- The challenges for journalism in the age of Trump, this week on "Firing Line."

- The media, those people are right there, they're corrupt, largely corrupt.

(audience clamoring) They are truly the enemy of the people.

- [Margaret] At a time when Americans' trust in traditional news sources is at an all-time low, we explore the changing landscape of politics and journalism with three longtime professionals.

Jonathan Martin is politics bureau chief for Politico.

- This is the hard truth to grapple with.

A lot of Americans want their views to be ratified.

They want their views to be affirmed by the outlets that they're reading.

They don't wanna be challenged.

- [Margaret] Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for the New York Times.

- The New York Times, I think, is very dominant, but it's nothing like it was 20 years ago.

And we're very aware of that for a whole lot of reasons.

- [Margaret] And Bob Shrum, veteran political operative, is director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where we gathered recently to discuss the challenges facing political journalism.

- It's a very tough time.

We are testing whether or not we can sustain the democracy in a time when we don't agree on basic facts.

- [Announcer 1] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, the Meadowlark Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Bob Shrum, Adam Nagourney, Jonathan Martin, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Donald Trump is the second president to return to office in a non-consecutive term.

And I want to know what the unique challenges and responsibilities of covering a second Trump presidency are for journalists.

Jonathan Martin.

- Look, the challenge with Trump is that you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

And I don't say that to look for sympathy.

I don't say that to say "Woe is me."

Covering politics is the great joy of my life, and I think it's the best job in the world.

But here's what I mean.

If you cover Trump straight, and cover him for what he is and what he says and how he conducts himself, it basically demands page one, "Pearl Harbor," or "Man Walks on Moon" headlines.

- Every day.

- Every day.

You can't do it.

If you grade him on a curve, and you try to put him in that great blender of between the 40 yard lines, post-World War II, consensus-era American politics that all of us grew up in, you're doing the reader or the viewer a disservice because you're not really covering him for what he is.

You're pretending like he's a conventional figure when he's emphatically not a conventional figure.

He's a break from modern American politics.

So what do you do?

It's really tough.

And I think 10 years on, we haven't figured it out yet.

- Adam, take us in the newsroom of the New York Times.

How is the newsroom grappling with covering Trump like any other candidate?

- It goes back to 2016, I think Jonathan laid out a lot of the issues and problems.

If you try to cover him traditionally, it doesn't work 'cause he does all this stuff that I think is designed to get attention, even if it's not really that weighty.

It's hard to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

I think it's easier to do that when he's a candidate.

I think when he's president, there's such institutional authority between what he's saying that it's really difficult.

I think if you talk to people who were involved in 2016 when he ran against Hillary Clinton, we had trouble figuring it out.

We had trouble figuring out the balance of how to cover him.

I think it was better for us and everyone else in 2024.

But it's still there.

He says stuff that's just wrong.

And I think that we have an obligation to point that out.

But it's not that easy 'cause when you do that, if you don't go far enough, people say that you're carrying his water.

If you go too far, you're being hostile.

- You're being hostile.

- And the bigger problem, or as big a problem in my view, is if you go really, like, let's just say that he said stuff that's a complete lie.

Just for argument's sake, if you don't mind.

- Sure.

- I'm not saying he does.

- [Margaret] I mean, hypothetically.

- Hypothetically.

- Hypothetically.

Well, if you use the word liar or really strong words to describe him, and we deal with this every day, writing headlines, writing stories, I always fear that it will turn off readers who look at it and go, "There's the liberal New York Times," or liberal political or whatever.

"We're not gonna pay attention to it."

It's a real problem.

Do I think we're better at it than we were in 2016?

Yeah.

Do I think we've cracked this nut?

Absolutely not.

- Bob, from your position here at the Center for the Political Future at USC, I wanna ask you to place this in the context of the many campaigns that you've been involved in and also against the backdrop of where we are with press freedoms internationally.

Reporters Without Borders, for example, had the US' rating in their freedom index drop closer to autocratic Hungary than any of our democratic peers in Western Europe.

