How is the Media Changing Under President Trump?
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Each morning, it's a new opportunity, a chance to start fresh. Up First from NPR makes each morning an opportunity to learn and to understand. Choose to join the world every morning with Up First, a podcast that hands you everything going on across the globe and down the street, all in 15 minutes or less. Start your day informed and anew with Up First by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts. From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, we take stock of recent moves by the Trump administration to crack down on the press. The White House has barred the Associated Press from events because the AP wouldn't reclassify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. And the White House says it will decide who is part of the press pool that covers the president, not the White House Correspondents Association.

Meantime, some news organizations like The Washington Post are making editorial changes, while others race to settle lawsuits or find ways to reset relations. A closer look at Trump's impact on press freedom after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim.

Voice of America is among the latest organizations facing upheaval amid the Trump administration's clampdown on reporters and news outlets covering the president. After Trump official Richard Grinnell accused a VOA reporter of treason for quoting on social media criticisms of U.S. AID cutbacks, the reporter was placed on leave.

Meantime, the Associated Press remains iced out of White House events, and an emboldened FCC has launched investigations and filed lawsuits against news outlets, sometimes alleging bias. What effect is this having on an already fragmented and vulnerable media, and ultimately, the press freedom essential to a democracy? We take a closer look at all of it this hour with David Fokkenflik, media correspondent for NPR. David, so glad to have you on Forum.

Pleasure. Thanks for having me. So let's start with what's happened at Voice of America. First, can you just remind listeners how broad VOA's reach is? Sure. So Voice of America was founded in the 1940s at the height of World War II. And the idea was twofold, and it's really remained ever thus. It's to provide news, in this case, behind enemy lines, particularly to subjugated populations oppressed by the Nazis, and

That could be relied on. And so then, you know, if the Nazis were claiming that they had won a battle and the allies had actually won it, they would say so. But the twist was if the allies lost, they'd report that, too. And that provided a real differentiation from the kinds of information people were receiving from official channels in Nazi occupied areas and also a soft power and soft appeal of saying, hey,

hey, in America, in the West, we don't do that to you. We're not going to censor the news in that kind of way. And it really continued across the Cold War, and it continues to the current day. There's debate about, you know, should we be doing this at a time when the Internet's available? But in reality, they are able to reach several hundred million people in scores of countries across the globe, and they're accompanied by other nations

networks that some of our listeners may be familiar with, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. There's Radio Free Asia. There's the Office of Cuba Broadcast that gets things behind censors in that country and a number of other sister networks as well. And the idea is, as I say, twofold to provide news in areas where a free press isn't operating or it's not financially robust enough to provide significant coverage and also to kind of

operate as soft power exercise of diplomacy by saying, America, we provide you with different kinds of cultural things. You know, they were projecting jazz and rock music behind Soviet lines during the Cold War. And also to say, you know, we are going to include news that doesn't always reflect perfectly on us and doesn't always reflect

unanimity on us. That is, it reflects points of views that may criticize the government at any given time here in the States as a way of showing that's how America operates. Right. So this model, as you say, of how a free press can function in a democracy. And then now, as you report, it has embarked on a formal review of a chief national correspondent's social media postings for potential bias against the president. What did this reporter do and what's going on?

So this is fascinating, in some ways troubling, particularly for people inside Voice of America and journalists monitoring this, and also a little complicated. It goes like this. There's currently, as you say, an investigation being undertaken by a senior executive, really news executive inside Voice of America, of predominantly Steve Herman's social media feeds.

particularly Twitter, to see whether or not it betrays a point of view. Now, interestingly, Herman, if you know, I follow him on Twitter and Blue Sky, and he's one of the better known English language journalists they have at the network used to cover the White House.

He doesn't offer a lot of top spin or, you know, a ton of one liners on his tweets. The question I believe under review is whether what is perceived to be a unrelenting flood of retweets of other people's articles or tweets of links to these articles of things that

may reflect a critical point of view of what the new Trump administration is doing, what the Elon Musk-led Doge initiative is up to, the slashing cuts, the putting mass quantities of employees on long range or potentially permanent furloughs or job losses, you know, that it accretes in some ways that even if he's not

rhetorically assailing the administration that he comes off negatively. There is a backstory to this, which is that he was investigated by two political appointees of Voice of America's federal parent agency. One of the things I didn't say explicitly is Voice of America is owned by the federal government.

As are its, you know, a number of its sister networks. Some of them are actually private networks funded by the feds. But regardless, VOA is actually owned by the federal government and its federal parent agency had two senior political appointees assigned to investigate him much the same way by a very MAGA conservative appointee by Trump in the last year of his first term in office.

