A dangerous anti-press mix

“It’s not enough for people to read the news. They have to trust it.”

In 2017, the press will have to confront a president and a public that are dangerously hostile to it.

peter-sternePresident Obama has not been a friend to national security journalists. His administration has used grand jury subpoenas to force reporters to reveal their confidential sources. And it’s used the Espionage Act, a vague 1917 law that criminalizes sharing sensitive national security info, to jail reporters’ sources.

But Obama at least paid lip service to the importance of press freedom. He held regular press conferences, sat down with reporters for one-on-one interviews, and publicly praised investigative journalism.

Compare that to the president-elect. Trump made insulting journalists a staple of his campaign rallies, threatened to sue news organizations for reporting true stories that were critical of him, and refused to issue press credentials to reporters who had written things that he did not like.

Combine the Obama administration’s legal precedent with Trump’s disdain for the press and you’ve got a dangerous mix.

Trump and his choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, will likely to increase the number of subpoenas and leak prosecutions. They might even go a step further and try to indict reporters under the Espionage Act. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, has already said that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet “should be in jail.”

Such heavy-handed repression of journalists might inspire public outcry against Trump. Or it might not. Right now, much of the public shares the president-elect’s disdain for journalists.

A nasty, polarized campaign filled with competing charges of media bias has soured the press in the eyes of many people on both left and right. These people won’t stop reading and watching mainstream news sources, but they will have less trust in them. That will make it harder for mainstream journalists to win sympathy if Trump tries to crush them.

It will also make it tougher to debunk conspiracy theories spread by fake news sites. Someone might read The New York Times, but that doesn’t mean they’ll trust the Times when the paper debunks conspiracy theories or fact-checks politicians.

It’s not enough for people to read the news. They have to trust it.

Public distrust of the press will also make it easier for celebrities and billionaires to silence media companies that they don’t like. The Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan made it difficult for public figures to win libel cases against journalists. Even when a jury finds in favor of a public figure, those verdicts are usually reversed on appeal. But plaintiffs don’t have to win cases in order to make life difficult for media companies. Legal bills aren’t cheap. A sufficiently motivated billionaire can easily fund enough frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt a small media organization.

Invasion-of-privacy suits are even more dangerous for news organizations, since truth isn’t a defense. Journalists can publish accurate stories and still be found liable for invading someone’s privacy. A jury that identifies more with celebrities than journalists is less likely to accept high-minded First Amendment arguments about newsworthiness and the public’s right to know.

In 2017, journalists will face attacks on all fronts. They’ll need to defend their First Amendment rights in court while keeping the public informed about the Trump’s administration’s activities. They’ll need to remind the American people why a free press is important.

Peter Sterne covers media for Politico.

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Trushar Barot   API or die

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot