Columbia Journalism Review

It is an odd paradox in a small community: people shop with their local TV reporters and send their kids to school with the children of the editors of their hometown newspaper. They know their local journalists not simply as a byline but as the reporter who sits in the fourth row from the front on the right side of the church every Sunday. They don’t always see them as “the media.” The media are CNN and The New York Times and the Huffington Post. The media that deserves to be put in pens, like cattle, as Tom Matthews, editor of the Wayne County Press wrote in a recent column.

In the coming months, local journalists, like their national counterparts, are sure to face more criticism as Trump prepares to take office. There are two things at play: one is what role journalists will have under a president who has been outwardly hostile of the watchdogs of government, and the other is to what extent people will be willing to listen if the journalism doesn’t confirm previously held beliefs. In other words, how will any journalist deliver credible news under a model in which people doesn’t necessarily want information but rather something else?

[Commentary] We, as journalists, had better take extra care these days to strike the right balance between reacting and overreacting if we don’t want to be used as pawns in someone else’s strategy. Sometimes it seems that all the press wants is for President-elect Donald Trump to agree not to set up concentration camps—even as he confers with Republican leaders on how to completely dismantle what’s left of America’s public spaces, public institutions, and protections for the poor and the vulnerable. We will have our civil liberties, but nothing else.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

WikiLeaks used to be the press’s only source for anonymously submitted online document dumps. Since then, the press has developed its own digital capabilities and a comfort with leaked material—and WikiLeaks has strayed from editorial curation and toward publishing unedited archives.

Before the election, the conversation around Wikileaks focused on the question of whether or not the press should report on the Podesta e-mails, since they are so targeted, uncurated, and not even clearly newsworthy. The verdict, rightly, was that the press should report on the leaks: Glenn Greenwald argues in The Intercept, and Trevor Timm in The Guardian, that it is the journalist’s job to take what was leaked, decide what is newsworthy, and report on it. The role of the press is not only to report the leaks, but to interrogate the information and assess its newsworthiness. But now, after the election, there is another layer of transparency that is the press’s job to add: transparency on WikiLeaks itself.

[Commentary] How can media companies do professional journalism that reaches audiences on the major platforms? And how can the giant platforms make that professional journalism worth their while?

I’m glad that the 2016 election has prompted people to buy new subscriptions to paywalled legacy publications. But that, by definition, is a way to stay out of the trenches, to keep clean hands in the new media wars. Instead, legacy outlets and new ones alike could let important coverage that is native to this new space out from behind paywalls. Editors could treat the information ecosystem as a frontline beat. And the platforms need to find a way to support the native journalism that is the only antidote to the poison in their veins.

[Ben Smith is the Editor in Chief of BuzzFeed.]

To say the media missed some seismic shift in American political culture goes too far. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; President Barack Obama’s approval rating is sky high; and the winning GOP candidate this cycle received fewer votes than his losing predecessor in 2012. National journalists filed so many dispatches from Trump country that the genre coalesced into a recurring joke on Twitter. That reporting came in addition to strong and copious accountability work that exposed Trump as a grifter who jokes about sexual assault and Clinton as a uninspiring politician surrounded by a shady personal network.

This is a column about reviewing campaign journalism, however, so here goes: The performance of “the media” in 2016 was…mixed.

[Commentary] Wide swaths of the country, both geographically and demographically, don’t believe us. They see us as tools of some amorphous establishment, and have turned for their news of the world to alternate channels, to put it politely. To them, “corporate media” is of a piece with government insiders and self-dealers who, to paraphrase the tagline of one of this year’s attack ads, make government work…for them. Journalism is only one part of the problem. But it can and in my view should be part of the solution.

We can help provide the country with a common basis of facts and a common vocabulary to discuss our challenges. We have the power to actually introduce Americans from different backgrounds and points of view to each other. We can, in the popular phrase, be a convener of important conversations. 2016’s presidential campaign has provided a great opportunity to show how important we can be. Independent, fair-minded journalism is desperately needed. We need to find out how to rebuild it everywhere. That’s something we can ask the public to believe in. We did not have that conversation during the election. We need to have it now.

[Michael Oreskes is head of NPR News. He was national political correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.]