And that was seen to be unconstitutional as well as unlawful by a federal judge named Beryl Howell. And she ruled that this was an incursion upon his First Amendment rights as a federal employee, but also as a as a journalist. And it was a problem in this case.

That narrative is certainly what informs or that those events certainly what informs a lot of the concerns of journalists at the network right now, as has a reassignment of a woman who had been a senior White House correspondent to be a basically another senior national correspondent focusing on other issues. Although that does happen periodically at major news organizations, including my own.

The wrinkle here is that actually this review being done was approved by the director of The Voice of America, a longtime, very distinguished journalist at The Washington Post, was a national editor there, went on to become an official at the Holocaust Memorial and Museum in D.C. And then finally, the head of Freedom House before he went to head up The Voice of America. Well, Freedom House is an advocacy organization for activists and journalists that embraces free speech principles. And so

Mike Abramowitz, the director of Voice America, was appointed under Biden's head of the parent agency of VOA and is not seen as an ideologue or a partisan figure. He's seen, if anything, as a distinguished journalist and a free speech advocate. So the fact that he approved this review means it's a little hard to process. Is this anticipatorily doing MAGA's bidding? So far, there's no sign of that.

And yet Carrie Lake, the very pro-MAGA, pro-Trump, former local TV host who's

been designated as the intended next head of the Voice of America, has not, to our knowledge, been sending any nasty grams insisting on this being done. So the claim is from Voice of America, this is a journalistic review over journalistic issues. The history, you know, has some foreboding echoes. Yeah. What has Carrie Lake said she wants to do at VOA once she is installed as director? Right now, I think she's just been installed as an advisor because there's still some confirmations that need to take place. But what has she said she wants to do?

Yeah, you've got it exactly right. She's a senior advisor to President Trump who has been assigned to what's called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the parent agency for Voice of America. But she's clearly, you know, kind of determining how the agency is run. She says she wants to improve it. She says she doesn't want to turn it into a Trump TV, but that she wants to make sure it's fair and that it's free of bias, all of which sounds fair.

And she also says, look, you know, it's going to may need to run a little bit more efficiently and effectively. We may need to review how we do what we do in the current moment. And the current moment, of course, is being defined by this Doge initiative, you know, inspired and overseen, it appears, by Elon Musk.

to really streamline government to the point of hacking a lot of folks out of it. So it comes as little surprise that that would be part of what she would do as well. And it's fine for new leaders to make assessments of what's working and what's not, how moments and technologies and societal shifts in lands abroad may suggest that recalibrations are needed. Her rhetoric prior to

you know, signing on, getting a government paycheck and a government.gov email address was a lot less conciliatory. And it was more sounded as though she was going to be sticking it to conventional notions of journalism. That's not how she's presenting herself at this current moment. Well, let's go over to the White House and remind us why the Associated Press has been banned from the White House press pool.

Yeah. So the Associated Press has experienced, you know, a bit of a shock. It has been part of what's called the presidential press pool since it was invented, as I understand it, more than a century ago. And the idea is that you can't have the entire press corps or anybody who wants to hear what the president or top official has to say speak.

At any given moment at events that are often in relatively constrained spaces. So they create pools. They might have a few print reporters, a couple of TV reporters and and visual journalists to convey the images and live stream the video and what's being said. You might have somebody from radio pool. NPR often performs that function. And you might have some online journalists as well. The AP was always a part of that pool. And the members were sort of assigned and assigned.

you know, if you like corralled and the logistics figured out by the White House Correspondents Association, it's kind of a thankless task. But then you have a pool reporter write up what was said. And then journalists from different outlets can write their stories differently, but they're operating on the same basis of what was said at a given event. And, you know, if there's body language, if there's something non-verbally indicated, whatever, that's, you know, shared with the press corps to report. The White House has said, why should you guys get to do that? They have...

essentially said the Associated Press is no longer welcome to be part of that, although it can go to the White House because it declined to embrace President Trump's preferred language for describing the body of water that we all know as the Gulf of Mexico. First day, he says it's the Gulf of America. Boom, America first, Gulf of America first. And the Associated Press issued style statements

language for its journalists, but also for the, you know, hundreds of news organizations and other institutions that rely upon its language advice and style book said, listen, we're going to continue to refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico, but acknowledge the president that the president has, you know, decreed that he wants to

the U.S. government and Americans to refer to as Gulf of America. We'll acknowledge it, but we're not going to be overridden by it. After all, the Associated Press serves news organizations all over the world, including in Mexico. And this is what people know it to be. Bodies of water are not controlled by a single country in that way, or at least this body of water is not. And the White House just said no. The White House said, this is the fact. This is now what it is called, full stop. And so the Associated Press is tossed out. And I think it's, you know, at once kind of

And on the other hand, it's an obvious effort at government incursion into editorial choices that would seemingly be protected by the First Amendment.

