It’s definitely not morning in America for the media, believes NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. The metaphor Rosen uses to illustrate the media’s plight during the first several months of Donald Trump’s administration isn’t a time of day but an entire, harsh season; he headlined his tweetstorm of last Sunday “Winter is coming: what it will be like for the press under Trump.”
In September, Rosen alleged that candidate Trump was “trying to break the press,” meaning that Trump sought to trash “the entire system that gives honest journalism a role in the republic.” Now, with Trump only a few weeks from taking office, “the situation is way beyond just finding and publishing hard-hitting or critical stories…The problem [won’t be] at the level ‘how to cover Trump,’ but how to recover conditions in which anything journalists do makes a difference.”
Excerpts from the tweetstorm (bolding added):
1/ For those asking "how bad is it likely to get?" for the American press as a check on power, things to look for in the next 6-8 months...
2/ Already in gear: Trump loyalists (Jeffrey Lord is the model) recruited into the press as a gaudy show of balance.
3/ There, the implied message from journalism to the Trump forces (the government + his core supporters) is: "Don't hurt us, we'll be good!"…
5/ From Trump a steady flow of easy-to-check lies as both a show of power and to cast the press in the role of petty but hateful antagonist.
6/ Ugly attacks on individual journalists who somehow provoke POTUS and his troll army online will intensify. But here a thing to watch for—
7/ The cabinet, GOP office holders and opinion leaders. Do they join in these attacks? Or is it just the tip and the base of the pyramid?...
9/ It's not that we won't see big investigations and spectacular exposés. We will. They will serve as rocket fuel for the political divide.
10/ The assault on a common world of fact, the "we create our own reality" thing. Of that we are just at the beginning. It will get worse…
12/ Someone in government who can't live with what's happening will do what such people have always done: leak a 'big story' to the press…
14/ ...[In response, Trump] will demand a show of power. And the full force of the government will be brought to bear.
15/ DOJ guidelines (which aren't laws) and norms in government that said 'tread carefully around the press'— these will vanish overnight.
16/ Picture, say, [Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold] on trial for espionage. GOP leaders and office holders complicit. Culture war exploding around the trial...
17/ It's an obscene image. I hope it never happens. I'm not trying to be lurid or provocative. Just descriptive of conditions in place now.
Two days after that series of messages, Rosen tweeted, “Every day on the campaign trail and now during Trump's transition, norms of American democracy are being ground to dust.”