On Election Nights past, ProPublica staffers were more likely to be found at home watching the results roll in on TV or online than in the newsroom. The nonprofit, public-interest journalism outfit isn’t in the business of tracking the vote. But in 2016, it’s trying something new.

Working out of a temporary newsroom setup at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, it will be the hub of a country-wide network of journalists, journalism students, and concerned citizens tracking and reporting on problems that prevent people from voting. Amid Donald Trump’s cries of a “rigged” election and a “crooked” news media, more than 300 newsrooms—at least one in every state—have signed on to participate in the Electionland project to ensure voter problems are surfaced, reported, and rectified by the time the polls close on Election Day, when it counts.

[Commentary] Donald Trump is a moral, intellectual and spiritual failure. Trump’s followers forgive his abusiveness, callousness and mendacity because it embodies, to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous phrase, “the crooked timber of humanity.” His failures of character allow them to forgive him his wealth and power. What his followers cannot forgive is the liberal media’s smug enforcement of the straight and narrow path to happiness and success, a smugness and prescriptiveness often born in conditions of prosperity and privilege that are far removed from the way the majority of Americans exist.

Most American define success in terms of their families, their work—if they’re lucky enough to be working, and at a job with dignity—and their attachment to their communities. For most of the media, success is the right school, the right style of parenting, the right cultural products, the right job, the right etiquette in every social situation, the right social attitudes, and the right workout. That difference between how the media defines success and failure and how much of the rest of the country does, is one of the great causes of the divide between the press and the tens of millions of Americans who have rallied behind the exceptionally flawed Republican standard-bearer. It is a reason most of the media never grasped the rise of Trump’s base of support. Unless it’s addressed, one of the legacies of the 2016 election will be a permanent, and deepening, mistrust of and alienation from the mainstream press.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

First, could President Trump “open up our libel laws”? No. States create nearly all libel laws, and they’re subject to First Amendment limits. Trump couldn’t require states to change their laws, any more than he could require the Supreme Court to change its First Amendment jurisprudence, or require Congress to rewrite the First Amendment. This is a matter of eighth-grade civics.

Second, could President Trump change the Freedom of Information Act? Kind of. He alone couldn’t amend the law, but he could affect its implementation. For example, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama signed one executive order and two presidential memoranda heralding a “new era of openness” that would, among other things, re-establish a presumption of disclosure for records requested under the FOIA—and reverse President George W. Bush’s changes to the Presidential Records Act, to hold his own records “to a new standard of openness.”

Third, could President Trump crack down on public affairs reporting? Yes, most likely in the area of national security—if his Department of Justice prosecuted journalists under, say, the Espionage Act, something that has occurred once before, or if his DOJ tried to obtain an injunction against publication, or prosecuted leakers and subpoenaed journalists to supply information. Another route would be to issue an executive order modifying how classified information must be handled, or allowing information to be classified for longer periods.

Fourth, what if President Trump simply didn’t like the press, as he’s been saying on the campaign trail? What impact could that have? It could mean Trump would be less accessible to journalists or wouldn’t invite them to certain functions or press conferences.

[Commentary] For the first time in history, the Iranian state broadcaster livestreamed the entire 90-minute US presidential debate. This was not meant to be a civics lesson. Rather, it was an effort to highlight the dysfunctionality of the American political system to the Iranian public. That decision shows the ways in which—win or lose—the Trump campaign has eroded US standing around the world, particularly when it comes to such issues as human rights and press freedom. This may seem incidental compared with the enormous threat a Trump presidency poses to US institutions from the political parties, to the Justice Department, and the media itself. But for vulnerable journalists around the world, it’s a game changer.

When it comes to press freedom and the rights of journalists around the world, the US exercises its influence in two ways. The first is by example. But Trump has consistently trampled on America’s First Amendment tradition. The second way in which the US exercises influence is by speaking out when the rights of journalists are violated around the world. Trump has indicated he has no inclination to do so. If Trump were to be elected president, he would likely become America’s first democratator. Though he now appears likely to lose, the Trump campaign has already had a negative influence—as anyone who watched debate night from Tehran already knows.

[Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.]