Trump, the Public, and the Press

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The voters have spoken. A plurality preferred Donald Trump’s stream of lies to journalism’s truths about his many misdeeds.

I have covered and occasionally interacted with Trump for almost four decades and am still trying to understand why voters—and now, many business leaders and publishers—accept his record of ruthless bad behavior, chaotic management, and general incompetence and how journalists should respond.

Voters enjoyed Trump’s ability to intimidate his critics and establishment elites. And the Democrats were ineffective when responding to the grievances and promises—real and imagined—that were the basis of Trump’s campaign.

Even before taking office, the prospect of Trump’s controlling the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court frightened owners of once-proud news organizations. Some seem willing to undermine editorial independence to curry favor with the incoming president.

Billionaires, once thought to be the saviors of journalism, are proving themselves poor stewards of media companies. It is always dangerous to generalize, but several billionaires who have purchased media companies treat their acquisitions as sidelines they can run without much hands-on attention. They believe that running a media company must be easier than whatever business made them rich and that their talent and training are easily transferable from their primary business to media. They also trust their instincts more than others’ experience. They seem to favor many of Trump’s economic policies and fear he might retaliate against their primary businesses should he dislike their publications’ coverage of him.

Billionaires who have built powerful news organizations can assume a perverse sense of entitlement. Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg LP and a former mayor of New York, refuses to have his name included in Bloomberg News’s list of billionaires—Forbes ranks him as the world’s fifteenth-richest person, at a net worth of $104.7 billion—and his news staff of more than three thousand editorial employees rarely covered his years as mayor. During his brief pursuit of the Democratic Party presidential nomination, he proclaimed that Bloomberg News wouldn’t provide in-depth coverage of him or of the other candidates. “And quite honestly,” he told a radio reporter in Iowa, “I don’t want all the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me. I don’t want them to be independent.”

Before I joined the Los Angeles Times as its executive editor in 2018, its new owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, and I discussed the risks to his reputation and that of the Times should he try planting news stories to benefit his other businesses. We agreed that it was my job “to keep the lawnmower out of the flower patch.” We had occasional disagreements, but he kept his word, and in the thirty months before I retired, we never published a story I wanted to kill or killed a story I wanted to publish.

Soon-Shiong was among the first to recognize the likelihood of global disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. After closing the Times building in March 2020, he spent the rest of the year working on his COVID-19 vaccine. During that year, he wasn’t shy about criticizing President Trump for failing to take the pandemic more seriously. So I read his recent post on X with more than passing curiosity. In it, he congratulated President-elect Trump and the vaccine skeptic and former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, on their “great decisions” in appointing “highly qualified critical thinkers” to lead the Food and Drug Administration (Dr. Marty Makary), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Dr. Mehmet Oz), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Dr. Dave Weldon). These agencies all have a say in the approval of the kinds of cancer drugs that are at the heart of his medical research. 

Soon-Shiong seems to have shown no concern that his comments have had an unmistakable chilling effect on the Times newsroom, especially since they followed his decision to block an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president days before the election. It was reported last month that he told the editorial board to “take a break” from publishing articles about Trump.

Sadly, other media owners have shown similarly little concern about the impact of their public praise for Trump. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and bought the Washington Post in 2013, also ordered his paper not to endorse a presidential candidate, killing an editorial endorsement of Harris less than two weeks before the election. Shortly after Trump was named Time Person of the Year, Marc Benioff, who controls Salesforce and owns Time, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone.”

Last month, the Walt Disney Co. agreed to contribute $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library and pay $1 million in legal fees to settle a frivolous defamation suit brought against Disney’s ABC News subsidiary and George Stephanopoulos. Trump has promised to sue other media companies whose coverage offends him. Disney’s lawyers may have feared what depositions might uncover, and they seemed unwilling to argue that Trump is a libel-proof plaintiff. That doctrine holds “that a notorious person is without a ‘good name’ and therefore may not recover for injury to it,” according to Sack on Defamation, the definitive treatise written by Robert D. Sack, now a senior judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Meanwhile, CEOs who criticized Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021, or who would have never done business with his real estate, casino, and consumer companies are now begging for an audience at Mar-a-Lago. Big Tech’s Elon Musk has become a fixture, while Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and other CEOs have met with or spoken to Trump. Lawyers for Trump’s perceived enemies may be busier than ever. He has made the Nixon-Agnew enemies list look like child’s play.       