So the White House has said, listen, there is not a right to be present when the president speaks in a pool. That is a privilege. We've decided a judge at one point, while seemingly sympathetic to the arguments being made by the AP, said, you know, why? Why does the White House Correspondents Association, why do these reporters get to determine this themselves? Yep. More on Trump right after the break in his moves against the press. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Each morning, it's a new opportunity, a chance to start fresh. Up First from NPR makes each morning an opportunity to learn and to understand. Choose to join the world every morning with Up First, a podcast that hands you everything going on across the globe and down the street, all in 15 minutes or less. Start your day informed and anew with Up First by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're looking in this hour at the Trump administration's efforts to restrict press freedom. There have been a whole slew of actions and it's been hard to keep up. But David Falkenflik of NPR, media correspondent there, has been tracking a lot of it. And he's with us to talk more about the details of what's going on. So listeners, what questions do you have about Trump's moves?

against the press. What thoughts or questions do you have about how media outlets are responding and have moves by the Trump administration or media outlets caused you to act in one way or another? You can email forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And David, before the break, you were just talking about how the AP is responding to the White House restructuring its press pool and claiming that it can do this, and also about how people have been reacting and interpreting this. And I was struck actually by something that Peter Baker tweeted. He said, "Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin's reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.

He went on to say the message is clear, given that the White House has already kicked one news organization out of the pool because of coverage it does not like. It is making certain everyone else knows that the rest of us can be barred, too, if the president does not like our questions or stories. What do you think about that? Is that the message you feel like that is being sent across news organizations with this move?

I think it's hard to interpret it in any other way. I mean, I think the president and Caroline Leavitt, his press secretary, have been pretty explicit in saying that they will be aggressive about moving against news organizations whose decisions and judgments they take issue with.

You know, the president filed a number of lawsuits against news organizations and social media companies, social media giants, before taking office. Just recently upped his lawsuit against CBS over their editing in a fairly benign way of

the interview of Kamala Harris, the vice president. And you can take issue with, by the way, the way in which they did that. They gave slightly different slices to two different versions of the interview they served up on CBS. But

It's not a there's no real legal claim there. Every single lawyer I've spoken to about that has affirmed that for me. But CBS's parent company is thinking hard about settling it because they have a huge, you know, they're about to be bought and they need that to be approved by federal regulators. The various elements and levers of the administration in this very young part of its second term have proven themselves absolutely not only willing, but willing to be explicit about the ability to use

to use the levers of government, the bully pulpit, but at times regulations and the law, and at times just the intimation that they can do things against those they feel have crossed them in ways that I think are trying to bring news organizations to reflect the rhetoric that the president wants rather than perhaps the reality that their reporters might be finding.

This is Neuron Discord writes, the Gulf of America kerfuffle with AP is just a front, right? Can we be real and just say that it is a transparent attempt to send a message and to intimidate the media, to prepare everyone for not reporting against things that are inevitably coming? And Stephen writes regarding the VOA, I can't tell you how many times I've seen right-wingers retweet something that I find offensive. And when I've called them out on it, they've always replied, oh, that's not necessarily my personal point of view. I just want to see what my followers think.

Think about it. A lot of journalists say that, too. They're quoting coverage and showing you what is out there, but not necessarily endorsing it. And as you were saying, editing interviews and sharing different cuts with different programs, again, these just feel like normal everyday operations of news organizations that have now become mainstream.

deeply, deeply politicized and also treated as illegal. And in the case of the VOA, Richard Grinnell called it treason. So, you know, the AP is fighting back. And we are seeing even news organizations like Fox News frustrated about the White House's view that it can handpick who covers it. But we're also seeing things like at the Washington Post, owner Jeff Bezos is

announcing last week changes to its opinion section that is being seen potentially as an effort to maybe placate some of the demands of the Trump administration. Can you explain what Bezos has asked the opinion section to do or what he said the opinion section will do?