And they cite concentrated ownership of media, public distrust in media, growing pressure to revisit media freedoms that are codified in law, like New York Times versus Sullivan, and the contraction of media platforms across the country, which includes the diminishing influence and presence of local journalism.

How do you see this moment against the broad sweep of your life in politics?

- Well, first let me make a comment about campaigns that I was involved in.

You used to be terrified that you would be fact-checked and found to be wrong.

- Right.

(audience member laughs) So that when you were making an ad, you'd go over every single syllable and make sure that you could defend it.

That's all gone.

That's why I would suggest the problem is systemic, goes much deeper than Donald Trump.

In say the early 1960s, and that was even before I was doing campaigns, in the early 1960s, we had gatekeepers.

The New York Times was a gatekeeper.

At a certain point, the Washington Post was, maybe the L.A. Times, and certainly CBS and NBC, ABC to a lesser extent at that time.

And I always have this thought experiment with students.

Imagine in 1962 that someone at CBS went up to Walter Cronkite, who was then the dean of American television journalism and maybe journalism, period, and said, "By the way, there's a group called the John Birch Society, and they're holding a press conference today in New York, and they're gonna charge that President Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist conspiracy and President Kennedy is a socialist.

How many cameras should we send?"

And he would've looked up and said, "You're fired."

- Yeah.

- The gatekeepers decided that there was a common base of knowledge, common set of facts that we all ought to operate on.

It's a big systemic change.

Concentration of ownership, that's a problem.

But you know what else is the problem?

The fragmentation of media.

I don't have my cell phone with me because we're on the air, but everybody now can get whatever news they want, that they already agree with, they're not gonna be challenged, and they can actually be a broadcast outlet of their own if they want.

- And reinforced by an algorithm that feeds them more of what they want, and then always sends them further down the path of their preferences, which they wanna be reinforced in the first place.

This is the hard truth to grapple with.

A lot of Americans want their views to be ratified.

They want their views to be affirmed by the outlets that they're reading.

They don't wanna be challenged.

And so that's a huge, huge difficulty.

I think Bob is exactly right, this is much bigger than Trump.

Technology's enormous driver of this.

And it's hard to know that it's happening because we're living it.

But what is really, I think, going on, Margaret, is that we're living through the end of the post-World War II consensus in politics, in media, and culture and everything else, where you had a society that was really sort of pushed toward the center in every conceivable way and pushed toward a certain level of sort of common language, common views, common values.

And we're back to a 19th-century model that's much more fragmented.

- And we have alternative facts.

(chuckles) - Yes.

- Whatever they may be.

- There's no shared truths.

The old Pat Moynihan line that everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts is sadly out the window.

- So how important then is it, Bob, that there is some kind of convened consensus about what's happening at a national level and at a local level with our leadership?

Is that fundamental to a representative democracy?

- Probably, but we're gonna test the proposition because we don't have that consensus.

I mean, we have people who think that the January 6th insurrectionists were national heroes who were trying to save the country.

We have people nominated to the cabinet who refuse to answer the question of whether or not the 2020 election was rigged.

And in one case, the person said it was rigged.

We don't have that kind of consensus.

It's a very tough time.

We are testing whether or not we can sustain the democracy, free elections, respect for each other, in a time when we don't agree on basic facts.

- I'll give you a good example of that.

The New Yorker magazine wrote a devastating story in my opinion about the now defense secretary with some of the original allegations about sexual assault, drinking, I read that story, I remember thinking, by Jane Mayer, but I thought, "You know what, I bet this isn't gonna bring him down."

I mean, it probably should have brought him down.

10 years ago, it would've, but not any more.

'Cause people don't care, people don't believe what they're reading in organizations like that.

- Let me then ask you guys, you have written a book, I mean, you famously wrote book about The New York Times' efforts to transform itself.

I guess the question, really, I have for you all is, how important or how relevant are these legacy media publications?

- Speaking with some bias 'cause that's where I work- - Yeah, I mean, there's no way you can be objective.

- Yeah, but I think that there's a smaller, smaller, two things are going on.

One is, none of them is as big as they were 20 years ago, as Bob was saying, Cronkite, right?

