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.
Matt Carlson is an Associate Professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era and On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism, and co-editor with Seth C. Lewis of Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation. Carlson has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters on contemporary struggles to define journalism and news practices, including in the Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, and New Media & Society.
Sue Robinson is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is the author of
Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities. A former reporter, Robinson teaches and studies journalism, digital technologies, and power in local information flows, engaging in applied research and working with a variety of community and news outlets on best practices.
Seth C. Lewis is Professor and Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He has published widely on many aspects of news and technology, and is co-editor, with Matt Carlson, of
Boundaries of Journalism. A former journalist with
The Miami Herald, Lewis is a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a recent visiting fellow with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He chairs the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.
