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Last night, less than twenty-four hours after Donald Trump swept to a second term, Rachel Maddow appeared on MSNBC and offered a rallying cry to the network’s liberal viewers. Pointing to authoritarian takeovers of other democracies, Maddow noted that “the more ground the authoritarian takes, the harder it is to ever get that ground back”—making it urgent that those who oppose authoritarians in America “stop them from taking any uncontested ground right from the outset.” The last thing Trump and his allies want is for the millions of people who voted against him “to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as hell,” Maddow said. “We just got marching orders from the universe and the Electoral College.”
This was an exquisitely Maddovian monologue, one that felt like something out of a late-2010s time warp. But other members of the media have suggested that when it comes to tackling Trump, at least, we aren’t in that moment anymore. In yesterday’s newsletter, I briefly noted already circulating predictions that if mass outrage and interest drove eyeballs and subscription dollars to aggressive journalism during Trump’s first term, “exhaustion and apathy” might instead reign as we enter his second. After I wrote, this sort of chatter continued. In a piece headlined “The #Resistance Is Futile,” Puck’s Dylan Byers argued that while Trump’s comeback might “seem to portend increased audience demand for a return to the resistance-style journalism of the democracy-dies-in-darkness, grandstanding-Acosta, soliloquizing-Maddow variety,” the media industry has fundamentally changed since then, its audience having aged and shrunk. Even Maddow, Byers added, archly, “now works just one night a week—a chunk of which she spends promoting her books and podcasts.”
Other media voices yesterday fell somewhere in between the evangelizing of Maddow and cynicism of Byers. Their contributions can perhaps be seen as the start of a debate, which seems sure to run and run, as to where the line should now lie between overtly fighting Trump and simply throwing up our hands. “Editors should be sending a clear message that they will choose accountability over resistance,” Jessica Lessin, the CEO of The Information, wrote. “That’s how we show the critics of the press why the press is so important.” Stephen Engelberg, the editor of ProPublica, struck a similar note, promising aggressive investigative coverage of “what promises to be a drastic change in the role of the federal government in all of our lives,” while adding, “we are journalists, not leaders of the resistance.” But others leaned into the latter word. The media critic Dan Froomkin praised Engelberg’s missive, but lodged “one quibble: journalism *is* resistance.” Addressing an imagined young journalist, Samuel G. Freedman, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, wrote in CJR that, “faced with the intended demolition of democracy, the news organizations that you will be populating and perhaps leading must regard themselves as part of a principled resistance.”
Already, there is a lot to unpack in all this. There are some real philosophical differences here, and some semantic ones. There is a difference, too, between “resistance” with a small-r and “Resistance” with a capital-R and hashtag, the latter evoking a caricature of the performative anti-Trump liberal politics of which Maddow, at least in the eyes of her critics, is a leading avatar. If this strain has been unfashionable for a long time now—and the defeat of Kamala Harris has only nailed its coffin shut—it was never an idea that Serious Journalists felt comfortable associating with, and understandably so. And yet, in some respects, the lines here are uncomfortably blurry, especially in the face of a political movement that has sworn to go after the press even harder than it did before. Underpinning these early debates, too, are urgent questions about the economic viability of the news business.
For starters, Maddow’s monologue last night may have sounded Resistancey in the hashtagged sense of the term, but she was talking specifically about America’s democratic system of government, including the free press; indeed, after calling on the military to clearly assert that it will not deploy force against US civilians, she urged the media to “give the people of this country assurances that they will not become state TV,” and that they will fight for their own freedom “as these guys on the other side…try ultimately to turn us all into some American-accented version of RT.” You don’t need to own an “IT’S MUELLER TIME” T-shirt or Adam Schiff bobblehead to agree with this sentiment; indeed, it is to be hoped that every journalist sees their job as being to, well, resist this outcome. Engelberg may have steered clear of the word “resistance,” but he struck a similar note to Maddow when discussing the role of the press at this moment. “We may be harassed. We may be sued. We may be threatened with violence. We may be ignored,” Engelberg quotes his colleague Jesse Eisinger as having told staff yesterday. “Are we just sunshine journalists, or are we ready?”
This isn’t to equate overheated anti-Trump punditry with coolly fact-based accountability journalism. (The press “must continue to do its workaday job of reporting the news, of holding power to account, of describing the changes that are being made and proposed,” Richard J. Tofel, a former president of ProPublica, writes in CJR today, but “it must do this work with restraint and proportion, not saying the sky is falling when the winner of an election fairly won is making choices he is entitled to make.”) But I would argue that these things exist at opposite ends of a spectrum and that there is a large gray area in between: some things are clearly punditry and some things are clearly straight journalism, but language that, to one good-faith observer, looks like the latter looks to others like taking a side, and vice versa. (Racist, liar, fascist; there is still no consensus as to how the press should go about its very fundamental task of describing Trump’s everyday behavior.) And, more importantly, Trump and many of his supporters clearly see no distinction between accountability and resistance; to them, the former is definitionally the latter. In such an environment, is squabbling over where to draw the line between them really the best use of our energy?
