Consider This from NPR - In second term, will Trump punish news outlets that anger him?

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

During the campaign, President-elect Trump called for reporters to be imprisoned and for media outlets to lose their licenses over unfavorable coverage, Will he make good on the threats?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Since his first term in office, President-elect Donald Trump has had an antagonistic relationship with the press, to say the least. A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are. I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news. I'll tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. He's called for media outlets like CBS and ABC to lose their licenses over unfavorable coverage. Like here he is on Fox & Friends after ABC hosted this year's presidential debate.

I mean, to be honest, they're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that. And the press was front of mind again as he spoke at a Pennsylvania rally just a couple days before the election, reflecting on another potential assassination attempt. To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don't mind that so much. Media outlets like The New York Times have been preparing for what a second Trump term might look like.

Executive editor Joseph Kahn recently spoke to NPR. in which the rule of law protections for the press could be worn away by either authoritarian leaders or by populist leaders who rally their supporters against independent media. Consider this. Donald Trump has suggested that in his second term, he will take on the press with more than just words. So just how might he do it? And how will media organizations respond? From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. All right, I'm just going to stop right there.

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It's Consider This from NPR. President-elect Donald Trump's win of a second term in the White House has prompted intense reporting and analysis from the news media, as well as some soul-searching and concerns. During the campaign, Trump pledged to imprison reporters and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage that he did not like. NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflik joins us now to talk about the fractious relationship between Trump and the news media and how it might all play out over the next four years. Hi, David. Hey, Elsa. All right. So what lessons do you think the media should take away from Trump's win, his second win? In this cycle, he's particularly continued to foster and to benefit from a continued plunge in trust in the news media. So what does that mean this time around? Well, this time around,

you know, Trump decided after a first debate with Kamala Harris didn't go well for him. He just avoided a second one, seemed to pay absolutely no penalty in the public's thinking about him. Similarly, he didn't just no penalty in the public's thinking about him. Similarly, he didn't just decide not to be interviewed by 60 Minutes. He backed out of what CBS says was an agreement to do so. Again, absolutely no harm to him in terms of how voters thought about him. Instead, he went to spend time with podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn. These aren't explicitly political shows, but they talk about politics and they do it in a way that is more natural for many of the young male voters that Trump was seeking to get.

And let's not forget, Rogan has a bigger audience than TV news shows, and he and Vaughn and some of the others Trump talked to are much less likely to trip Trump up, you know, holding him accountable for specifics about his policies or proposals or his past record. The big lesson, if you're asking the question, is I think Trump found out for sure he didn't really need the mainstream media. Well, what about the right wing media like Fox News? Like, has his relationship with them changed? It's more about their relationship with him, it seems to me, that you have all these outlets that are hurtling to catch up to him and stay close by him.

You had Fox News pay such a price four years ago when it seemingly backed away from him announcing Joe Biden had won Arizona on election night that it hurtled to embrace so many of the lies and falsehoods about election fraud that he and his allies put out there that Fox had to pay seven hundred eighty seven million million to an election tech company as a defamation settlement. This time, he attacked Fox as insufficiently loyal for just interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris, which was a pretty big get for them. Loyalty, I think, is a key element. Fox has stayed resolutely by his side while tamping down on some of the more extreme claims. Well, it's not new news that Trump doesn't like most journalists, right? Like he has long villainized journalists. He doesn't talk as much, though,

these days about the news media offering up fake news. He talks more about punishing the news media. And I'm just curious, so far, what has Trump said that he would do to the press if he were reelected? Go ahead and lay it all out for us, David. Right. Well, if you think about one of the key elements of his campaign rhetoric, the idea that I am your retribution against all those who would stand in my but really your way. I think the press is one of the key elements of that. He is looking or appears to be looking to punish outlets that failed to cover him and his approach in the way that he wants. He suggested that he would make libel laws looser, that is easier for places to successfully sue news outlets for coverage that they felt treated them unfairly. He has threatened

to, as you mentioned earlier, throw reporters and editors in jail if they seek to keep confidential sources hidden, something that under the Biden administration, the Justice Department said it would do in almost the smallest fraction of cases. He said that he would punish, you know, big legacy broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, for the way in which they covered him and the way in which they moderated the presidential vice presidential debates. Now, to be fair, broadcasters don't hold licenses regulated by the federal government, but all those stations they own do. And those are profitable pressure points for him to threaten to really come after them. And if you believe, as many do, that he's going to embrace the agenda set out by this conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, what's called Project 2025,

he disavowed it, but it's created by a lot of folks who have served him in the past and have spoken for him in the past. It would go after public broadcasting like PBS and NPR. Only a modest amount, a couple percent of points of NPR's funds typically comes from federal sources, but our member stations get a lot more. That would be a real hit for a lot of them. And this is a fight that everyone has seen coming. So how do you think the mainstream news media should be or is now gearing up for Trump 2.0?

Well, there are a few different reactions you're seeing, and some don't want to articulate this or define this as a fight. You saw several major American daily newspapers decide not to endorse this year. The Washington Post, perhaps most famously among them, an endorsement was in the works planned by the editorial page editor being drafted by some of the writers there. And owner Jeff Bezos essentially killed it and said, we're not going to endorse just days before the election. You know, Bezos has enormous business interests in front of the federal government. And there's concern among people who have criticized him, even from inside the Post, to say that he didn't want to antagonize Trump any further than

the Post's reporting had already done. Meanwhile, Bob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter who had been among those to criticize Bezos, nonetheless met with the paper's executive editor and publisher and then went on MSNBC to say they had assured him that the Post intends to do intensive, aggressive accountability reporting anytime it's needed and required of it, but that it's going to avoid cheap shots and a lot of sort of the histrionics and rhetoric that arguably defined some of the initial responses to covering Trump when he first got into office. Others are taking a different tack. You have The Guardian and Mother Jones and some of the investigative outlets. They're saying, hey, we're going to be here. We're not owned by billionaires. We don't have interests in front of the federal government. And we're going to be

under pressure. But we are going to be here to serve the needs of the public. And then there's a third way. The New York Times, it endorsed Vice President Harris, to be sure. But its leaders under the direction of A.G. Sulzberger, its publisher, said, we are studying what happens in autocratic nations, how a press maintains its independence, how news organizations, while not being part of any oppositional force, are part of the checks and balance in a functioning democratic process. And we need to maintain that. How can we sustain free speech and free liberties under such moments? You're hearing people at The Times plot for that, and now they're going to have to see what they do

and what they put into action. That is NPR's David Volkenflik. Thank you so much, David. You bet. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and Emily Kopp. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. On the TED Radio Hour, on December 24th, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will touch the sun. The spacecraft will hit the closest approach ever to the sun.

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