Donald Trump is no friend of the media… which means he’s no friend of yours. To be an American is to accept that others have the right to speak regardless of whether or not you like what they’re saying. Donald Trump, who doesn’t really make concrete statements and hasn’t had the ability to chill speech significantly yet, hasn’t really seemed to accept that people’s right to speak is inherent.
Naturally, feeling the existential threat to who they are and what they do, the writers of the world have taken notice and are now allowing their thoughts and feelings to float on the digital winds… Below is one of a few articles I’ve come across recently…
Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump
How bad is it? Pretty bad.
For a free press as a check on power this is the darkest time in American history since World War I, when there was massive censorship and suppression of dissent. I say this because so many things are happening at once to disarm and disable serious journalism, or to push it out of the frame. Most of these are well known, but it helps to put them all together. Here is my list:1. An economic crisis in (most) news companies, leaving the occupation of journalism in a weakened state, especially at the state and local level, where newsrooms have been decimated by the decline of the newspaper business. The digital money is going to Google and Facebook, but they do not have newsrooms.
Continue reading here: http://pressthink.org/2016/12/winter-coming-prospects-american-press-trump/
The article is a bit melodramatic, but honestly right now any kind of insightful commentary can be helpful for writers. Now is not the time to walk away from other people’s viewpoints is it.
Update
It was not that melodramatic and things in general have deteriorated across the country for news companies… with hundreds of job cuts, multiple websites / papers closing selling themselves or reducing circulation, and an overall weird occurrence where private equity and billionaires are the people ending up owning these news companies…