Yeah, absolutely. The opinion section last week, their announcements that Bezos said, you know, I've thought hard about this. I want the section to focus on personal liberties and free markets. Very similar emphasis to what The Wall Street Journal has done for many, many, many decades. And

The thing that was really striking to me was he said he wanted to do that. And he said, in an age of the Internet where you can find opinions anywhere, we are not going to post or publish, by and large, opposing points of view. You know, if you think of an old fashioned print newspaper, and I realize most folks don't subscribe to them anymore. Nonetheless, there was what was called the op ed section of the op ed page. And the idea is it's a

And the idea is that not only is it physically apart from it and not only is it written by other people, but that often it will present opposing points of views of way of thinking about things because a community and a country deserves more than just sort of one slice at it.

it. Bezos says we don't need to do that anymore. Well, the Post had built up an extraordinary cadre of scores of writers, columnists, analysts, pundits and contributors who offered a cacophony of thoughts, right? A very disparate range of points of views. And this flies against that. And it seems as though the

First off, let's acknowledge Bezos has every right to be able to say what editorial line he wants the Post to take as a publisher or as an owner. That's not meddling. That's their prerogative. That's different than dictating what the separately run newsroom has to say, at least by the lights of American journalism.

And yet to and also, I guess we should acknowledge Bezos really is somebody who comes from kind of a libertarian point of view, and it serves him to be so because libertarians, by and large, don't like regulations. And that is something that Bezos and Amazon really have fought hard against since the since, you know, its rise to prominence.

All of that said, the idea of those values and not accompanied by opposing values would suggest a world that's going to be much gentler on Donald Trump. A guy who seems to enjoy tremendously, except in the instances of going against his perceived opponents or enemies, as he might define them, seems to want to tear down one regulation after another.

whether it's from raw milk to fracking to whatever, to just sort of have a much less regulatory approach to government in a way that would mean that Bezos' op-ed pages and editorials would not be found offensive by the president. And you've got to remember that his editorial pages have repeatedly written that Trump is unfit for office and has strenuously made the case that that

that he should not be allowed to reenter, much less be elected. And this comes on the heels, of course, of Bezos canceling an endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election day itself. And so what Bezos has done is really refashioned the voice of The Washington Post to be a much more sympathetic and much less confrontational oppositional critic of President Trump's time in power.

Roke on Discord writes, the media has already changed under Trump. Each time they search for verbs or words that soften the impact of his actions in the name of neutrality. And every time they let blatant lies go unchecked, they were complicit. Now what we see is the formalization of a behavior that began years ago. Even reality TV reunion episodes are better at fact checking than journalists at major networks. Let me go to Will in San Francisco. Hi, Will, you're on.

Hi, yeah, thanks. This is a really important conversation. I really appreciate KQED for hosting it. So my question is, as a regular person, how can I tactically or practically support press freedom, freedom of speech, a strong press? Can I donate to certain organizations or be a member? I've been listening to KQED and I've been a member, but what do you recommend a regular person do to help?

Well, thanks for the question. I mean, David, already, it seems like a lot of people have basically dropped their subscriptions or canceled their subscription to The Washington Post as one way to voice their displeasure with some of Bezos's moves. But I don't know if you have other thoughts, too, for Will.

Well, look, I think something like 300,000 people have canceled, canceled in just the 10 days after the announcement that they would not publish that editorial endorsement. That was something like 12 percent of their digital subscriptions at the time. And they lost 75,000 in just 48 hours last week. That's a ton. They have added about 400,000 in the time since the a few weeks before the election to the present. So it's kind of.

I think overall, they're down a couple hundred thousand. Why does that matter? Maybe it's sending a message to Jeff Bezos. Maybe. It's not going to hit him where it hurts because he, of course, is making billions of dollars a year through Amazon, Blue Origin and the like. Some of it through government contracts, I might add. But, you know...

The reporting at The Washington Post has actually been pretty muscular and impressive. Yeah. Even I got to say the criticism on the news side, even the criticism and the opinion section of Donald Trump has kept up, I will say, in the days since the announcement of the changes, although they haven't taken full effect. We don't know who the new editorial page editor is, for example. But, you know, it hurts the journalists there and their resources and the size of the staff and what they have to work with to bail out of that. There are nonprofits, right?

uh, that are doing good work. And I think, you know, the question is what, what places do you find yourself going to? Do you keep going to, um, the Atlantic and hitting up against the paywall? And maybe at a certain point, that's a notion that you should be subscribing to that publication. And they've grown in recent years. Maybe, you know, uh, there's the Indianapolis mirror. If you live in Indiana, your listeners probably less so there, but I'm just saying like there, there are places around the country, uh,

that are doing good work and are seeking to build and need the support. I think that, you know, sustaining those organizations are real. You know, I how do I say this? I don't view journalism as part of the hashtag resistance. You know, I think of it as more hashtag reality. And I think the idea for me is to equip listeners and readers and

you know, I go on some TV show viewers with the information that they need to act as citizens and not just as consumers or not just as sort of passive recipients of information, but who get to make choices for themselves. They love Trump. They hate Trump. They, they, they, they love Gavin Newsom. They hate Gavin Newsom, whatever. I want them to have the information they need to make and evaluate people who act in their names and things that are done with their taxpayer dollars. Right. And, uh,

I would support those places that you find to be credible over time. That is that their journalism holds up, that their judgment just doesn't just ring true, but it proves to be true. And when they get things wrong, keep faith with their audiences by acknowledging it and rededicating themselves to getting their coverage better.

