Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.
After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.
Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.
“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.
Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.
Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.
“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.
With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.
And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.
Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.
Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.
Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.
Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.
Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”
Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.
How to defend against all this?
Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.
On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”
I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”
The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”
Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.
More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.
It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.
Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.
Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.
For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.
“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”
Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.
Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.
Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.
To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