This isn’t just a debate over words; there’s an economic component to it as well. The idea that the “Trump bump” of the first Trump presidency—when energized liberal readers tuned in to CNN and MSNBC and subscribed to the Washington Post while nodding vigorously at its mantra “Democracy dies in darkness”—is dead isn’t just a sudden, post-election realization; media executives have been saying (and in some cases fearing) it for some time. And it appears to be true; maybe the biting reality of a second Trump administration will reenergize audiences for a time, but the vibes (to use a 2024 term of art) are more tired this time. In any case, wishing for a fresh Trump bump is not a sustainable strategy—just as it wasn’t last time, when it actually happened.
Thoughtful reflection about the role of journalism in these tumultuous times is welcome. And yet various media critics have observed something else going on alongside it: not just skepticism that there will be a resistance-fueled media sugar rush this time, but an apparent disdain for the very idea of it among certain media elites, who still seem to imagine, as I wrote yesterday, that their role is to speak across the political divide. Look no further than Jeff Bezos’s recent op-ed in the Post, after he vetoed the paper’s endorsement of Harris—a tortured rumination on lost trust and the “perception of bias,” in a world of “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.”
Depending on how generous you’re prepared to be, you could view this sort of attitude as itself a sincere attempt to expand media reach or the myopia of a centrist elite (or, in Bezos’s particular case, a high-minded rationalization of a flagrantly self-interested decision). What seems to be undeniable is that if relying on the Trump bump is an unsustainable strategy, then this alternative vision hasn’t yet worked either, at least not across the board. Indeed, in Bezos’s case, it proved disastrous—the Post may have been losing readers well before his endorsement decision, but in the days afterward, it hemorrhaged them, with some two hundred and fifty thousand subscribers canceling. I wouldn’t presume to speak for all of them, but it seems clear they felt betrayed. And, while some of those who canceled might very well be the sort of people who own a Mueller Time T-shirt, it seems a safe bet that many of them subscribed to the Post not for its unremarkable quadrennial editorial endorsements, but the aggressive factual journalism it was doing about Trump—the exact sort of work everyone agrees we should still be doing now. Whatever Bezos’s true motives (and I would note, quickly, that his concerns about perceived bias did not stop him hailing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback” yesterday), alienating paying readers out of some poorly articulated concern that they were the only people reading you was, at the very least, a stupid business decision.
And, if hoping for a Trump bump is not a sustainable strategy for the media as a whole, it might still be viable for some individual outlets. As Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire reported last week, Bezos’s decision at the Post seemed to precipitate a flood of support to some rival news organizations, including the US edition of The Guardian, which yielded millions of dollars in donations; The Guardian is now fundraising off of Trump’s victory, as is Vox, while Slate has reportedly far outpaced its normal subscription rates since Tuesday. These are liberal outlets, sure, but each does some valuable fact-based work, no matter who is paying for it.
Since Trump won, there have also been suggestions from some progressive journalists that the left should now develop its own media ecosystem, to mirror the off-the-cuff podcasts that many pundits are currently hailing (exaggeratedly, in my view) as a key to Trump’s victory. Such podcasts are part of the media but they don’t typically do journalism, per se; calling for more of them, but on the left, is certainly not an acceptable substitute for the independent-minded reportorial work of mainstream news organizations. But nor is the idea some evil trespass against informational purity. So much of the present discourse about media is driven by a palpable anxiety, particularly among older industry leaders, that the traditional press has lost its gatekeeper role. There have been serious consequences as a result: the loss of no little factual journalism, especially at the local level; the crumbling of major news institutions and attendant loss of jobs; fewer guardrails against lies and propaganda, which are now easier to find in the first place. But in other ways, the amplification of new voices is exciting. Either way, it’s a reality that journalism institutions must now compete in a noisy informational space, one that my generation, which came of age in this space, understands instinctively. Joe Rogan didn’t just invent it.