That is my kind of standpoint. And yeah, send some money to the folks who are doing the work that you value. But I will say a similar thing happened in the LA Times. Patrick Soon-Shiong, also a billionaire with a lot of business in front of federal regulators, remolded, killed an endorsement similarly, has remolded his editorial page section. It's been playing around with different AI devices, lost a bunch of subscribers.

The journalists there are doing some really good work. And he may be sincere in what he's doing. Bezos may be sincere in what he's doing. But it happens in a timing where...

You know, they're doing it at a time where, for example, Bezos has joined digital titans sitting behind the president at the inauguration, sending a million dollars from his personal bank accounts to help his inaugural fund, going to Mar-a-Lago with his fiance to meet with Melania and Donald Trump for a private dinner. There are a lot of ways in which they're showing deference and accommodation in ways that are unethical.

complicating for the work that the journalists are doing. Work for the journalists, journalists like Ann Telness, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, formerly with The Washington Post. Ann, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you for inviting me. So you decided to quit The Washington Post at the beginning of this year after an editorial cartoon of yours was killed. Can you describe the cartoon?

Oh, sure. It was basically all the people you're just talking about. The tech titans, the heads of newspapers on bend a knee in front of a large

statue of Trump even though you don't see his head you know it's him because of his tie um and they are offering uh their money and other things to him and also there's a little tiny Mickey Mouse that is um laying down there also offering himself because of the um

The ABC connection right the the defamation lawsuit they settled there for 15 million What explanation did you get for that cartoon being killed? Okay, so this was a rough so the way that the editing process works at least for me at the Washington Post and I've been there since 2008 so I've dealt with Basically what happens is I choose the subject matter I am NOT told what to draw and

Because I'm not an illustrator. I'm an editorial cartoonist. I have a point of view just like a columnist would have. And I send the ref over through another editor. And then I hear back. And usually if there's a problem with it, it has to do with visual metaphors. You know, an image that might make the editor uncomfortable. He doesn't understand it. Or maybe my cartoon isn't perfectly clear. But then that comes back to me. And then I do something about it. This time it was just no.

And so, yeah. I was going to say it was it was different. I immediately I was surprised because I had never had that happen before. And because of the timing, I mean, you said it was the beginning of the year. It actually was right before everyone headed off for Christmas break. I believe it was December 19th, but I'm not sure. But that was when you submitted the editorial cartoon.

Correct. Yes. Yes. I meant you left the post at the beginning of this year. Is that right? I did. I waited. I waited until my editorial page editor was back from a vacation because I wanted to discuss it with him. Um, so then I quit after I, after I discussed it with him. After you discussed it with it, with him, because why do you think it was pulled and what was it about that that made you say, I can't work here anymore? Well, as, as has been reported, um,

The editorial page editor

David Shipley said that it was repetitive, which is funny. A couple of months away from that now, I find it even more ridiculous. And people have pointed out that, you know, we do lots of different topics several times in written columns. You know, I had never done an editorial cartoon about this. This was in the news about these, about the Jeff Bezos and, you know, and Mark Zuckerberg going down to Mar-a-Lago. So I, you know, I did a cartoon about it. So, yeah, that was...

That I don't know. It's weird. I hadn't planned to quit. I I wanted to continue commenting through my cartoons because I had just been elected president. But I just knew I just thought I can't do my job if I'm told I can't do certain topics. And that was a way of telling me that I could not do that topic. So I quit. And I didn't find it persuasive how he explained himself when we when we spoke privately.