The New York Times, I think, is very dominant, but it's nothing like it was 20 years ago.

And we're very aware of that for a whole lot of reasons.

Whether there's all these different voices, whether it's the attempt to sort of delegitimize the New York Times and other press.

So even given that, what makes it worse is you've seen, at least for now, the decline in some other really big deal newspapers.

Obviously what's going on here in Los Angeles, right?

- I think there was a degree of optimism, if I could interject, I think there was a degree of optimism in the 2010s, that there were benevolent billionaires who were coming along to purchase these legacy operations, that you had Patrick Soon Shiong, who was gonna buy the L.A. Times, you had Jeff Bezos, who's gonna buy the Washington Post.

And frankly, the jury is, yes, and the jury is out on how this is done.

They have hemorrhaged jobs.

They have hemorrhaged- - You think it's out?

- I'm being generous.

- I hope so.

I hope you're right.

- I'm being generous.

- [Adam] Yeah, and I hope you're right.

- I think we haven't seen the end of the story.

I don't know that we know what the final chapter is, but we have certainly seen of late a turn of the page.

- Yeah, yeah.

- They have hemorrhaged jobs, they have hemorrhaged money.

They seem to be to some- - Subscribers.

- They've lost subscribers.

Some of the owners are perceived to be susceptible to the whims of political pressure.

- Can I- - Interject by all means.

- Look, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were pioneers of putting themselves into the social media era.

Most people who read the New York Times now read it online.

They don't read it in the paper.

The Wall Street Journal, same thing is true.

I think the Times now has 11 million online subscribers.

- Paid subscribers.

- That's very sustainable as an economic model.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, did not do this and is, as you said a moment ago, hemorrhaging money.

And as a result of that, I think someone like Bezos who thought, "I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna save the place.

I'm gonna be a hero," now wants to somehow other make it sustainable and thinks that to do that, he has to get along with certain political people.

So he vetoes the editorial board's decision about who to endorse for president.

- Is there a concern by any of you of media capture along the lines of Orban's Hungary, where sort of Orban-aligned or aligned autocrats come in and purchase media outlets and then neuter news organizations?

- Yeah, I'm a little less concerned about that because of- - Why?

- Well, just the size of our country and the diversion political views here.

I think there'll be an appetite for center-right, center-left news outlets.

I don't worry about the Times and the Journal.

I think of all the outlets, I think the Times and the Journal will survive.

People will be getting the news, whether it's on a phone, an iPad, or a chip implanted in their arm, because as long as there's, like, an oil and gas executive in, like, Odessa, Texas, there's gonna be a Wall Street Journal.

And as long as there's, like, a philosophy professor at, like, Oberlin, and there's gonna be a New York Times.

I'm being very stereotypical of the audience- - But to your point, it's a fragment of the audience, it's a fragment of the country.

- Well, it's also a national, look, this was driven home to me when I was covering politics, probably even before I came to the Times, and I would be on the ground in an affluent city, and I'd be driving through a neighborhood and I would see the blue bags or the white bags in the driveways.

The Times and the Journal.

I wasn't seeing the local paper.

So to me the story is, look, the national papers like that are gonna survive.

There's going to be a market for them.

They're going to be just fine.

What I really worry about is The Washington Post and the L.A. Times and every other smaller paper because the local regional journalism doesn't have the financial model.

The benevolent billionaire model clearly isn't working now.

So who rescues McClatchy, (indistinct), Gannett?

Those papers are valuable and they're not gonna be replaced.

So it's not The Times and The Journal I worry about, it's everybody else out there.

- And to what extent is that loss of local news a threat to democracy, Bob?

- Oh, I think it's a huge threat because it disconnects people from what's happening in their communities.

Right now, you have a lot of these local newspapers, even if they're surviving, they fire the staff, and they just use wire copy or copy that's generated on a mass basis.

And they're not really informing people about what did the city council do that in fact kept fire trucks in a storage facility instead of having them out there when the city of L.A. started to catch on fire.

- It's even more tragic than that.

And I think that's a prime example.

- And that's pretty tragic.