Such competition isn’t ideal—I’m on record as arguing that fact-based journalism is a public good that demonstrably cannot survive at scale in a competitive marketplace, and that we need to think seriously about options for public funding to help it survive. This, increasingly, is happening, at least at the local level. Under Trump 2.0, though, it’s fair to assume that the federal cavalry isn’t coming. And so, if we are to compete in this world, pretending that we don’t have any institutional values to appeal to an imagined mass market is not only untenable (especially, again, for an industry under full-fledged political assault) but might be a turnoff; as my colleague Josh Hersh wrote last week, many listeners tune in to off-the-cuff podcasts because they know what they’ll get from them. Again, this isn’t to say that all journalism should become punditry; far from it. But if some liberal readers are attracted to our basic mission of aggressive reporting—and the aggressive defense thereof in the face of sharp new threats—we should encourage that, not scold them as part of some resistance (small or big R) we don’t want to associate with. High-principle hand-wringing about who is paying for work we would be doing anyway is a luxury we literally cannot afford right now.
It would, of course, be great if this sort of aggressive journalism appealed across the political spectrum; if people who have been told to hate the media as part of an explicit far-right political project were able to consistently differentiate hard-hitting reporting from punditry; if our rhetorical assurances that we are strictly nonpartisan were uniformly respected. I am absolutely not saying that our work should be exclusionary; indeed, there are things we can do to try and win trust across the political divide, involving, as Astead W. Herndon of the New York Times, put it last week, going into the world and making everyday people feel listened to. Even those who distrust media coverage of politics have other informational needs that we can, and should, strive to meet. The idea, as one TV executive told New York recently, that a Trump win equates to the total loss of half the country and the attendant death of mainstream media is a huge exaggeration, and a state of affairs we should not just accept.
But for these imperatives to even begin to have an effect, we need first to imagine a media that is less aloof and elitist; the answer is precisely not high-level elite signaling, aimed at an imagined centrist reader, that we’re not the resistance, and don’t worry about our existing subscriber base, we think they’re all liberals as well. Independent journalism shouldn’t pander to the capital-R Resistance, but it shouldn’t performatively exclude them as part of some trust-winning exercise either—they are people, too, and besides, they might actually want to read us! And this sort of rhetoric is, in some ways, a form of American exceptionalism. All around the world, journalists are resisting threats to their work and holding power to account—often in bluntly adversarial ways that American media elites would not approve of at home, even as they laud such work as a bulwark against encroaching authoritarianism abroad. Now, it should be clear, their world is the one we all live in.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, press freedom organizations weighed in on the threat that Trump might pose to the media in his second term. Reporters Without Borders urged Trump’s second administration to “change its tune with the media and take concrete steps to protect journalists and develop a climate conducive to a robust and pluralistic news media”; the Freedom of the Press Foundation, for its part, called on the Senate and the outgoing Biden administration to push through a bipartisan bill curbing the surveillance of journalists and protecting their sources, “before it’s too late.” Meanwhile, CJR’s Sacha Biazzo and Meghnad Bose surveyed how news organizations around the world covered Trump’s victory. (“What if they finally voted for Hitler?” the Spanish publication El Diario asked.)
- Writing for The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel makes the case that the way Elon Musk has run X—that is to say, cutting its staff to the bone and turning it into a right-wing political weapon—is a blueprint for how Trump might now run the federal government, perhaps with Musk’s help. In other news about Trump and tech, Kevin Roose, of the Times, predicts what his return to office will mean for the sector, from Musk’s growing influence to a boon for crypto and the end of Biden-era antitrust fights (unless, perhaps, you’re Google). And Politico reports that Trump could remove Israeli spyware manufacturers—whose products have been used to surveil journalists in many countries—from a US trade and national-security blacklist.
- Yesterday saw two major developments in the regulation of social platforms in English-speaking countries beyond the US. In Canada, officials ordered TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, to shutter its operations inside the country—though Canadian citizens will still be allowed to download and use the app. And the Australian government set out plans to ban children under sixteen from using social media at all, with affected platforms—including Tiktok, X, Facebook, and Instagram—responsible for compliance. “Social media is doing harm to our kids,” Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, said, “and I’m calling time on it.”
- In the UK, the new Labour government announced plans to reform the laws that govern media deals to cover news websites and weekly or monthly magazines. Under existing provisions implemented in 2002, Britain’s culture minister can already intervene in mergers and acquisitions involving broadcasters and local and national newspapers, but “our laws haven’t kept pace with technology and evolving news consumption habits,” the current culture minister, Lisa Nandy, said in a press release. “As people increasingly get their news online, we need a regime that is future-proof.”
- And the NBA suspended Joel Embiid, of the Philadelphia 76ers, for three games without pay after he confronted and then shoved Marcus Hayes, a columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, in the locker room. Embiid told Hayes, who had mentioned the former’s dead brother and child in recent articles, “The next time you bring up my dead brother and my son again, you are going to see what I’m going to do to you and I’m going to have to…live with the consequences.” The Associated Press has more.
