Houston, the media has a problem

It is Nov. 9, 2016, and I wake up for school at 7 a.m. after going to sleep just six hours earlier, an anxious mess. I checked my phone and confirmed: Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States. I am fearful for myself and so many others because I have heard what he says about anyone who isn’t like him: white, cishet, conservative and Christian. 

It is Nov. 9, 2024, and I am writing this article. It has been three days since I woke up to the same news: Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S. I am again fearful for myself and so many others for many more reasons than before. He and the Republican party have managed a sweep of the country’s governing bodies and paved the way for the institution of Project 2025.

There are too many policies and projects I anticipate Trump and his government to implement to speak of in one article, and with so many of them, I can and will admit I am not an expert on all of his promises. What I know I can speak better on, and what I also fear deeply for, is the future of journalism under the second Trump administration. 

In (Mild) Defense of Journalism 

It would be hard to count how many times I have been asked by, presumably, well-meaning people about how I feel about joining a field that is either getting overtaken by artificial intelligence, social media, other technology or sensationalism. 

Years ago, when I was a budding high school journalist and intensely defensive of my chosen profession — yes, I knew that early — I responded to these questions with a fervent testimony on its behalf. I had so many idols in journalism, and I was absolutely awestruck at its power. Truly, the profession could do no wrong.

I am so much less sure of that now.

To be fair, I am still awestruck by the power of journalism. The difference between then and now is I have seen how it can be used for good and evil. I still love journalism, and I am still intent on joining the free press when I leave USC, but I have to acknowledge its flaws — and there are many.

The first issue is one I have spent years of my life researching and writing about: the Local News Crisis. Summarizing this issue in just a few sentences is difficult but necessary. I wrote in a Daily Trojan Magazine article earlier this year that the U.S. is on track to have lost a full third of all of its newspapers by the end of 2024. I also wrote that over one half of the counties in the U.S. have only one local news source, and as of last December, 228 of those counties were put on a watchlist by the Local News Initiative at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism to lose said source. 

The Local News Crisis has significant ties to the second issue at hand: a massive misinformation crisis. This crisis generally can be attributed to a few sources. For one, local papers are generally found to be more politically neutral than national networks such as FOX News or even MSNBC. 

Profiting off of the “attention economy,” as coined by Emily Bell, the director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, these networks and social media platforms will keep pushing any sensationalist or polarizing content that gets them clicks or views. The masses come back for more, the content keeps being pushed, and the cycle continues. 

Of course, when people notice this and become opposed to the practice, they will — or might — turn against the media and their trust in it will waver. This is a dangerous game to play when public trust in the media is already very low. 

In October 2024, Gallup reported the percentage of Americans who say they have a good amount of trust in the media had fallen to just 31%, and the percentage of those who said they don’t trust the media “very much” or at all have been steadily rising — to 33 and 36% respectively — since between 2018 and 2020, with a brief exception for “not at all” between 2023 and 2024. 

When the numbers are broken down by party, a dramatic gap appears. In 2024, just 12% of Republicans said they trust the media “a great deal/fair amount,” whereas 54% of Democrats said the same. Independents landed somewhere in the middle at 27%. A similar split is found between age groups, where the younger the respondent was, the lower their trust was in the media. 

I can think of a few current reasons for the drop in public trust, but the one I want to focus on is the man this country just elected to be the next president. 

An Issue of Presidential Caliber

Gallup reported 40% of Americans trusted the media a fair amount in 2015. In 2016, as Trump’s first campaign ran its course, it dropped to 32%. For Republicans specifically, the percentage fell from 32 to 14. 

There are a few different reasons to point fingers at the president-elect when it comes to sabotaging public trust in the news media. For one, it has been a frequent punching bag of his. Freedom House’s 2017 report on the state of press freedom around the world painted a damning picture of how he thinks of and treats any media he doesn’t like.

On the bottom of one page in the report, a quote from Trump is spotlit: “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

During his first presidency, the Trump White House went multiple long stretches without a single press briefing, something that is supposed to happen daily. POLITICO reported that at one point, the daily press briefings became opportunities for then-Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to chastise reporters for coverage the administration didn’t like. 

On the campaign trail for what will be term number two, Trump levied threats against the media to the tune of imprisoning journalists and stripping networks of their licenses. In 2022, he joked at multiple rallies that after throwing journalists and their editors in jail for not revealing their sources on certain matters, they would comply with the threat of prison rape.