So we're coming up on a break, but you were in a documentary, Democracy Under Siege, a new one that just came out, though it was filmed before the election, where you said you were very worried about the state of American democracy. Can you tell us more? And is this connected? Well, this was a documentary that I've been working on for a few years with Laura Nix, the director. This is her vision. And

Obviously, we didn't know that Trump was going to win. So I just was kind of reacting to the situation that I saw in front of me. I wasn't I guess I was I was a little frightened that he was going to win, but I just I just saw a continuing breakdown. So it's actually it's a very relevant, unfortunately, a very timely thing. It was created for a European audience, unfortunately.

to kind of explain how our election process works. But I have to tell you, I learned a lot watching it. I think every American should see this. It unfortunately does not have U.S. distribution. That's a whole other show you ought to have. Certain films don't have U.S. distribution. Yeah. And Thelma, I really appreciate you coming on to share what I'm sure was a very difficult experience, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist formerly with The Washington Post. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the Trump administration's moves to tighten its grip on the press and the impact and potential impact of

They have David Fulkenflik as media correspondent for NPR News. And you, our listeners, are joining with your questions and thoughts about Trump's moves against the press and the impact that it can have. Your thoughts about how the media is responding or certain media outlets are responding and sharing how moves by the Trump administration have

has prompted you to act. For example, Patrick on Blue Sky writes, recent events have made me realize the importance of protecting freedom of the press. I'm already a KQED supporter and have started donating to AP News 2. Another listener writes, so if the right can sue for seemingly biased media reporting of Voice of America, the left should meet that aggression and file suit against what we deem right-winged media sitting groups.

in the White House now. You can share your comments by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum, our social channels. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. Let me go to Bert in San Francisco. Hi, Bert, you're on.

Hi, Mina. I appreciate the show. Listen, I'm going to speak quickly because I'd like to try to get a few things in. I worked from 1980 to 1983 in the Reagan White House press office as the editor of the White House News Summary and also as a press advance man. I very much understand and appreciate the antagonistic nature between a press office and the fourth estate. We desperately need a strong fourth estate. There's no one in the current press pool or

press offerings that is like a Sam Donaldson, a Bill Plant, Ann Compton, or especially a Helen Thomas. We have people asking in the current press, Zelensky, why aren't you wearing a suit? It's a joke. The press, it

It needs to continue to be on this guy's back and challenge him. However, the press, I think, does itself a bit of a misservice, if you will, when they don't call out Trump for being a liar. They'll say, oh, well, he didn't provide the facts. Here are the real facts. No, call it what it is. Be stronger. Act.

stronger. I'm particularly proud of the fact that we in our press office were the first press office to bring CNN to the front row when cable was just coming out. We knew that it was a risk, but we

also knew that it was important to reach more and more people. We understood the adversarial nature, and it needs to be adversarial to keep people honest. The way that I think we should continue to help the press is just like what I did earlier this week. Donate to KQED. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Formerly, who says he was formerly of the Reagan press office. Thank you very much. And I swear, listeners, we are not bringing on people who say they're going to say that. But appreciate the point, Bert. And David, it actually reminds me of something that I read by George Packer recently,

where he says, how does a free press in this country die? Probably not the way Americans imagine. It's unlikely, though not impossible, that heavily armed police are going to raid newspaper offices or confiscate computers and haul editors and reporters off to jail. He says the demise of independent journalism in the U.S. will be less spectacular than the notorious examples of other times and places, as much voluntary as coerced, less like a murder than a death of despair.

And I think that is actually really important for listeners to understand, right, David? What we're talking about, you know, they're hard to pick up on because they can seem incremental, but they're part of a...

a much broader, when taken in their totality, attack on the media. And the media is in a really vulnerable place right now, right? I mean, we've got news organizations that are really struggling financially. We've also got incredible distrust in the media. And I really like, David, how you described sort of the Trump

operating as something of a pincer movement, applying pressure to all possible vulnerabilities. Just talk a little bit more about that and why that image came to you. Sure. Well, I mean, they're attacking the credibility of the press. They're attacking in some ways as best they can the financial underpinnings. You saw mass cancellations of subscriptions. I'm not sure that'll have a huge effect, but it could. Politico offers certain kinds of professional services for politicians

experts and policymakers and lobbyists and the like, and government got a lot of that. And that was a fair amount of revenue for politically. They're trying to find ways to do this. The Pinscher movement came to mind because of what they're doing to public broadcasting. You're seeing the president, Elon Musk, and their allies on the Hill call for an elimination of all funding for public broadcasting. But they're also at the FCC, Trump's

the person he elevated as a commissioner to be chair of the Federal Communications Commission says he's concerned about whether the underwriting spots, the corporate underwriting spots heard on this station throughout public radio, public television are actually indistinguishable from commercials on corporate media, which would violate laws and policies. And therefore, you know, that's a problem. Now, I will say in passing that NPR, PBS and other public

And broadcasters say, you know, that they are scrupulous to observe the dictates of the FCC on such stuff and repeatedly and frequently get guidance from the FCC, which they've sought to follow over the years. So they feel like they're actually on the right side of the line on that. But if you look at that, they're trying to take away public money. They're trying to take away private money and they're trying to take away public standing. NPR was among the organizations that they tossed out of workspaces at the Pentagon. Right.

you know, presumably for coverage that the new secretary of defense and his his aid of his aides didn't like. Right. And it seems to me that there's this overall thing. Right. There's this attacking consistent with

Republican rhetoric going back to Nixon, but not only from the right, but a consistent thread of discrediting and disparaging the media, right? There's these financial pressures that we've touched on but not really dived into that really are making it harder for the media to do all the things that's being asked of them, even as they're available on far more platforms than ever for folks if they want it.