(chuckles) - It is, but I'm talking about the conspiracy theories.

Look, if the media of yesteryear still existed Western North Carolina and you had a robust Asheville newspaper and robust weeklies in every small county in Western North Carolina, and that was how people got their information along with the big national networks, I don't know, they wouldn't be convinced that the government bioengineered a hurricane to hit them last fall.

That, to me, was the most eye-opening moment that I've had about the media landscape in a long time.

American citizens believing the federal government bioengineered a hurricane because they heard it on social media.

And that gets to the heart of lack of trust in institutions and the collapse of the press corps.

Because those folks aren't getting their information from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

They're getting it from social media which is reinforced by an algorithm.

It's heartbreaking.

- I wanna bring it back to how journalism is gonna interact with this administration.

Lawsuits are one of President Trump's favorite tactics against the media.

In December, President Trump sued the Des Moines Register for running the poll before the election that showed him behind Vice-President Harris.

He has sued CBS in federal court over the editing of "60 Minutes."

He has had a settlement recently with ABC news.

And we also know that Meta is poised to pay roughly $25 million to resolve a 2021 lawsuit that Trump brought after the company suspended his accounts.

Trump's nominee for the FBI has promised to pursue journalists.

What is the impact of all of these actions on the newsroom?

Adam?

- I think two things.

I think that for papers without organizations that don't have resources, it's really intimidating.

I think a newspaper like the New York Times, I don't wanna speak for the Sulzbergers or their bank accounts, but they can afford it.

And I think that so far they seem to be really, again, this will sound boosterish, but gutsy in terms of standing up to the administration.

But they're also being very, very careful in fact-checking stuff, realizing that anything can be a cause for action.

I think it's a real problem.

It's one more thing that's gonna shrink the number of papers that are really covering the world objectively and it's a reason to be alarmed.

- And you have to distinguish the different categories of people who can afford to defend these suits.

New York Times can afford to defend the suits.

- Wall Street Journal.

- Wall Street Journal can.

- Exactly.

- Meta can.

Meta can, Facebook can.

But they're not doing it, they're giving in, not because they're worried about spending money on the lawsuit, they're worried about the regulatory decisions that the administration might make that would affect their bottom line.

- They're thinking of their stockholders rather than their- - Same with Disney and ABC, by the way.

- Yeah, right.

They were first, right?

- Yeah.

- Jonathan, should reporters be concerned that the nominee to run the FBI has said that he will prosecute journalists?

- Yeah, I think they should take that seriously.

I think Trump- - What should they do?

- Cover him aggressively and cover his conduct aggressively.

- Is the intent to chill reporters' courage?

- I think the threats are one thing, but the settlements are actually more demoralizing, frankly.

Donald Trump threatening to sue a news organization, or actually doing it, is like an old story.

What is, I think, more alarming is a series of institutions settling and giving him money.

(Adam and Bob laugh) That to me is a bigger term here because it shows that there is a level of capitulation which speaks to their level of fear.

- And by the way, if it goes too far, then your earlier question about Hungary will become quite relevant.

You could see across the country, if you drive all the local journal or most of the local journalism out, you have the Times, the Wall Street journals on an island, able to defend themselves, maybe Politico, Politico able to defend itself because of its owner, but everybody else in a quite different and perilous position.

You could begin, I think, to see people saying, "We have to shave the story.

We need to get rid of the fact-checkers, they annoy him.

We need to be very, very careful."

- Let me ask you this, at the dawn of, sort of, social media, and its intersection with political campaigns and national politics, the platforms were perceived to be structurally benefiting the Left.

Right?

- Yes.

- Facebook helped elect President Obama.

Today, the universe dynamic is totally different.

X is, formerly Twitter, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, who has a desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing.

- And who fires people who had executive agencies.

- Mark Zuckerberg's content moderation policy shifts at Meta and lack of fact-checking, all of this is seen, in many ways, as an effort to cozy up to the president.

The Right now has the advantage.

- Yeah, I think the critical moment of the shift, by way, was Elon Musk buying Twitter, which he insists on calling X, which means he's named it after one of his children.