At a rally just before Election Day, he said he wouldn’t mind if a would-be assassin shot a member of the “fake news.” 

“I have this piece of glass here. But all we have really over here is the fake news, right? And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” Trump said in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 3. “And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind.”

A report by the International Women’s Media Foundation in 2024 has an entire section dedicated to what it calls “the Trump Effect,” which in part details how his followers have responded to his attacks on the news media. It opens with the harrowing experience of a photojournalist who was covering a Trump rally when he pointed at the press area and declared they were “the enemy of the people.”

“She and the other journalists were shocked, but before they had a chance to process his words, the crowd began spitting at them and trying to grab their press badges and camera straps,” the report read. “After the event, the journalists were escorted to their cars by event security.”

This opening anecdote is one of many the section shares, including a man who stormed the press area at a Pennsylvania rally after Trump criticized CNN and a tense interaction on the stage of the 2024 National Association of Black Journalists’ Annual Convention & Career Fair, where he ripped into moderator and ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott. He called Scott and her question “nasty,” “rude,” “hostile” and “a disgrace” when she asked how he could win back Black voters after he called Black journalists and politicians “losers” and “animals.” 

“During a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania,” the report read, “a white male reporter was approached by someone wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘Journalist. Rope. Tree. Some assembly required,’ a clear, menacing reference to lynching, intended to intimidate journalists covering the event.”

Commands Will Come from the Oval Office

In the early hours of Nov. 6, it became clear Trump would win the Electoral College and the popular vote, and that Republicans would retake the Senate. Just over a week later, networks began projecting that Republicans would take the House of Representatives as well. 

Trump will have far more leeway to institute the policies he pleases. He will control the executive and legislative branches, and with a 6-3 majority on a court where several members are in their 60s and 70s, he will likely shape the judicial branch for the next few decades. His cabinet picks demonstrate that he wants his yes-men close by. 

In the final days immediately before the election, we saw two media giants — The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — pull their punches. Both papers pulled already-written endorsements for Kamala Harris weeks before the election, with the L.A. Times’ owner saying they did so to not increase already-present polarization in the country. 

In the case of the former, a post on the social platform X from owner and e-commerce mogul Jeff Bezos confirmed one of my fears: Corporate media owners are becoming complacent when the media is needed the most. 

“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” he wrote. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Naturally, he posted this after writing in an op-ed published by his paper that a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris would have continued a pattern of endorsements that he wrote, created a “perception of bias” for the paper. But this post is fine. Sure. 

Speaking of X, its owner, Elon Musk, has generated his own share of controversies surrounding his destruction of the platform, various types and degrees of bigotry, and his close association with the president-elect. 

Many essays could be written on the many ways Musk’s purchase and control of the platform have been an absolute trainwreck, but I want to focus on his attitudes toward and treatment of the media on the platform. 

A few months after he bought the platform, Musk began labeling the accounts of networks such as NPR “state-affiliated media,” a term previously used for networks run by their governments such as RT in Russia. Sometime shortly after it was given the label, reporters at Forbes discovered that the terms for a “state-affiliated media” label on then-Twitter’s website had been altered to omit an explicit exemption for NPR from this term because it maintains editorial independence. 

As a result, some news organizations — including NPR — left the platform in the following weeks for similar reasons. NPR cited the label it had been given and the subsequent strategy to maintain its image as a credible news organization without a tainting label; PBS had the same label issue and came to the same conclusion. LAist, Hawaii Public Radio and WBUR — NPR’s Boston affiliate — all left in a show of solidarity toward NPR. 

Recently, on Nov. 13, The Guardian announced it would also be leaving X because it was concerned about the spread of far-right conspiracy theories, racism and the way the platform handled coverage of the presidential election. 

“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse,” The Guardian said in an announcement. 

Musk has now been tapped by Trump to co-lead the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” a name that is all but confirmed by Musk himself to be a nod to a cryptocurrency named after the “Doge” meme. 

Potential and Pervasive Pet Projects

Now that Trump will hold office, there is a well-known — or should be well known — policy plan he may be adopting: Project 2025. 

Project 2025, developed by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, is a 922-page document written by several people who worked in Trump’s first administration — and some who still work for him. It outlines what the foundation thinks the next Republican president should do when in office, and it is a doozy. 

