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The Media Today

Is Trump Flooding or Draining the Zone? Yes.

Hiding and oversharing information are parts of the same strategy.
February 3, 2025 By Jon Allsop
Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO via AP Images

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On Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, held her first formal briefing and, before taking questions from the assembled press corps, wanted to point something out to them: “All of you once again have access to the most transparent and accessible president in American history.” She then outlined some changes that would be coming to the briefing room. Press credentials would be restored to four hundred and forty journalists who were “wrongly” stripped of them under the Biden administration, she said—in the name of the First Amendment, she said. And the new administration would be reserving seats in the room for “new media voices”—podcasters, influencers, content creators, and the like—from whom Americans increasingly get their news. Media critics seemed receptive to the idea—as long as the seats didn’t go to softball-lobbing Trump sycophants.

On Friday, Leavitt returned to the podium and shared some “exciting news”: since inviting new media personalities to apply for access, she said, the White House press team had received more than ten thousand submissions. She then introduced that day’s “new media” voice: a host of the right-wing podcast Ruthless, who asked Leavitt whether the traditional media was out of touch on immigration. (“The media?” Leavitt laughed. “Out of touch?”)

Later on Friday, press officials over at the Pentagon also announced a change to their media policy: the introduction of an “annual media rotation program” that, a spokesperson said, would “broaden access” to limited office and broadcasting space in the building for “outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalist value” that comes with it. Soon to be out of their dedicated workspaces: NBC News, NPR, the New York Times, and Politico; soon to be in: the pro-Trump One America News Network, Breitbart, and the New York Post, as well as HuffPost—a liberal outlet, but one that does not currently have a Pentagon correspondent and did not, it says, ask to be included in the rotation. Per NBC, the outgoing outlets found out about the change in a memo sent to the entire press corps, and were told that “no additional information will be provided at this time.” At least two of them expressed concern that their ability to report on the Pentagon would be obstructed, as did the Pentagon Press Association; according to CNN’s Brian Stelter, some journalists were “left wondering” whether the decision had anything to do with the outlets’ tough coverage of Pete Hegseth, the scandal-plagued Fox host turned newly confirmed defense secretary. Kevin Baron, a veteran defense journalist, decried the policy as “the erasure of journalism at the Pentagon.”

A week ago, I wrote in this newsletter that the best way of interpreting the new administration’s early days—which had been marked by a close-to-unprocessable deluge of major announcements—might be through the familiar Trump-era lens of flooding the zone with shit, or the impulse to overwhelm perceived opponents, not least the news media, by creating so much news that they can’t possibly focus on all of it at once. Since I wrote that, a number of reporters confirmed that this is indeed a conscious strategy of Trump 2.0, and the flooding seemed to continue apace. On Thursday, for example, three of Trump’s most controversial nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard—faced simultaneous confirmation hearings, in what The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser described as an apparent “masterstroke in outrage management by the Senate’s Republican scheduling gods.” The fact that all three hearings were overshadowed by a tragic plane crash over Washington was not a distraction tactic, of course—but Trump’s subsequent press conference blaming the disaster on Democrats and diversity at least had that effect.

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein argued on Saturday, however, that if the “prevailing wisdom” about Trump’s first days is that he is flooding the zone, the “real story” is “exactly the opposite”: the new administration’s operations, Stein wrote, “have so far been defined not by the spotlight they’ve commanded but by the secrecy they’ve imposed.” Government insiders and outsiders alike are confused as to who, exactly, is running what; rank-and-file federal workers “have been thrust into a state of paranoia about the status of their jobs”; congressional Democrats, at least, have been left in the dark, with their staffers resorting to deciphering Leavitt’s tweets “as if they were Indus script.” Stein argues that all this “crypticity” marks a “stark difference” from Trump’s first term, which was “an often unruly, directionless, and very public mess.” That it was—but we should not forget that it was also marked by its own penchant for secrecy and stonewalling (as I chronicled at the time, in a series of newsletters in the format: “The White House wages war on transparency: ____ edition”). “Between website deletions, Pentagon booting news outlets and press offices switching from emails to X posts,” as the Associated Press reporter Michael Sisak put it over the weekend, there are once again “lots of blackout curtains going up around government transparency, accountability and the dissemination of information to the public.”

By press offices switching from emails to X posts, Sisak appeared to be referring to an earlier announcement from the National Transportation Safety Board indicating that it would no longer distribute information about the Washington air disaster (and a subsequent crash involving a medical plane in Philadelphia) by email, and would instead post it to X; the NTSB later suggested that this was a temporary move to coordinate briefings amid a deluge of media requests, but it nonetheless provoked concern about the outsourcing of government communications to a private network—one owned, of course, by the Trump ally Elon Musk, more on whom shortly. And the website deletions referenced by Sisak appear to be a bona fide big deal. Stories about these trickled out last week: CNN noticed that the Justice Department had taken down a database of charges and convictions against January 6 rioters who have since been pardoned (or had their sentences commuted) by Trump; 404 Media reported that an internal presentation about effective governmental communication was taken offline, apparently because it referenced “pronouns”—part of a “scattershot effort” to implement Trump directives targeting diversity initiatives and so-called “gender ideology” (even though, in this case, pronouns were only being discussed as an everyday part of speech). On Friday, a deadline set by these orders was reached. According to the Times, more than eight thousand government webpages have since disappeared, including information “about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research.” (Some pages were later restored with or without edits; the picture remains fluid for now.)