- Or vice versa.

(Bob laughs) - I think that was the moment because the logarithm can be tweaked so that it advantages certain kinds of messages.

- Real fast, to bring it back to the media though on this question, thinking about the campaign, Margaret, I think back to two events that get at how Kamala Harris, or, well, how Democrats are fighting a conventional war against an asymmetrical political warrior in Donald Trump.

- [Donald] Hello, how are you?

What a beautiful woman.

- Donald Trump goes to a closed McDonald's drive-thru and fry station, (Bob laughs) and literally breaks the internet.

I mean, the internet melted down that day.

Everybody, I don't care how apathetic they were, knew that Donald Trump was at a McDonald's somewhere in America.

That is his big play, all right?

Kamala Harris' big final close was to give a prepared speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. - And it will probably be the most important vote you ever cast.

- Which could've happened in like 1999, 89, 79, or 69.

Technology would've been irrelevant.

That's a conventional play by a conventional politician.

I'm gonna give a big summary speech at the end of a campaign, and that's gonna drive the coverage.

Not anymore.

The McDonald's drive-thru is what breaks through.

It's not a big speech.

- All right, well, so let's go back to 1985 then.

Bob, you were on the original "Firing Line" program, which aired for 33 years with William F. Buckley, Jr. You were on several times.

In one such program, you sparred with Buckley about Star Wars missile defense systems.

Take a look at this.

- [Bob] Oh, I'm excited for this.

- I'm telling you, we shouldn't waste money on Star Wars.

I can define a reasonable level of expenditure.

- How?

- And to spend beyond that- - How?

How?

- Because I think we can- - Now, Mr. Shrum, don't try to- - [Bob] How did you define your reasonable level?

- You don't know the slightest thing about what expenses are required to research this program.

He does.

- [Bob] Do you?

Do you?

- [William] No, but I know that you don't.

- [Bob] But they do.

(audience laughs) Which leads Mr. Buckley to the question, what are you and I doing up here talking about this?

(Bob laughs) - Oh, my gosh.

- Do you stand by your position?

- Yeah, sure.

Look, I was younger, heavier.

- Mustache, Bob?

- Mustache is good.

- Bill loved that exchange.

He put it in a book of "Firing Line" transcripts when they were published.

- Yeah, he did.

- Because the one thing I learned from him, very early on, like the first time I ever did the show, was that you can't pause.

When he asked you something or challenged you, you had to go at it right away.

And you had to say the first thing that popped into your head, otherwise, you're dead.

(audience laughs) - I was gonna go in a different direction with that.

What I was gonna ask you was, the role of conservative media has really developed.

Buckley was the first iconic conservative on television.

We now have a Balkanized media environment with conservative personalities and progressive personalities.

Very rarely do you see a moment like that where somebody from the Left and somebody from the Right have a rigorous contest of ideas.

- You know, he liked that.

His idea of conservative media was that it should be in dialogue with people on the other side.

- Jonathan, you wrote for National Review at the beginning of your career.

How do you reflect on the evolution of conservative media?

- Oh, good question.

Look, I think Trump is delaying what I view as the great reckoning on the Right.

There is gonna be a real showdown in terms of what it means to be a Republican.

Because Trump has kinda put off that argument because Trump is what it means.

And it's all personality, it's not issues.

But 2028 is gonna be, "What do we stand for on foreign policy?

Are we isolationist or internationalist?

How about domestic policy?

Are we for Lina Khan's FTC or not?

Where are we on entitlement?"

- Or immigration.

- All of the questions.

- To get to the heart of what you're saying, all the years that Mary Louise and I lived in Washington, we had conservative friends and liberal friends, and they mixed together at the dinner table.

It doesn't happen anymore.

People now choose their friendships according to politics.

I don't.

What we're trying to do at the Center for the Political Future is advance a model of politics where we respect each other, we respect the truth.

But the loss of that in Washington is one of the things that I think makes it very difficult to compromise in ways that move the country forward.

- Bob, Adam, Jonathan, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- Thanks, Margaret.

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