Can the media survive Trump 2.0?

Legal scholar Erin Carroll on Kash Patel's threats, what U.S. journalists can learn from international reporters working under authoritarianism, and how to win back the public trust

Kash Patel, MAGA loyalist and Donald Trump’s choice to lead the F.B.I., shares his once and potential future boss’s animosity towards the media, including on his lengthy enemies list “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” A serious question for the coming years is how Patel’s ascendance might transform Trump’s longstanding rhetorical attacks against the press into very real ones, even as the journalism industry faces not just a financial crisis but an existential one, with declining public trust, increased competition from social media platforms, and the growing threat of disinformation.

To better understand the threat a second Trump term poses to a media already struggling to redefine itself, we reached out to Erin Carroll, a law professor at Georgetown and former journalist who has focused her research on the challenges facing the press, now and into the future, recently asking critical questions about what the press is worth — to readers, to the public at large, and to institutions — and makes clear the connection between the plight of the press and that of democracy at large.

We talked to Carroll about what the press might face over the next four years, the lessons American reporters and news organizations can learn from the experiences of their colleagues who’ve worked under authoritarian governments, and the ways in which new forms of journalism and new approaches to audiences can help rebuild public trust in the media — and with that, renewed trust in democracy.

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You’ve pointed out that no one has yet been able to counter populist rhetorical attacks against the press. And now, we're in a position where those threats are not just rhetorical, but potentially very real. How do you see the situation for the media evolving post-election, and pre-January 20?

Trump was maniacal about his threats against the press when he was in office. He was tweeting, I think, on average more than once a day, like 2,000 tweets against the press, disparaging them in every possible way, right? And it hasn't stopped since he left office. In fact, it seems more like a party platform now. And we've got people like Kash Patel echoing those threats.

There hasn't been, on the other side, even an effort to try to counter that kind of rhetoric. Certainly, there are people in power who could have spoken up to defend the press, and that hasn't happened. And in past years, we've had institutions to do it. If you look back to the 20th century, we had the Supreme Court writing a series of really favorable opinions about the press that gave us all kinds of good rhetoric that the press is really still dining out on.

You have in mind like Sullivan and decisions like that

Sullivan, Pentagon Papers, the whole series of cases from the '60s and '70s brought by the press, involving the press, in which the court talked about the press as an educator, as a watchdog, as fundamental to democracy, right? So those cases have dried up, that rhetoric has dried up from the Supreme Court. You haven't seen it coming very much at all from the executive branch, even during Democratic presidencies. And in fact, I would argue it's been negative. I see many, many progressives being incredibly negative about the press in their public statements.

It is true that there is a lot to criticize. I am not Pollyannish when it comes to the press we have. A lot of my work is talking about the press that we need. The press is in dire straits right now. All kinds of reforms are necessary. But I think we really need to balance this punishing rhetoric even from the left in thinking about what positive things we can say to move us forward.

One reason it's so hard to defend the idea of American democracy is that democracy, at least in the abstract, has not really delivered for a lot of people. They feel like it doesn't really give them any kind of material improvement. And the press has also failed to deliver in a lot of ways. People on the right see it as an adversary. And people on the left are frustrated with the major news organizations and their choice of stories to cover.