Under Trump’s spotlight, in the wake of the digital revolution, journalists are being forced to redefine their field

Story by Daniel Hart
Photos courtesy of Nate Emory, whitehouse.gov

As Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, covered the Republican National Convention in July 2016, a T-shirt for sale caught her eye.

“The words on it were: Tree. Rope. Journalist,” Sullivan says. “And then in parentheses: some assembly required.” The shirt’s purpose was for laughs, but Sullivan attributes the sentiment to Trump’s rhetoric.

On the other side of the country, white-haired press veteran Floyd McKay shakes his head.

“I’ve never seen anything remotely like Trump,” McKay says. A professor of journalism emeritus at Western, McKay has covered politics since the 1960s, beginning with the administrations of Johnson and Nixon.

“Nixon was false, but not ignorant,” McKay says. “He was a crook and a thug, but he was not ignorant. You didn’t have the feeling that he wouldn’t know what he was talking about. With Trump, you get that.”

Donald Trump has sparked an identity crisis in American journalism. As he circumvents the media’s role as government watchdogs, journalists must figure out how to respond.

“As you know, I have a running war with the media,” Trump said on his first day in office. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”

Trump has repeatedly called reporters “scum,” “terrible people” and “dishonest.” As he continues to allege biased reporting and blacklist news organizations, American journalists are faced with a choice. Should they accept or reject their designation as Trump’s nemesis?

Of course, Trump isn’t the author of this narrative. Well before his candidacy, Americans’ trust in the media was already decreasing steadily, according to Gallup polls. This complex phenomenon may be caused in part by the increasing popularity of fringe news organizations who vocally distinguish themselves from “the mainstream media.”

Trump’s use of Americans’ distrust is destructive, though politically savvy, says Todd Donavan, a political science professor at Western. When news outlets lose their credibility, unfavorable coverage of Trump is easy to discard as biased.

“He’s attacking the legitimacy of that adversarial watchdog role,” Donovan says. “That’s probably more long-term damaging than the fact that he can drive the news cycle with Twitter.”

This crisis of credibility has risen in the context of another. In 1990, U.S. daily newspapers reached their peak workforce of 56,900 people, according to NiemanLab. Between then and now, as that number approaches a multi-decade low of 30,000, the media has experienced a digital revolution — and profits have dwindled.

“The business model of newspapers has been terribly diminished because of the internet,” Sullivan says. “It hasn’t entirely taken it away, but it has largely taken away the main source of revenue that supports journalism, which is print advertising. And no one has really figured out a way to replace that.”

Sullivan has seen these changes over a career as chief editor of The Buffalo News in Buffalo, New York, public editor of The New York Times in New York, New York and in her current position at The Washington Post in Washington, D.C., which has gained a reputation for challenging Trump’s false statements.

U.S. journalists face a dramatic, discipline-shrinking shift to the internet and a president who vehemently resents unflattering coverage. One might ask whether they will join the protestors in the streets, subjectively opposing Trump, or continue reporting neutral, objective facts.

Media ethicist, educator and author Stephen Ward rejects this dichotomy in his essay “Radical Ethics in a Time of Trump: How to Practice Democratically Engaged Journalism.”

A Third Path

“It is not a choice between acting as a journalist or acting as an activist,” Ward writes for MediaShift. “It is a problem of how to practice an engaged journalism dedicated to democracy while retaining the values of factuality and impartiality.”

Ward penned three essays advocating for what he calls “democratically engaged journalism.” He argues that while avoiding partisan lobbying, journalists need to be dedicated advocates of a democracy’s ideals.

“The role of journalism in a democracy is to inform the electorate,” McKay says, “and there’s nothing more important. The founding fathers created the first amendment for a reason.”

Becoming subjective and openly hostile erodes the media’s credibility, according to Ward. And yet, blindly recording what politicians assert as fact won’t do either in a time when the definition of a fact is publicly contested.

“When he says something that’s just false, do you say, Trump says the moon is made of green cheese?” Seattle Times Reporter Jim Brunner wonders, weighing in on the dilemma. “Do you repeat it? Or do say in the headline, Trump makes false claim about the moon?”

Sullivan rejects both subjectivity and false objectivity.

“I don’t see either of those as an acceptable way to go about doing journalism,” Sullivan says.

Addressing the prospect of an opposition press, Sullivan quoted The Washington Post’s executive editor Marty Baron, who said in a February media conference, “we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.”

On the other hand, “the neutral facts of what’s going on, presented without any inflection or just very straight, has its purposes,” Sullivan says. “But it tends to be not fully the way we should go about it, because it seems too much like stenography, and not searching enough.”

Instead, Ward proposes, journalists have a duty to advocate for liberal democracy “in the face of a populist, non-egalitarian ‘strong man’ approach to government.” Journalism supports democracy by fact-checking politicians’ claims to the public, and this responsibility is even more important with an administration that is aggressively loose with the facts. Ward calls on journalists to act as “objective advocates of democracy.”

But calling journalists advocates can be tricky.

