The 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, will again be inaugurated as its 47th this week, prompting concerns of what his second administration is going to look like for several sectors.
Mr. Trump’s personality has always been polarizing, even before his first presidency. His inflammatory statements and attitudes about women, immigrants, the global order, and his relationship with the truth – highlighted at the height of the COVID pandemic and his reaction to his defeat in his 2020 reelection bid – have cemented his reputation as a controversial figure.
While some US news organizations have been extremely critical of Trump, reporting on his personal, political, legal, and even financial problems, the former President has made known he was not backing down. At first, his instinct was to call every critical report “fake news.” Lately, however, there have been instances showing media taking an “initially conciliatory approach.”
A major broadcaster, Disney-owned ABC News, gave $15 million to the Trump presidential library as settlement for a defamation suit. Jeff Bezos-owned The Washington Post killed a cartoon depicting media and tech moguls paying homage to a giant Trump statue. It also declined to endorse a presidential candidate last November. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is ending its fact-checking program, initially in the US. And, of course, X’s Elon Musk is one of Trump’s most visible supporters and advisers.
But a journalism professor from New York University believes that US news media organizations have to cooperate to resist Trump’s tendency for revenge. Interviewed by Agence France Presse, Adam Penenberg posed the questions: Can the media resist bending under the weight of those attacks?
The New York Times also ran an editorial warning that “for smaller, less financially secure news organizations, the expense of defending themselves in lawsuits from Mr Trump and his allies may be enough to encourage self-censorship.”
Antics and controversies notwithstanding, any political victory is a testament that democracy is working. To wish for another election result would be to deny the power of the vote, held sacrosanct by the Constitution. Other outcomes would have been realized by changing the people’s minds and the way they arrive at their political decisions, but that is an issue for the next round of voting.
For now, Americans – and the rest of those economically, politically, or culturally linked to the US – have to resort to greater vigilance and fortitude. They must try to tell their truth in an unwavering fashion in the face of suppression, gaslighting, and the prospect of retaliation. It is, of course, easier declared than practiced, especially when the viability of the news organization and the reputation/safety of journalists are concerned.
But journalists in the US and elsewhere already know, from the start, that they signed up for a career that is neither smooth nor easy, and that essentially entails tangling with powers determined to maintain a certain version of the truth for their own benefit. It is up to the press and the people, to exert efforts to get the true and full picture and form their own opinions based on the evidence at hand.
The next few years will be as exciting as they will be instructive. Let us watch and learn, and then do better, ourselves.
