"Donald Trump's rapid - and seemingly improbable - ascension from reality show star to polarizing president threw into question many assumptions about how our media and political worlds work. His habit of lying, history of racist statements, and disdain for conventions upended traditional journalist-elite relations. Taking an expansive view of the contemporary media and political environment during the Trump years, News After Trump portrays a media culture in transition. As journalism's very relevance comes to be increasingly questioned, we focus on how different actors - from Trump to small-town newspaper editors - use their cultural power to define journalism, assess its value, and question what the news should look like. The chapters chronicle how Trump and his allies turned attacks on journalists into a central component of a rightwing populist formula, with journalists positioned as just one more self-interested, out-of-touch elite. Over time, this anti-press rhetoric escalated, with Trump regularlydebasing journalists as the enemy of the people. While journalists responded by falling back on cherished norms of objectivity and neutrality to trumpet their democratic role, many among their ranks questioned whether past commitments still had value in a changed media culture and if their reporting practices did more harm than good. To move forward, News After Trump does not advocate for a nostalgic return to the past, but instead argues for a journalism that is more assertive in speaking in a moral voice on behalf of communities, more comfortable in rendering judgments, and more self-aware of its shortcomings"--
Donald Trump might have been the loudest and most powerful voice maligning the integrity of news media in a generation, but his unrelenting attacks draw from a stew of resentment, wariness, cynicism, and even hatred toward the press that has been simmering for years. At one time, journalism's
centrality in reporting and interpreting important events was relatively unquestioned when a limited number of channels and voices produced a consensus-based news environment. The collapse of this environment has sparked a moment of reckoning within and outside journalism, particularly as
professional news outlets struggle to remain solvent. Alternative voices compete for attention with and criticize the work and motivations of journalists, even as a growing number of journalists question their core norms and practices.
News After Trump considers these struggles over journalism to be about the very relevance of journalism as an institutional form of knowledge production. At the heart of this questioning is a struggle to define what truthful accounts look like and who ought to create them or determine them in a
rapidly changing media culture. Through an extensive accounting of Trump's relationship with the press, and drawing on in-depth interviews with journalists and textual analysis of news events, editorials, social media, and trade-press discussions, the book rethinks the relevance of journalism by
recognizing the limits of objectivity and the way in which journalism positions certain actors as authority figures while rendering the less socially powerful invisible or flawed. This ethos of detachment has staved off vital questions about how journalism connects to its audiences, how it creates
enduring value in people's lives (or not), and how diversity needs to be understood jointly at the level of production, reporting, and audience in order to rebuild trust.