Image by Mohamed Nohassi.

It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.

Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven’t escaped the threats.

In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to the New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they’ll fall out of their sockets.)

It’s probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they’re under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it’s still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.

Bad News

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he’s back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What’s new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.

Even before Trump won the election, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn’t followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper’s opinion section on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper’s editorial board and instituted AI-generated “political ratings” for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.

I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of the Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he’s been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.

It doesn’t help that other large media companies have recently capitulated to lawsuits that Trump, as one of his hobbies, filed or threatened to file. Last December, ABC News settled a defamation suit involving star anchor George Stephanopoulos’s description of Trump’s sexual abuse trial with an apology and $15 million for a Trump-related foundation. In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from 2021 over the company’s suspension of Trump’s social-media accounts in the wake of the January 6th assault on the Capitol. It agreed to pay him $25 million and, coincidentally (of course), tossed out all its DEI initiatives.........

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