Journalists hard-pressed in Trump’s USA – influencer marketing is replacing critical journalism
The United States, the mother country of liberal democracy, was ranked 55th in the World Press Freedom Index 2024, in the same group with Belize in Central America and Gabon in Central Africa.
The position cannot be considered very good.
Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland were already traditionally the top-five countries for journalistic work in terms of freedom of the press.
The first months of President Donald J. Trump’s second term in office bode hard times for U.S. journalists also in the coming years.
Right in the beginning of February, the New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico had to leave the press room of the U.S. Department of Defence in Pentagon, and they were replaced by invited online media providers loyal to Trump, such as Breitbart News and One America News.
Also the journalists of the news agency Associated Press (AP) were banned in February from the press conferences of the White House because AP had not agreed to use the new name “Gulf of America” the president insisted for the Gulf of Mexico.
Already in his first presidential term, Trump systematically called, for example, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and CNN as “fake news media”. The media advocates of Republicans, like the Fox News channel and the Wall Street Journal have been more to the president’s liking.
The number of journalists is decreasing
However, the latest upward trend has concerned social media influencers and podcasters who are politically supporting Trump. At the same time when one of the world’s leading news agencies can no longer have its professional journalists attend the president’s events to ask critical questions, the doors are opened to influencer marketing professionals who praise Trump.
This is understandable as news consumption in the United States has shifted strongly to social media platforms (about 50%), and people trust much more in podcasts (55%) than in traditional news media (31%).
In the United States, the critical role of professionally produced journalism and the press as a watchdog regarding policy-making has become increasingly difficult all the time for a couple of decades already.
From the year 2008 to 2020, the number of U.S. journalists has decreased approximately by a quarter, and new cutbacks are still upcoming. For example, the FiveThirtyEight online publication, which is specialised in data journalism and owned by ABC News, notified inMarch that it is closing down.
Content must please those in power
Following X owned by Trump’s prominent supporter, billionaire Elon Musk, also other social media platform corporations have had to readjust quickly their algorithms and monitoring practices to please those in power. For example, Meta no longer actively monitors their social media contents in the United States but has outsourced this to the users; one can report about questionable content to the technology company by email.
The latest controversial forms of influence in social media in the United States include AI-assisted viral political short videos, such as “Trump Gaza”.
Another apt example of the dire straits for freedom of the press is the case of the Washington Post’s political cartoonist resigning from his job in this newspaper, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the chair of the board of Amazon. This happened already in January before Trump started his second term in office, when the newspaper refused to publish a cartoon that criticised the way techno-moguls and also the Disney media corporation worshipped Trump.
It is highly likely that the producers of this year’s World Press Freedom Index will gain plenty of evidence during the year on the basis of which the position of the United States will keep falling, or even plummet, in the press freedom ranking.
New violations against freedom of the press can be watched in the Pressfreedomtracker.us online service, for instance, which is maintained by various associations to promote freedom of the press.
The monitoring website was established at the beginning of Trump’s first term in office. So far, the greatest annual number, more than 800 violations against freedom of the press was recorded in 2020.
The writer Turo Uskali is Professor of Journalism, working in the Department of Language and Communication Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ģą˝Ö±˛Ą.
