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I was recently at a demonstration in New York City (my second in these weeks), part of the latest set of national protests against Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and crew and, among so many other things, their urge (in climate-change terms) to devastate this planet. That rally was once again simply huge, and I stood for 45 minutes or so watching my co-demonstrators march by me, packed into 42nd Street, which couldn't be wider, chanting things like "No ICE, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!" I also copied down some of the homemade signs they were carrying. (Making such signs definitely seems to be a sign of the times.)
Here are just a few that caught my eye: "Resist like it's 1938 Germany"; "Deport Trump, not Students"; "Trump to planet: Drop Dead"; "First they came for Kilmar, then Mahmoud, then Rumeysa, and I did not speak out. Then they came for me" [That one was modernized from a famed passage of Pastor Martin Niemoller, who first backed and then opposed the Nazis and ended up in a concentration camp]; "Turd Reich"; "Trump's mother was an immigrant"; "Ikea makes better cabinets"; "MAGA is a death cult"; "Think while it's still legal"; "The Earth doesn't have four years"; "Democracy, not monarchy"; "Is there a vaccine for stupidity?"; "3rd term, Sing-Sing"; "No more Dogey Business"; "This is what autocracy looks like" (with, of course, images of Trump, Vance, and Musk); "Get your tiny hands off our Democracy!"; "Lose the tiny dick(tator)"; and an older woman carrying a sign that said, "Hands off social security!"
And those were just a few among what must have been thousands of signs. And yes, a surprising number of the demonstrators were indeed of a certain age. A fellow aging demonstrator I chatted with offered me this comment: "Gaza could stop every university campus in the country, but not this! Where are the kids? It should be their job, not ours!" And it was true that, on average, the demonstrators weren't young -- although some certainly were youthful. Let me just add that, in my hometown, the media coverage distinctly left something to be desired (perhaps reflecting media anxiety about Trump & crew). The New York Times (the paper version of which I still read) carried an article on page 28 about the national rallies that day, but not one focused on the major rally in its hometown, which it barely mentioned. And yet, there was room on its front page that very same day for a Trump tariff piece headlined "Italians Fear American Palates Will Settle for 'Italian Sounding.'"
And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson take you deep into a media world in crisis in an era when such outfits could all too literally find themselves under the gun. Tom
Seven-and-a-Half Propositions for Journalism in the Age of Trump
The Good and the Bad in Media Coverage Now
By Nan Levinson
It's not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.
Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against "systemically biased content" and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government's good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven't escaped the threats.
In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. "Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story," Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to the New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they'll fall out of their sockets.)
It's probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they're under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it's still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.
Bad News
It's not as if we weren't warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he's back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What's new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.
Even before Trump won the election, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn't followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper's opinion section on defending "personal liberties and free markets," while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper's editorial board and instituted AI-generated "political ratings" for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.
I'm not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of the Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he's been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.
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