This sort of thing is not entirely new: as I reported in 2019, the first Trump administration routinely suppressed science about climate change by refusing to promote research, blacklisting certain terms, and removing whole sections of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, apparently for several years; in 2020, administration health officials were accused of messing around with pandemic data that pointed to politically inconvenient truths. But the recent moves appear to mark a dramatic acceleration. On Friday, Politico reported that staffers at the Department of Agriculture have been ordered to delete landing pages that discuss climate change and to log “all web content related to climate change” for further review. And, as The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu reports, Trump’s directives on diversity and gender have imperiled swaths of valuable health data that could now be stripped of vital demographic statistics, perhaps “erasing” transgender and nonbinary people entirely. On Friday, the data directory of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention went dark; it appears to still be offline. According to MedPage Today, the CDC has told agency scientists to pause publishing in any journal, to ensure that their work contains no “forbidden terms.”

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Shortly after taking office, Trump ordered federal health agencies to pause external communications—a step that has already caused chaos for health and science journalists (including at MedPage) who rely on regular communication with officials, as Poynter’s Angela Fu reported last week. Indeed, from the first minutes of the new administration, it was clear that routine matters of government communication and transparency were going to become a contested space. Moments after Trump took the oath of office, a public interest law firm filed suit alleging that the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE,” a trollishly named initiative to slash away at the state under the leadership of Musk, was already violating the disclosure rules that are supposed to bind federal advisory committees—but Trump then signed an order making DOGE part of the Executive Office of the President, a move that could put its activities out of reach of the Freedom of Information Act (and may have been teed up for that very purpose). At the very least, litigation as to the legalities of the move could outlast DOGE itself—it’s currently set to sunset next summer.

In recent days, a slew of stories have dropped tracing the—apparently breathtaking—extent of Musk and DOGE’s early moves to take over the federal bureaucracy: an offer enticing millions of federal workers to resign, announced in an email with the same subject line (“Fork in the Road”) as an ultimatum that Musk sent to staff at X after acquiring the platform in 2022; the seeding of friends and allies, some of them remarkably young, in key agencies; gaining access to a federal payment system that contains sensitive data on millions of people, following a standoff with a top Treasury official who has since retired; an apparently literal standoff over access to sensitive information at the US Agency for International Development. Despite this stellar reporting, however, it’s hard to know exactly what Musk is doing. For federal workers, the uncertainty may be part of the point; in his column for The Bulwark, Stein raised the possibility that Musk and his allies don’t want a mass exodus, but to turn officials against one another and make them paranoid. (“It’s scary,” one federal employee told Stein. “It’s psychologically torture.”) Either way, the uncertainty is already systemic. When Stein asked an official with Meals on Wheels where they were getting guidance in lieu of official sources, they replied, “just the news and the leaked memos.”

But the secrecy affects journalists too, of course: as Fu’s piece demonstrated, we rely on open and truthful government communication to make the news; we can report on leaked memos, but these rely on the public-spiritedness of insiders—not to mention their bravery, under an administration that has suggested it will go hard after leaks. This administration’s early blows against transparency—from the inconveniencing of hard-hitting reporters through the website deletions and press-releases-by-X—seem to reflect varying degrees of malice: some appear to constitute a degree of thought policing that Orwell would have been embarrassed to dream up; some to reflect incompetence amid chaos; some, perhaps, a bit of both. (As Ezra Klein noted in an astute column for the Times yesterday, the risk for officials in seeking to overwhelm their opponents is that they end up overwhelming themselves.) But they all ultimately militate against the freedom of information.

Stein argued that secrecy is the “real story” of Trump 2.0, and the exact opposite of flooding the zone. Withholding information is literally the opposite of spraying it from a fire hose—but these acts are perhaps best seen, and perhaps always have been in the Trump era, as twin tracks of a broader censorship strategy, one that seeks to keep what matters from the media by withholding it in some instances and overwhelming their attentional capacity in others. Musk, for instance, is currently operating both in the shadows and in the light of day: following days of speculation that he might be trying to shut down USAID altogether, he just…tweeted it out, as the saying goes. And hiding things can, as we’ve seen in recent days, itself create outrage that in turn floods the zone. 

Ultimately, the basic impulse, in flood and in drought, is the same. At her first briefing, Leavitt may have been right to call Trump the most accessible president ever. But this has never been the same as transparency. Trump, more than anyone, proves it.


Other notable stories:

  • Recently in this newsletter, we noted reports that Chuck Todd, the former host of Meet the Press, was poised to quit NBC News; on Friday, he made that official. According to Semafor, the political reporter Alex Seitz-Wald is also leaving NBC, to “help lead a startup in Maine that’s trying out a new local news business model” in partnership with various local businesses and a startup that aims “to transcribe and summarize local meetings and analyze them.” And, in other media jobs news, Peter Spiegel, of the Financial Times, is joining the Washington Post as managing editor.
  • And some jobs news from the home front: Ravi Somaiya, CJR’s long-serving digital editor, is departing to launch a new project in partnership with Lachlan Cartwright, a veteran media reporter (who has contributed to CJR). The project, Breaker Media, will aim “to be local to Downtown Manhattan, where both men live, the way the Southern District of New York is a local prosecutor’s office,” Semafor reports, and will launch a newsletter, podcast, and the occasional play. Cartwright described Breaker as being “against boredom and boredom only.” I’m wishing them all the best.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.