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At 2:16am, Eastern time, Eric Trump, son of Donald, posted a photo of his father to X. It shows Trump standing in profile, looking at what appears to be a victory speech in his hand. The side of Trump’s face nearest the camera is shaded in darkness, but the other side is visible, too, via a mirror behind Trump—and that side is brightly illuminated by a strip of light. Also visible in the mirror: Eric and other members of Trump’s entourage, lined up side by side, each capturing versions of the same image with their phones. (Clare Malone, who covers the media for The New Yorker, likened it to “kind of a fucked-up Vermeer painting.”)
Trump duly took to a stage in West Palm Beach and declared that he had reclaimed the presidency; as in 2020, the Associated Press and other major outlets had yet to call the race, but, very much unlike in 2020, two sources—Decision Desk HQ and Fox News—had already done so, and it was increasingly obvious that the others wouldn’t be far behind. (And indeed, they weren’t; they matched the earlier calls shortly before 6am Eastern.) Among other remarks, Trump turned to congratulate J.D. Vance, his running mate, hailing him as “the only guy I’ve ever seen” who looks forward to going into the “enemy camp,” a/k/a “certain networks” like CNN and “MSDNC.” (“He just goes and absolutely obliterates them,” Trump said.) As Trump continued with a round of thank-yous, a couple of supporters in the room shouted “ELON”; Trump leaned in closer to hear what they were saying, then let out an appreciative “ohhhh,” and said “we have a new star; a star is born.” Later, he invited Dana White, the founder of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to take the mic and say a few words. White himself reeled off some thank-yous: to the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with The Boys, and, “last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”
“Elon,” of course, is Elon Musk, the CEO of X; all of those thanked by White are podcasters and social media influencers who appeared with Trump during the campaign and helped him boost his message, to young men in particular. It’s tempting, this morning, to conclude that it’s their media world now and that we all just live in it—and some already have. (So much for the prediction of a journalistic reckoning over why we spent so much time talking about Rogan.) Indeed, it’s tempting to conclude a lot of things this morning, including about the supposed obsolescence and out-of-touchness of the traditional mainstream media. And some already have, be they from within that firmament or among those trying to take it down.
There’ll be plenty of time for this sort of analysis; for now, I’ll just stress that while there is clearly some truth to it, moments like this lend themselves all too easily to exaggeration and overgeneralization. As the author of yesterday’s “Bad Media Takes You’ll Hear Tomorrow,” I’ll also refrain from weighing in on the already red-hot pundit war as to why the election went the way it did, whether the polls failed, and so on. (One “bad media take” that I wrongly predicted for today was that reporters would describe Trump’s mood in defeat as “dark” and “defiant”; the banner headline atop the website of the New York Times this morning used those exact words—but to describe his victorious campaign. One I got right: that a journalist would note Trump’s more unifying tone in the event of his getting to give a victory speech.)
For now, a few important things seem clear for the press—things we’ve known conceptually for some time, but now hit with a shocking new clarity. The most important is that Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it. For CJR this morning, Kyle Paoletta runs down all the ways in which a second Trump administration “is poised to be devastating to journalism”: the surveillance of journalists (which his first administration already did); the politicized regulation of deals involving media companies (ditto, seemingly); more limited access to the White House than before; the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission; more leak investigations; the subversion of the process for renewing broadcast licenses (or the chilling threat thereof); the potential indictment of journalists—and not just those on the national-security beat—on espionage charges… the list goes on.
It would perhaps be nice to believe, as one slogan had it after Trump’s first victory, that the press is once again not at war, but at work. But that sort of language now feels naive. When a war is declared on you, you are at war, like it or not—even if all you’re doing is reporting the truth. There is currently every reason to believe that in a second Trump term, his assault on the press will move from the largely—if by no means solely—rhetorical to, as Paoletta put it, “a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic.”
The war on such reporting, of course, means that we are also at work. Already, there is chatter among some observers that the heightened mass outrage and interest of Trump’s first term—which drove eyeballs and subscriptions to organizations producing hard-hitting journalism, and energized the journalism itself—won’t be repeated this time; that exhaustion and apathy might reign instead. If that is indeed to be the case, then it will pose some very sharp questions for the business of news—or rather, intensify questions we’re already grappling with. I won’t pretend to have easy answers now. But there is still, and I believe always will be, a demand for new and important information—an itch that the Musks and Rogans of the world, for all their cultural ascendancy, will never be able to scratch—and enough journalists with the gumption and tenacity and desire to seek it out, relay it, and put it in context. Again, we are going to have to think harder than ever before about how to fight for the right to do that, and how to make sure that enough people see it and fund it. But we knew that already. Trump’s win intensifies the urgency, but it did not create the problem.