A necessary disclaimer here is that we do not, at this moment, know if Trump will adopt any of Project 2025. He distanced himself from it on the campaign trail even as Democrats continuously pegged it as a hallmark of his then-potential administration. Perhaps this is because The Heritage Foundation had submitted a different project to the first Trump administration and then said in 2018 that over 60% of their suggestions — including leaving the Paris Climate Accords — had been adopted. 

It also could be because senior Heritage Foundation advisor and former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, John McEntee, said a lot of the Foundation’s work will be “integrated” into the administration once again.

Nevertheless, we should be prepared for what could happen. And for journalists, what could happen is disastrous. 

Project 2025 advises on a wide range of subjects, from abortion to federal agencies to immigration, but most relevant to this article is its guidelines on the press. The document suggests several items that would significantly limit the ability of the free press to do its job, including potentially kicking journalists out of the White House.

Project 2025 also seeks to limit journalists’ freedom to protect their sources and seek them out, as authors recommend the next president should direct their administration to pull no punches when investigating journalists who retrieve information from government sources. This particular guidance is written by Dustin Carmack, former chief of staff to Trump-era Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and current director of public policy in the southern and southeastern U.S. … at Meta, who owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Project 2025 also suggests that publicly funded media, such as PBS and NPR, should be stripped of its funding. Contrary to what section author and former The Wall Street Journal editorialist Mike Gonzalez seems to imply in his writing, NPR and PBS do not get their money directly from the government, as is the purpose of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

CPB was created by the government in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and has been the middleman ever since. The corporation gets the money and decides how it wants to split it between every single one of its members. Also, the amount of money allotted to the organization is minuscule, constituting just 0.01% of the total federal budget. 

Gonzalez notes, “Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding,” and to finally do so would be “good policy and good politics.” The stated concern is an apparent worry that continuous funding would result in a BBC-like network funded by the government. Personally, I don’t think an amount totaling $1.33 per US citizen split between dozens of networks will do that. 

It is also worth noting that less than 1% of NPR’s current budget comes from CPB — and other agencies’ — grants. Again, not exactly an amount that will buy you influence. It is, however, an avenue NPR says is critical to maintain its status quo. In their own words: “Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism— especially local journalism —and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities.”

While I have noted that Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, this last policy suggestion is one he is comfortable with. In 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, Trump wrote in major cuts to the budget for CPB. The good news is that, in all four years, Congress — under both Republican and Democrat control — did not let him. We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

Trump has also now tapped the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, to be its chairman. Carr has previously said he would pursue attempts to penalize broadcast networks for perceived political bias. Trump himself had said he would like to take away the broadcast licenses for ABC and CBS because of their coverage of the campaign. While the networks themselves do not need the licenses, their local affiliates do. 

In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr wrote that the FCC should be able to control Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft — also known as “Big Tech.” On X, he called these companies the “censorship cartel.” Experts note his power as chairman does not give him absolute authority to make these decisions, but there might be ways to get around any blockades. 

Indirect Hits

Another almost guaranteed Trump administration policy will be the gutting, or elimination, of the Department of Education. This, again, requires congressional approval. 

Would this directly undercut the functioning of the free press in the U.S.? No. Indirectly? Absolutely. Education in this country has given students the tools to critically examine media and, at the most basic level, the ability to read. The current plan to gut the Department of Education involves stripping public schools and universities of the necessary (and already slim) funding they need to do their jobs as well as effectively nuking any support for special needs programs. This will arguably tank the already shockingly low literacy rate — just 79% of adults — in this country.

Another drawback to these cuts will be the loss of accessibility to education for low-income families via public schools and federal student loans, which could eliminate a demographic of potential journalists who can speak to the needs of and identify with low-income communities. 

The Future

On a very depressing note, I’m actually not sure what can be done to fix — or begin to fix — this. When I speak of the Local News Crisis, I am optimistic. I have answers, or at least beginnings of them. Here, I am scared.

It is heartbreaking to have to think like this about something I love. Because I do love journalism. For all my complaints about individuals and certain publications, I still truly believe journalism is an awe-inspiring force I am proud to be a part of. It has the power to expose the truth and make great change. As Walter Cronkite once said:

“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”

I am not ready to see democracy fall, but it might. 

Jennifer Nehrer is the Daily Trojan’s Data Editor. She is a junior majoring in journalism.