“The word ‘advocate’ can be misinterpreted,” Sullivan says. “What it really means is simply ‘speaking for,’ and I think speaking for those things is completely appropriate. But we have an idea in this country of what being an advocate is, and it tends to evoke ideas of people with picket signs. It sounds like political partisanship, but it doesn’t need to be.”

So while journalists should not take Trump’s bait, subjectively opposing him as an individual, neither should they passively relay politicians’ misinformation to the public, free of scrutiny or objective evaluation. Ward champions a third option — passionately advocating for democracy and avidly investigating alleged facts.

Since journalism is so crucial to democracy, Ward argues, journalists’ highest commitment should be to democratic ideals.

The Question of Access

“Inside out” journalism is becoming obsolete, says Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University in his essay “Prospects for the American Press Under Trump.” He uses the term to describe relatively direct, cooperative access to high-ranking government officials as sources.

Whereas journalists have traditionally been used to some level of this access, Rosen says they will now need to rely on lower-level government workers for key information. This strategy may need to become routine.

But the situation is a little more complicated.

“It was really interesting to me that for all of [Trump’s] disparagement of news media, the way he announced that the Republican healthcare proposal was going to be withdrawn was by picking up the phone and calling first, one person from The Washington Post, Bob Costa, and then Maggie Haberman from the New York Times,” Sullivan says. “So it isn’t that simple that access journalism is fully over.”

The best strategies haven’t changed. When journalists are shut out at the top, they work around, McKay says. Politicians who avoid direct contact with the press are nothing new.

McKay cites his past work as a political reporter on The Oregon Statesman. He would sometimes meet government sources informally for coffee — not necessarily the governor or secretary of state, but perhaps one of their aides, or the chief elections officer. Through conversation, McKay would gain a better idea of which political stories would soon be important. On the other hand, the source would better understand what McKay was looking for.

“And next thing you know,” McKay says, “Maybe a week or a month afterwards, I’d put a call through to them and they’d pick up the phone.”

McKay says politics is an inside game, and relationships with sources are key.

Learning to Listen

Journalists need to become better listeners by bridging the gap between the abstract issues they cover and the troubles readers encounter daily, Rosen says.

“Whenever troubles don’t match up with issues, there is trust to be won for journalists able to listen better than systems that are failing people,” Rosen writes.

Sullivan says too much of U.S. reporting comes out of major coastal cities. She gives a negative example of shallow reporting from her hometown.

“Whenever a big news organization would come and do a piece about Buffalo, you could almost dictate in advance what it was going to say. It would be about the crumbling steel mills along Lake Erie,” Sullivan says. “They were a joke, because they didn’t really get at what was going on and it relied on impression and stereotype too much.”

During the election, many journalists came into communities briefly, wrote stories, and left according to Sullivan.

“That’s very different from being a part of a community,” Sullivan says. “Some of the best journalism that’s been done, both politically and otherwise, is from people who actually live in a community and are more absorbed in it.”

Rosen and Sullivan both refer to Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold as a model of transparent journalism. Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer prize for his crowdsourcing-style investigative journalism of Trump’s alleged charitable donations.

Sullivan also uses The Upshot, the New York Times’ data analysis venture, as an example of trust-building methods.

“You can see the raw data and you can see how they interpreted it,” Sullivan says, “but you don’t have to rely on their interpretation. You can see the more basic information.”

Before The Washington Post and The New York Times, Sullivan worked her way from summer intern to top editor of her hometown paper, The Buffalo News. At that point, listening and transparency were already becoming values for her. At the suggestion of her younger, digital-oriented managing editor Brian Connolly, Sullivan decided to have live chats with Buffalo readers. They could ask questions of the editors and get answers in real time.

“It was honestly very stressful to do because you never really knew what you were going to be asked and you could really trip over your own feet in real time,” Sullivan says. “But I do think that it made readers feel like somebody was listening to them.”

Seated at a computer with Connolly, who provided real-time editing, Sullivan fielded questions and typed out answers for 45 minutes to an hour. By the end of the chat, Sullivan was covered in sweat. Nonetheless, she felt it was an important service to the paper’s audience.

Real-time dialogue. Open, transparent data analysis. Relationships.

Using these methods, journalists say trends in media trust are reversible. By reevaluating the central values of the field and working through what they look like in real life, journalists can regain the relationships they once had with their sources and readerships.

Thoughtful adaptability, together with commitment to its core values, has always been necessary for journalism to endure, McKay attests. During his time at Western, McKay taught media history.

“I would ask the class. I would say, ‘well, people say newspapers are dying. Can you tell me any form of news media that has actually died? There isn’t any. The closest you can come is newsreels in the World War II era, but they just morphed into television,’” McKay says. “They always just adapt. Radio adapts, television adapts, newspapers adapt, magazines — the whole thing.”

President Trump may have created an unprecedented crisis for journalists, but the fruit of that crisis may be a stronger, more profound form of journalism.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct an earlier version that mistakenly identified Seattle Times reporter Jim Brunner. Klipsun regrets the error.