Two billionaire publishers, the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and the LA Times Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked their editorial page editors from endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election.  If you believe the Washington Post’s slogan that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ their owner was the first to switch off the light. 

Then, Soon-Shiong blocked an editorial asking the Senate to perform its constitutional duty to provide advice and consent on Trump’s cabinet picks.  Now ABC News (owned by Disney) has agreed to pay $15 million in a settlement of a Trump defamation lawsuit plus $1 million in attorney fees because George Stephanopoulos said on his Sunday show that Trump was found liable for the ‘rape’ of writer E. Jean Carroll.  Actually, he was found guilty of ‘sexual abuse’ because a New York civil jury believed her claim that he forced his fingers into her vagina but was uncertain if he also used his penis. New York law states only penile penetration is considered rape.  This was a case ABC could have clearly pursued in court but made a political – really a business – decision not to.  Trump is now suing the Des Moines Register and their pollster for a pre-election poll suggesting he would not do as well as he did in Iowa.

It seems likely that top-down self-censorship of the mainstream media may preempt expected legal attacks on critical coverage from the incoming administration that has been promised by Trump’s pick for FBI Director, Kash Patel and by Trump himself.    

This is in large measure the result not only of right-wing ascendency in national politics but of a long-term decline and corporate consolidation of American journalism.  Also, helping to undermine the public’s ability to stay informed is the rise of the internet as a selective news source that generates revenue by reinforcing existing biases through its algorithmic infrastructure that aims to keep viewers online longer.  While billionaire tech ‘bros’ embrace Trump, working journalists are portrayed as part of an elite that Trump has defined as ‘enemies of the people’ mainly for exposing the machinations of those in power including the president-elect. 

I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for half a century.  According to a study by the job recruitment company Zippia there are close to 15,000 freelance reporters working in the U.S. whose demographics skew slightly more white and female, than the nation as a whole and who earn an average of $61,000 a year compared to full-time journalists who average $86,000.  Freelancers make up a third of the 45,000 working journalists in the U.S. so figure your news is coming not from some media “elite,” that promote “fake news,” but working people like myself covering wars, politics, pandemics and the climate emergency.

Earlier in this century I got to train colleagues in Poland, Turkey, Tunisia and elsewhere on environmental reporting.  I remember in Turkey going over some of the basics of investigative reporting including always keeping good notes and tapes stored and dated including by year as some stories become beats that can continue over a lifetime.  Sergei Kiselyov, a Ukrainian colleague who’d covered the Chernobyl disaster, offered an addendum, “I’d just suggest you also keep your notes and files somewhere other than your home or office so that when the police come to look for them, they won’t be there.”  This tip is worth keeping in mind over the next several years.  The jailing of journalists has happened too often before in this country and almost certainly will again in the near term.

Or they could just be laid off.  Many of my friends and colleagues who worked in newspapers are now freelancers like myself, the newspaper industry being in a near terminal stage of collapse.  This is largely due to loss of revenue to online advertising, corporate consolidation and hedge fund predation where operating enterprises are bought up, wrung out (staff layoffs focused on older higher-paid reporters doing complex investigative work), and then sold off for parts (printing presses, data-bases, real-estate).  This has resulted in massive job loss.  Newsroom employment dropped 26 percent between 2008 and 2020 according to a study by the Pew Research Center and continues today. I know of one Pulitzer-prize winning reporter who agreed to a one-third pay cut rather than see a second wave of layoffs further hollow out their publication.

The loss of competitive newspapers has resulted in the absence of a lot of good reporting, particularly at the local and regional level where many continue to shut down each year.  Since most local TV news stations depend on local newspapers for their hard news this has also had a cascading effect on the public’s ability to access reliable information about those with and in power and how they’re wielding it from zoning boards to local corporations and government agencies. Many people have turned instead to unreliable online social media including bloggers and influencers to get their news. 

The proliferation of disinformation, misinformation and incitement to hate on social media or through the use of AI fakes also raises questions about who’s left to mediate what passes for news and to sort facts from fabrication, particularly at a time when much of the public now agree with Donald Trump.  An October 2024 Gallup poll found 69% of the public has either “no trust” or “not very much confidence” in the media.  When I began working in 1974 over 70% of the public trusted the news media.  And with some reason. 

When I was covering the wars in Central America I asked my friend photo-journalist John Hoagland how he saw our role.  “I don’t believe in objectivity because everyone has a point of view,” he said.  “What I say is I’m not going to be a propagandist for anyone.  If you do something right, I’m going to take your picture.  If you do something wrong, I’ll take your picture also.”   He was killed in crossfire a year later. Ironically the best recent movie on how reporters actually behave under fire and under stress is ‘Civil War’ that is set in a future America at war with itself.  

With the “legacy” network news operations of ABC, CBS and NBC now under the control of Disney, Comcast and ViacomCBS, major corporations dependent on the regulatory whims of Donald Trump, and with Trump’s talk of eliminating public funding for PBS (and its ‘News Hour’) plus ‘news outlets’ such as Fox and the Sinclair Broadcast Group that owns 294 TV stations covering 40% of U.S. households, acting as propaganda arms of the MAGA movement, the likelihood of much critical mainstream coverage during a second Trump administration is doubtful even before any expected lawsuits, indictments and jailing of journalists.

To paraphrase a quote from a darker time, “First they came for the journalists and then we don’t know what happened.”

For more on this topic check out Status’ piece; “The Atlantic Editor-In-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg warns newsroom decay is how ‘democracy decomposes'”

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