.
On the American public not being able to agree on facts
Baron: The sad reality today is that we as a society do not share a common set of facts. But it’s actually a lot worse than that. We cannot even agree on what a fact is on how to determine a fact, because all of the elements that we have used in the past to determine what a fact is have been devalued, dismissed, denigrated, denied. All of that things like education, expertise, actual experience, and above all, evidence. …
So the idea here is to obliterate the idea that there is some truth, independent truth that can be determined by independent arbiters of truth, whether it be not just journalists, but the courts as well, or anybody else, and that the only truth, at least in Trump’s mind, is the one that comes out of his own mouth.
On what traditional media can learn from social media influencers
Baron: We have to be better communicators. We have to recognize that the way that people are receiving information today is radically different from the way that we received information when we were growing up and the way we maybe prefer to receive information today. So we have a lot to learn from influencers, actually, in terms of how to do that. Our authority is not just being questioned today, but our authenticity is being questioned today. And these influencers are coming across as much more authentic and therefore people think they’re more authoritative.
Monique Nazareth and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
