Since the Nov. 5 election, there has been much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in America’s newsrooms and broadcast studios. President-elect Donald Trump has journalists across the nation worried.
They agonize that many of us may end up in re-education camps led by indoctrination specialists from Fox News. The roundups of coastal media elites, cable pundits and late-night talk-show hosts, they fear, will begin once the 47th president takes office on Jan. 20. I jest, maybe.
The 78-year-old former and future commander-in-chief may begin taking wrathful retribution — right after ending the war in Ukraine, but before deporting millions of the undocumented — in his historic second term. He’ll be targeting those who compared him to members of World War II’s Nazi regime during the campaign, and called him other nasty names not fit for a family newspaper. He said so during the campaign.
Journalists in Illinois should have no fear, if Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker stands by his stern challenge to the Trumpmeister — “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” Pritzker said last week at a press conference promising to Trump-proof the Land of Lincoln. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
We should feel safer already, but that Mother Jones magazine subscription of mine may have to be scratched. Unlike others who poked the presidential bear during the campaign and anguish over the “end of democracy” during the next four years — a pretty tall order for Americans to swallow — I’m a rosy optimist. But, like others, I have enough sense of mistrust to see a rocky road as we travel ink-stained paths in the next few years.
We’ve survived previous presidents. Richard Nixon and his attendant “enemies list” comes to mind. That document, compiled by Nixon’s fawning minions, was to be used to “screw” political opponents. It surfaced during the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.
The list had union leaders, journalists and Hollywood types lumped together as “enemies” of Nixon’s second term. Many on the list considered it an honor to be targeted by the 37th president. We all know what happened in Nixon’s second, truncated term.
Remember, too, it was Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who called journalists and other critics of the administration “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the fall of 1970. Will the next four years be déjà vu all over again? After all, a solid majority of the nation’s voters enthusiastically ignored warnings from editorialists and others of what is on the Trumpian agenda.
Those Americans don’t seem to be distraught over what the future holds. Instead, they boldly rejected the tenets of the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration and Democratic Party ideology. They voted for change, not a dictator.
They have installed not only a Republican president, but also a ruby-red U.S. Senate and what looks like the House of Representatives remaining in the GOP column. With Trump winning the popular vote, that’s a clean sweep in anyone’s vocabulary.
Journalists and those who still like getting their newspapers delivered daily or weekly should expect some recoil. A recent Gallup study showed that fewer than a third of Americans hold a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the media to report news properly. Ouch.
In another poll of registered voters, nearly 60% maintain mainstream media outlets are themselves major threats to democracy. On the other hand, 10% of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, believe the Earth is flat. Another 12% contend NASA faked the half-dozen moon landings American astronauts made from 1969 to 1972.
There are glimmers of hope. A study in 2018 found enrollment in college and university journalism sequences increased during the first Trump administration.
One of the reasons cited by collegians was to counter administration claims of media bias and fake news. The budding journalists also said they wanted to serve the public, give voice to overlooked and under-represented communities and see the storytelling potential of social media.
A similar spike in the number of journalism majors in the nation’s nearly 400 colleges and universities that offer degrees in the subject, including 10 in Illinois, erupted following the fall of the Nixon administration and the release of “All the President’s Men.” Alas, in 2021 the number of undergraduate students enrolled in journalism and mass communication programs was down by almost 10%, according to the 2021 Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Enrollments.
That decrease was attributed to the coronavirus pandemic, with many J-programs reporting decreases in operating budgets, along with increases in faculty hiring freezes. We will see during the next four years of Trumpism in America if members of the Gen Z cohort take up the calling of journalism in similar numbers to the ‘70s and 2018.
In the meantime, don’t take as social truths all those pie-in-the-sky threats of a dictatorship in the making that Trump’s enemies promise will happen beginning next year. Perhaps I’m just a passenger on the Good Ship Lollipop, but I’ll take a wait-and-see before manning the ramparts.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
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