The worry for journalists / writers / and people in general over Donald Trump continues!
As previously mentioned, Donald Trump has not actually made any concrete steps towards threatening free speech just yet. The worry comes from the fact that Trump erratically makes crappy statements and will shortly have the discretion to make life a living hell for anybody he doesn’t like.
Prospects for the American press under Trump, part two
In part one of this post, I described in 17 numbered paragraphs a bleak situation for the American press as a check on power, now that Donald Trump has been elected. My summary of it went like this:
Low trust all around, an emboldened and nationalist right wing that treats the press as natural enemy, the bill coming due for decades of coasting on a model in political reporting that worked well for “junkies” but failed to engage the rest of us, the strange and disorientating fact that reality itself seems to have become a weaker force in politics, the appeal of the “strong man” and his propaganda within an atmosphere of radical doubt, the difficulty of applying standard methods of journalism to a figure in power who is not trying to represent reality but to substitute himself for it as a show of strength, the unsuitability of prior routine as professionals in journalism try to confront these confusing conditions, a damaged economic base, weak institutional structure and newsroom mono-culture that hinders any creative response, and a dawning recognition that freedom of the press is a fragile state, not a constitutional certainty.
This is a crisis with many overlapping and deep-seated causes, not just a problem but what scholars call a wicked problem— a mess.
Continue reading here: http://pressthink.org/2016/12/prospects-american-press-trump-part-two/
Journalism will go on.
Probably.
Maybe.
History says things can go in a very different, very violent direction.
Update
Things have gone in a terrible direction, with the President of the United States, Donald Trump constantly calling reporters the enemy of the people. Which is an astoundingly deranged thing to say considering why this country was founded… and what its constitution guarantees…