And that we're being challenged by all kinds of actors who are not necessarily as concerned with factual and original reporting, which takes work and build into their own formula for success, repeated attacks on what you might call the legacy media. And then there's an effort to kind of pull back on success.

Outlets of information. I really see the attacks on on media as part of this, where the president and his his advisers, it seems to me, are removing from public view a lot of information that that federal research has either funded or actually executed and done that might be useful on matters that are useful to farmers, to investors, to parents, to, you know, to the public.

To people in almost every sector of American life, the federal government compiles an extraordinary amount of information. And it's all, you know, the proposals are to either pull it back from public view or cut it back significantly in so many cases. You know, I used to report for the Baltimore Sun and I when I first started

almost 25 years ago covering media, I met a guy named Tony Pan. He's a weather forecaster for WBAL Channel 11 Baltimore. I still remember it, right? I saw that he tweeted, haven't talked to him in many years, decades, but I saw that he tweeted. He said, look, people are like, oh, who cares if they're going to get rid of NOAA, which is this sort of atmospheric agency that does all kinds of environmental and weather research and advisories. And he says, people are telling me, well, I can just get this information from my apps. He's like, folks,

All of these fancy apps that private companies put out with all kinds of, you know, seemingly bespoke and localized weather information, they all rely on the underlying information gotten from federal researchers.

You know, this stuff will affect your everyday life in ways that you don't realize because it undergirds so much of the texture of what we do as Americans and what we take for granted in information heavy age. And it seems as though the president through things as minor as and as seemingly silly and as trolly as saying the AP doesn't call it the Gulf of America. Well, then they can't be in the room when I talk to the prime minister of Israel or the president of France.

Well, actually, it extends far more broadly. And so the media is part of that. But I think there's a desire to constrict information flow that he doesn't control so that information he doesn't want out there that might contradict his aims is not available for people to check him with. And that's, I think, a pretty serious development. You know, Ronald Reagan, we had a caller here. The call went in a direction I did not expect.

And certainly I would argue that the press has brought a lot of condemnations and criticisms on itself for behaving for a lot of decades pretty imperiously and for getting things wrong, even in the first couple of years of Trump being, I think, too hyperbolic and less focused rigorously on only going as far as the facts could take you, but being really rigorous about pursuing those facts. And even so, the.

The president is offering a kind of accountability, but he wants to provide it to accountability against the press, not by the press to people in power, not accepting what our caller from the Reagan administration did, even though they were notorious and fabled for the spin that they offer journalists. This is a different order of enterprise, right? Let me go to Steve in San Francisco. Hi, Steve, you're on.

Oh, good morning. Thank you very much. I wanted to say that I believe that media outlets that persist in telling the truth about the Trump administration should start preparing now for attempts to do things like revoking broadcast licenses.

It's my opinion that the truthful media should prepare by setting up alternative, possibly internet-based, likely internet-based, real-time streaming solutions such as you may find on YouTube or other platforms. And there actually is a little bit of a precedent for this. They didn't lose their license, but KGO Radio had a format change. And some of the talk show hosts from the former KGO switched to hosting their own live streaming shows. And I think that it would be wise

for KQED and to start thinking about doing just in case things get really bad. Go ahead. Sorry, Steve. Oh, very briefly. I was just going to say props to Bert for giving a shout out to Helen Thomas, whom I had the privilege to meet once. Well, Steve, thanks for that. And the things that you're talking about, those discussions are definitely important.

But, you know, Steve's point, too, when we when we look at the Trump appointed Federal Communications Commission chair and Brendan Carr, you are seeing someone who is very willing to go after organizations to revive cases that, you know, the Biden administration has dismissed to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know,

weaponized licenses. I mean, there are definitely things that what Steve is talking about that people are seeing on the horizon under this person, right, David? They're just more organized. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Carr has had a reputation of being hostile to, uh,

to regulation of being sort of a more deregulatory figure and business friendly in many ways. But he has, as you said, either instigated or reopened inquiries into acts by all of the major broadcasters, except, of

Of course, Fox, you know, the sister channel to Fox News and also controlled by Rupert Murdoch. So it's ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS. You know, these are all under one form or another kind of investigation. Trump also, of course, you know, and in so doing, he's also adding a certain degree of additional pressure on places like CBS where he's he's suing them.

