‘An existential battle’: how Trump’s win is shifting the US media landscape

When MSNBC’s morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced to their viewers last week that they had paid a visit to Donald Trump at his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago they must have suspected there would be a reaction.

The married co-hosts on the liberal news network made hay for years lambasting Trump, especially in the run-up to the presidential election. Now, in the wake of his victory, they told their viewers they were seeking to reset communications with the man they had warned only a few weeks ago was set to bring fascism to America.

“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,’ Brzezinski told Morning Joe viewers on Monday. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”

Their reward? An online barn-burning by their critics online and a fall in viewer numbers for a show – and a network – already struggling in a rapidly declining US cable news sector. The following morning, broadcast viewing figures for the network plummeted 38%, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Yet Scarborough and Brzezinski’s about-face is just one data point in the US media landscape that shows that some core elements of the press in America may be recalibrating its approach to how it covers the second Trump administration and where the all-in oppositional attitude that defined much of the press in his first term is in retreat.

Yet the moves come after an election campaign in which Trump frequently attacked the media and dubbed them “enemies of the people”. It comes as his allies have threatened to curb the press and attack their media critics. They have also already launched a wave of multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a host of media companies for their coverage that they often baselessly claim to be bias, such as Trump’s allegation that CBS misleadingly edited an interview with Kamala Harris.

Certainly those threats seemed to be at play with MSNBC, which is now also facing an uncertain future as the network is being spun off by its corporate parent, Comcast. A subsequent sale would come under the purview of Trump-appointed regulators.

According to Puck News, the couple’s visit to Trump’s tropical paradise was because Scarborough was said to be “petrified” that the president-elect’s Department of Justice would go after him. “That’s what this was about,” a source told the news site about the motive. “It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.”

“It was about access and power,” said Jeff Jarvis, a media writer. “But this visit didn’t do anything for access, and they didn’t come back with anything journalistic. They were willing to throw the reputation of the show, their reputations and the reputation of the network over for their own personal fears.”

But MSNBC is not alone in facing tough choices. The US media are facing numerous issues: fears over what Trump might do, complex business decisions and interests faced by their corporate owners, and also an understanding that the president-elect won the popular vote, showing that their audiences exist beyond the safe havens of Trump criticism.

But these are choppy waters. The Washington Post, famed for bringing down Richard Nixon, has been the focus of controversy under its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and the British journalist, Will Lewis, he has tasked with running the once-storied brand.

The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers after it declined to make a presidential endorsement. Bezos defended the decision, triggering suspicion that Amazon’s role as a defense industry data cloud contractor had played a part. But since Trump won, Lewis has not changed tack and a longstanding and widely respected political editor at the paper was reportedly removed from his job last week.

The Post’s controversy has played at the same time as the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Kamala Harris, also triggering widespread dismay in the newsroom and a questioning of how critical of Trump the newspaper would continue to be.

The Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framed the matter as an attempt at neutrality, though his activist daughter Nika Soon-Shiong also said the decision was informed by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza – which he later confirmed in an internal email.

After years of anti-Trump coverage under Jeff Zucker, CNN is also effecting course-correction. Last week, the cable news giant’s Dana Bash said it was unclear whether a group of men carrying swastika flags marching in Columbus, Ohio, belonged to the far right or far left.

“A group of neo-Nazis paraded through that city wearing, waving swastikas, covering their faces,” Bash said. “We don’t know what side of the aisle this comes from. I mean, typically neo-Nazis are from the far right.” The statement immediately attracted ridicule for its seemingly bizarre attempt at neutrality.

Some at the New York Times, too, are offering a more ameliorated tone than under the first Trump administration, even as the paper has continued to break stories on Trump’s preparations to return to power. The columnist David Brooks advocated soon after the election that Trump is a “sower of chaos, not fascism”, adding: “In chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault.”

It is certainly a complex challenge. The media’s symbiotic relationship with Trump was both nurturing and self-destructive the first time around as readerships boomed, but a significant chunk of the population – the chunk that delivered Trump back into the White House – became even more hostile to the mainstream media and embraced the idea it was “fake news”.

The news industry in the US, with a few exceptions, is on life support as audiences fracture and social media traffic referrals dry up. Social media is more trusted by the public, and the press is now facing a second hostile Trump administration with diminished resources.

But would a more restrained approach work? Would it attract readers previously hostile to the media, and would it blunt any attacks from the Trump administration?

Some are skeptical.

“You’re trying to pursue readers you’ll never have and in the process pissing off the readers you do have,” Jarvis, the media writer, said of outlets playing it safe on Trump. “That’s the paradox – mass media still believes in the mass media. The challenge for journalism now is for people to feel heard and a separation from the power structures of politics and money.”

The only network firmly in a good place appears to be rightwing Fox News, which dominated 24-hour news broadcasting through the election cycle and seems confident of its identity as America returns to life under a Trump presidency.

Fox News finished the week of 11-17 November with its highest share of the cable news audience in the network’s 28-year history across multiple categories, while MSNBC saw its lowest-rated week in quarter of a century.

For some observers, all this makes for worrying times ahead as America confronts a president with openly autocratic sympathies and a radical rightwing agenda.

“The press is going to find itself in an existential battle for its own integrity if it does not decide to confront and challenge Trump top to bottom. There’s no way a truly free press can be neutral about lies and broken civic norms and survive,” said Jim Sleeper, author and retired lecturer in political science at Yale University.

“If the populace has decided to trade in its freedom and rights for stability and security that authoritarians always promise, then the press has to make a choice and decide that honest journalists are dissidents.”