Not all companies have folded. Following the Disney settlement, he filed a civil suit against the Des Moines Register and the highly regarded pollster Anne Selzer, who incorrectly predicted that Harris would carry Iowa a few days before the election. Gannett, the Register’s owner, has vowed to fight the suit.

Trump and I met in the late 1980s when I was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. One night, I joined a group of nervous bankers on the Trump helicopter. We were flying from New York to see a boxing match at one of his near-bankrupt Atlantic City casinos. The bankers groused about his erratic management while acknowledging his resilience. When he subsequently launched The Apprentice, I thought his business advice was silly, at best comic relief. But that wasn’t the point. His self-confidence drove ratings and introduced him to a national audience. 

Trump and I last sat together at the Time 100 dinner in April 2016. He read the results from five primary elections on my smartphone, confirming he would be the Republican nominee, and we both laughed. I was certain his election was a long shot after he said that John McCain, the former Republican senator, vice presidential nominee, and Vietnam POW, wasn’t a war hero.

But Trump won, and then, after four chaotic years, he lost. Some of his most important aides and cabinet members, in books and not-for-attribution comments, portrayed him as a fascist, an idiot, or both. The Washington Post counted more than thirty thousand false or misleading statements while in office. He was impeached twice, indicted four times, and convicted of thirty-four felonies in the one criminal case that went to trial. In 2023 a civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, and assessed damages of $5 million. A second jury awarded Carroll additional damages of $83.3 million last year in a related defamation case.

And then he won again. He dismissed detailed exposés by brilliant journalists as “fake news,” and millions of voters agreed.

Trump may be a narcissist who has projected his misdeeds on his rivals. The Democratic incumbents were vulnerable, but timing is everything, and Trump and America were ready for each other.

The seeds of Trump’s success go back three decades to 1994, when Newt Gingrich got Republican buy-in for his Contract with America and polarizing politics. That came at the same time as the business model for much of traditional journalism began an irreversible decline brought on by the internet and then social media. Widely accepted, fact-based news gave way to fragmented information, often filled with falsehoods, catering to individual interests and biases.

The Contract with America called for tax cuts, welfare reform, crackdowns on crime, a balanced budget, and other measures. Republicans swept that year’s midterm elections, gaining control of the House for the first time in forty years, as well as the Senate and many governorships and state legislatures. “The Gingrich approach of extreme right ideas, combined with a scorched-earth personal level of politics in attacking opponents—later seen in Clinton’s investigations and impeachment—has also had a major impact on American politics,” the University of Colorado political scientist Paul Teske told the History Channel in 2018. “It helped bring a much more ‘win at all costs’ mentality and a divisiveness that persists today.”

The year 1994 was also when Marc Andreessen cofounded Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape Communications. Its browser gave wide access to the internet, unleashing populist forces that continue to evolve.

When I was named Time Inc.’s editor in chief, in 1994, I was surprised to learn that People magazine was far more profitable than Time. People’s editors understood that readers and viewers increasingly viewed the media and politics as entertainment.

Truth became a casualty three decades later as docudramas and documentaries have been conflated, conflict has supplanted consensus, and Trump counts among his passionate supporters Andreessen, Musk, and other tech billionaires who control how most people communicate and get information.

Early in his first book, The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote about the importance of bravado. “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.… People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.”

Decades later, while involved with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and The Apprentice, Trump’s obsession with overnight ratings, reliance on instinct, contempt for experience, and use of Fox and family as a primary talent pool have made him the perfect candidate and the most imperfect president.

Trump has promised that his return to the White House will bring radical changes to government, politics, and journalism. While contemplating Trump’s many threats, it is worth remembering that America has lived with popular demagogues before and that, over time, truth prevailed. 