Right. Now, the networks themselves are not regulated exactly by the FCC. It's their local stations that have licenses. CBS is in the process of selling itself. Sherry Redstone, the controlling owner of selling CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global, to Skydance, which is owned by David Ellison, the son of the tech giant Larry Ellison, who's basically quietly pro-Trump billionaire. But

But CBS and Paramount own, I may get it wrong, but I think it's about 26, 28 local stations. And so...

It matters, you know, when they make these claims and they investigate a local station because he could hold up this multibillion dollar transaction over whether or not he thinks or or finds that there's some problem with what its local stations have broadcast of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview or something entirely different. He has shown a very expansive definition of what he thinks the FCC should be involved with. His predecessor had dismissed, you know, the the

investigations that were going or reviews in certain cases what was going against the three networks and also one against Fox as being basically kind of ranging into free speech questions that she didn't want the commission involved with. You know, I saw Carr speak last week in Washington and, you know, he just said, look, I'm holding these...

operations to account. And the regulations require me to make sure that they're acting in the public interest. And that's the trade-off that they must offer in order to have access to the public airwaves.

And that is true. But it is also true that he has called for a defunding of all public broadcasting, which he's absolutely entitled to do. And he's also participated online in a very robust pro-MAGA kind of rhetoric on social media in a way that seems to belie the notion that he's just kind of a clinical regulator. Yeah, absolutely capable of doing so many of the things that he is doing, which is why so many underscore that he's

The only way to fight back is the media's willingness to fight back and on the public's willingness to support a free press. Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Let me go to Max in Oakland. Hi, Max. Thanks for waiting. You're on. Yeah, great show. Important show today and every day virtually. I just wanted to report on some issues.

editing and that I've personally been experiencing censorship in the form of self-censorship. Back in the late 70s, early 80s, I was one of a handful of postcard, Xerox postcard collages who used to

around Berkeley in the Bay Area and taking aim at Nixon and Reagan, et cetera, et cetera. And I never really worried that I was going to get a knock on the door one day by the FBI. But today I find I'm really cautious about sending out any text or I don't do tweets anymore. I quit Twitter when Musk took over, and I used to be pretty –

doing a digital collaging mostly about Trump in the first Trump

And now I'm afraid to do anything. I'm worried that AI can easily track anyone that does anything negative about Trump and MAGA people. Wow, Max, I got to tell you what you're describing. You are not alone. This is actually a headline article.

I believe today in the New York Times that says people are going silent, fearing retribution. Trump critics muzzle themselves and people say they're intimidated by online attacks from the president, concerned about harm to their business or worried about the safety of their families. Max, thanks so much for sharing your personal experience of this. And gosh, David, just thinking about the downstream effects and especially of a downstream effect

Of a media that doesn't act as a bulwark, doesn't act as an entity to keep the powerful accountable. I guess what I would say is you're hearing internalized an incredible degree of anxiety, some of which may be –

you know, feel real in a dystopian moment where AI is being used to sort of hunt for every word version of the word equity in government and whatever one feels about DEI, it appears that the IRS and other places to be turning up things about equities, you know, that have to do with financial instruments and just sort of blithely knocking things out left and right that don't actually have the intended effect. Uh,

You know, I don't think we're in a place as a society where people have lost the freedom of speech. I do think where people have much more free speech than they ever did because they have the ability to transmit instantly what they think and also transmit globally what they think. Right. That just didn't exist before social media.

And at the same time, there can be professional, personal and potentially broader consequences for that. I don't think we're in a place where, you know, agents of the state are going and rounding people up. But I do think that people have internalized that. It wouldn't surprise me if some journalists have as well. And yet I also think that we're in an age of hyperbole so that everything is taken to be a threat, which sort of numbs us the fact that more specific things may actually turn out to be so.

Good point, David. Thank you so much for talking with us today. You bet. David Foggenflick, media correspondent for NPR. My thanks to Caroline Smith for producing this segment. And as always to our listeners who listen, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Each morning, it's a new opportunity, a chance to start fresh. Up First from NPR makes each morning an opportunity to learn and to understand. Choose to join the world every morning with Up First, a podcast that hands you everything going on across the globe and down the street, all in 15 minutes or less. Start your day informed and anew with Up First by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.