Nor does Trump’s win somehow invalidate, as if by majoritarian acclamation, all the great, truthful, hard-hitting accountability journalism about him to date; indeed, the problem with Trump journalism up to now has been (as I’ve argued many times) that the good stuff was too often drowned out by a political-media elite more interested in doing journalism by poll, and by political consultant, and by optics (and possibly, of late, by betting odds). We need vastly less of that type of journalism, but we already knew that, too. We need more of the good stuff—and more focus on it in the newsletters and cable shows that still, in a world of Musks and Rogans, have at least some power to set the political agenda. This would be the case even if an entire country were primed to reject its presentation of facts or its logical conclusions. And the will of a majority does not speak for an entire country. America remains divided. In many ways, that’s been a huge problem for journalism, which imagined that it could speak across the divide. This morning may feel like the final nail in that hope. But if this election has proved anything, it’s that the country is more complicated than elite media clichés can capture. This goes for the divide, too. And, even in the world of caricature, there are still millions of Americans out there who not only need good journalism, but want it, too. They deserve for us to keep offering it.
After I tuned in to election night coverage yesterday—and it appeared (in the end fleetingly) that we might be in for a long period of inconclusiveness, 2020-style—I started writing this newsletter about the idea of division, or more precisely of fragmentation, in an election cycle that saw that emerge as a key media trend. I had planned to take as a metaphor the dizzying profusion of screens I was seeing everywhere I looked: the three in my home (phone, laptop, TV; all tuned to different networks), and all the screens within those screens (journalists’ own phones and laptops; a “Big Board”; two “Magic Walls”). I was also planning to write about how certain outlets appeared to be trying, via their aesthetic choices, to elide the problems of division and fragmented attention by emphasizing American unity. (Amazon Prime Video, hosting live election coverage for the first time, did this most literally, opening with a paean to the Founding Fathers, then seating Brian Williams and a panel of pundits in front of a giant wraparound screen that smushed together symbols of Americana—the White House, Mount Rushmore, the Alamo—in an almost literal uncanny valley of compressed landscapes.)
But the photo that Eric Trump took of his father ended up being more visually telling. It, too, presents a collage of surfaces and screens (or the backs of them), but here, they are all showing one thing: Donald Trump. There’s a metaphor there, too: however fragmented our media landscape may now be, for all of us, Trump is the ever-present center of attention, the unifying object. That isn’t changing anytime soon. For four more years, that’s the work.
Other notable stories:
- Writing for CJR before the results were known, Daniella Zalcman made the case that in the event of a second Trump term, the press “cannot allow ourselves to continue documenting his political theater” by putting images of it front and center in coverage. Historically, photojournalists have found it “easier for us to document the lives of the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the oppressed than it is for us to show the forces responsible for their conditions”—and yet “almost every major American news outlet has pivoted to showing Trump as the root cause of our impending descent into fascism,” Zalcman writes. “It seems the American media has forgotten that one of its core duties is to be oppositional to power; instead of centering what is at stake, we have made Trump the strongman poster child for his own political violence.”
- Late last month, after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire medical entrepreneur who owns the LA Times, controversially blocked the paper from endorsing Harris for president, Nika, his daughter, suggested that the decision had been guided by Harris’s complicity in the “genocide” in Gaza. Soon-Shiong quickly denied that this was a factor—but yesterday, Ryan Grim, of Drop Site News, obtained an internal email in which Soon-Shiong suggested that Gaza did affect his decision, writing that both candidates seemed to support selling weapons used to target civilians. He also accused his paper’s columnists of embracing a “sickness of thought” in suggesting that his non-endorsement decision was guided by fear of Trumpian retribution.
- For Vanity Fair, Paul Farhi—who reported on allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Mark Halperin, a political journalist, at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017—examined how Halperin returned to some sort of prominence this election cycle, appearing as a pundit in various outlets. (Halperin has apologized for making women feel uncomfortable; he denies the assault allegations.) Halperin hasn’t been back on mainstream news shows, but “many others have been willing to give him the opportunity,” Farhi writes. His case “seems to represent one of the more successful comebacks among the news-media figures felled by #MeToo scandals.”
- In media-labor news, tech workers at the New York Times continued their open-ended strike yesterday, amid stalled contract talks with bosses; there had been some speculation that the work stoppage would jeopardize the paper’s infamous election night “Needle” (which aims to show the real-time probability of different outcomes), but the Needle came online and apparently stayed put. Elsewhere, staffers at the Anchorage Daily News voted in favor of forming a union at the National Labor Relations Board—making the News the first unionized newspaper in Alaska.
- And Alyson Krueger, of the Times, profiled Stellene Volandes, the editor in chief of Town & Country, about how the magazine is evolving in the digital age while continuing to produce “a luxury print product that is as relevant as ever.” The magazine was founded in 1846 to serve a rising moneyed class, and set out to “instruct, refine, and amuse,” Volandes said. She added that these remain its guiding principles: “Creating conversations when you are 178 years old is a fantastic thing.”
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