In the late 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-born Catholic priest living in Detroit, broadcast sermons that became increasingly anti-Semitic as he found much to admire in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It has been estimated that his audience included as many as thirty million listeners, or 25 percent of all Americans at the time. The National Association of Broadcasters canceled his weekly radio show after 1939, when the war in Europe began, and three years later the Archdiocese of Detroit closed his newspaper.

Although Trump was only four years old when “McCarthyism” first appeared in print—“as shorthand to describe Senator Joe McCarthy’s penchant for lying, bullying, and trying to stifle dissent”—Trump grew up as a disciple, using similar tactics to polarize America. Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s sidekick, also represented and mentored Trump. 

Journalists pushed back, beginning with Herblock (Herbert Block) in the Washington Post and followed by Time and Life magazines, both owned by Henry Luce, himself a Republican and fervent anti-communist. Luce worried that his New York editors failed to understand why McCarthy had so much support from middle-class, midwestern Americans, but he did nothing to suppress his magazine’s descriptions of McCarthy’s demagoguery and his lies or its coverage of McCarthy’s disastrous appearance on television that killed his career. Neither Coughlin nor McCarthy, of course, had the power Trump will have as president.

I have wondered why Soon-Shiong and Bezos waited until days before the election to order their publications not to endorse Harris. It is appropriate for a publication’s opinion pages to reflect its owner’s beliefs, and there would have been little reason for complaint had they decided early in the year not to support either candidate. However, the timing suggests they panicked after realizing a Trump victory was likely and a Harris endorsement could hurt their other, more important businesses.

There have always been privately held publishers who have shown little interest in editorial integrity or independence. I believe, however, that a newsroom’s integrity is more easily preserved by owners who take pride in producing quality publications without competing interests. The Bancrofts controlled ownership of Dow Jones & Co. during the twenty-three years I worked for its flagship, the Wall Street Journal. Although the family supported the Journal’s strident, conservative opinion pages, I never heard criticism of the paper’s news pages from them. Similarly, I believe the New York Times benefits from the Ochs-Sulzberger family’s singular focus on the company that publishes it. 

Privately held Hearst Corp. may be another exception. Although it and Condé Nast laid off hundreds of magazine employees last fall, Hearst’s newspapers remain profitable, with digital subscription revenue largely offsetting print revenue declines. (Hearst’s newspapers in Houston and San Antonio endorsed Harris, despite being in deep-red Texas.) Hearst CEO Steven R. Swartz has said that Hearst is a stronger publisher because the company has invested heavily in professional and business-to-business products that provide strong sources of growth.

Finally, “do we need to change the rules of journalism or to double down on the old rules?” asks Clark Hoyt, a former vice president for news at Knight Ridder and former public editor at the New York Times. Hoyt notes that Adolph S. Ochs pledged “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved” when he bought the New York Times in 1896.

Those are noble ambitions, but it is unclear how many publications besides the Times have the resources to deliver on them, or how well those ambitions can stand up to the Trump White House.

Margaret Sullivan, another onetime New York Times public editor and a former Washington Post media columnist, who now teaches at Columbia Journalism School, has written that “when covering politicians who are essentially running against democracy, old-style journalism will no longer suffice.” Sullivan says, “The press must be just as tough on Democrats, should they adopt similar tactics or start lying all the time.” However, her call for greater analysis and less repetition of baseless statements is directed at Trump and the Congress, courts, and party he seeks to control.

We need to find owners committed to editorial independence. There are some promising signs. The Institute for Nonprofit News has grown quickly in recent years and now has 475 members. Foundations such as Lenfest in Philadelphia and Venetoulis in Baltimore shelter for-profit publications under their nonprofit entities. ProPublica, a nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism, produced more than six hundred stories last year. We must continue to develop new outlets such as Substack and find other ways to make truth fashionable again. 

The truth may not matter to the wealthy owners and CEOs who are treating Trump as much like a pope as a president. But journalists must redouble our efforts to expose every conflict of interest, every lie, and every threat to democracy.

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Norman Pearlstine began his journalism career in the 1960s. He has served as managing editor at the Wall Street Journal; editor in chief, chief content officer, and vice chairman at Time Inc.; senior adviser at the Carlyle Group; chief content officer at Bloomberg News; and executive editor of the Los Angeles Times.