The Trump Administration and Media Bans

From the Worldwide Leader in Journalism, Truth and Democracy, this is the Pointer Report Podcast, a joint production between the Pointer Institute and the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. Now here's your host from the Pointer Institute, Tom Jones. Hey everybody, thanks for listening. I am so pleased to talk to our guests for this episode. You know, when I first started covering the media full-time when I joined Pointer back in 2019, this guy was a must read for me to help me learn about the media, get my feet wet. And here we are six years later and I still read every single thing he writes. He's Paul Farry, longtime media reporter for The Washington Post. He's since has moved on to work for places like Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, no Pointer. When are you going to write for Pointer, man? That's what I wanted to know. Come on down. I'm happy to do so. Love it. Paul, thanks so much. We'd love to have you. Everything you write is so, so important and so pertinent to the media world. I want to start by talking about some of the things going on inside Washington these days. You're just outside of Washington. President Donald Trump back in the White House, let's start with this deal involving the Associated Press. I think most people who listen to this podcast probably already know, but just to catch people up. Basically, Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. AP decided they're going to keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico. They say they serve an international audience, which is true. The Gulf of Mexico is not inside U.S. borders, also true. It's not known as the Gulf of America anywhere else except in Trump world. And then Trump responded by banning the AP from certain places, the Oval Office, Air Force 1. What do you make of all this, Paul, is Trump actually bothered if the AP is not using the term Gulf of America or is this about something else? Yeah, it's about something else. It's about hassling the press and showing who's boss and pushing around the lame stream media as he likes to call it. And as I've been explaining this to people, it's the first real constitutional first amendment case in which it comes down to a single word out of a style book. It's really not about that. It's just asserting who's the big dog and you all take orders from me, and that's the Trump model. It's also the authoritarian model. If you can push around the AP on a single word and the usage, what pretext would you have to push around the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, et cetera? He could do the very same thing and he invites the confrontation. He invites the crisis of sorts. He's betting that certainly his followers are going to side with him because every time he opens his mouth, it's absolutely truth and not side with the media. So it's making an example of AP, which I don't know why you really want to pick on AP. AP is about as neutral as they come, but that's where we are. Yeah, that's the thing that maybe shouldn't baffle me, but I could see if he went after the post because he didn't like something at a columnist's road or the New York Times or CNN or whatever. But as you mentioned, AP is sort of the gold standard of, I don't know if neutrality is the right word, but just truly fact-based journalism, hardly any opinion in anything they do. Well, I will stop here and say that AP is influential in this sense that, going back to this notion of a style book, the AP style book is kind of the Bible for news speak, news usage, sorry, not news speak, that's Orwellian, but for newsroom usage of how we refer to things. You don't have to live up to it, but it's the most influential reference book. In that narrow sense, picking on AP makes some sense, they have a style book that goes out to lots and lots of news organizations. Why not try to take them down? It's punching the biggest guy on the prison yard in that sense. And reportedly, he's also upset about other kinds of usage, but he hasn't publicly made a case of gender-affirming care, which I think is AP style he doesn't like. So this could go on and on and on and deeper and deeper. And in fact, it will, because this is just the first example. He will start throwing people out of the briefing room once he doesn't like the questions. Yeah, I wanted to get into that. Before that though, you wrote a column recently for Columbia Journalism Review, which I thought really hit on an important topic. When I covered sports, we would see this quite often where a coach or a general manager, somebody would be really upset with a particular reporter or news outlet. And it's, okay, well, and it's sort of similar, you know, I'm not talking to any media as long as that guy is here. And I've seen it happen where other news organizations banded together and say, okay, fine, if you're not talking to them, no one's going to talk to you. There are now some people, you wrote about this, such as Jim Acosta, formerly a CNN, who said other media organizations should show their solidarity and back the AP and not show up for you or walk out of these press conferences. You think it's a bad idea? I actually think it's a bad idea, but I'll let you explain why that's maybe not the route to go. Well, the two main reasons to make it simple is it's unworkable and unwise, and we can take both of those. First of all, before I go on, let me just say what Trump is doing is going to prove to be unconstitutional and illegal. The AP eventually will exhaust its appeals and it will sue, and if there's still a First Amendment left, they'll win in court. As Jim Acosta did back in 2018, as Brian Kerum did back in 2019 or 2020, when Trump threw him out of the newsroom. So let's put that out of the way, but no one, well, it may have been suggested at the time, it didn't rise to this level. Jim Acosta is the one kind of leading the charge of saying, listen, if this is the kind of totalitarian environment we're in, let's give them some of his own medicine, let's band together. Now, the question then becomes is how do you band together when you have on any given day dozens and dozens of news organizations in that briefing room, and you've got hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people who'd like to be in that briefing room. So the day NBC CBS, Washington Post, New York Times says, yes, let's all go in this together. There's not going to be empty seats, there's going to be a full briefing room. It'll be a sham, it'll be a put up job. Trump doesn't mind that. He loves to have his favorable coverage from the right wing media, but it will be lost on anyone what the protest is about, and as the days go on, it will become dimmer and dimmer as to what the purpose is and what the effectiveness is. So I just think it's very difficult to get all news organizations on the same page because not all of them oppose Trump, a lot of them are in favor of what he's doing. If you work for Breitbart, you might think it's okay. If you work for Daily Caller, you might think it's okay. So anyway, people will show up. It's unwise for this reason. The briefings actually do produce news, so they do produce a certain kind of news. Those clips of the reporter asking the question, the press secretary giving whatever answer the press secretary have, are a primary way in which people learn about what the White House is up to on a daily basis. So millions of people watch the evening news, millions of people watch the local news. TV is still a huge medium. It's not what it once was, but it's still a huge medium. Where are you going to get those clips? Where are you going to get the press pushing back and the White House responding? Those are valuable. Obviously, the White House is going to say what the White House says, but that is itself part of the record that we as reporters form. It might not be as valuable to a print reporter who can find other sources and talk to other sources in other ways. But that visual, that dramatic, succinct clip is still a very important way people learn about what's going on at the White House. I don't think Trump's going to back down on this. You mentioned AP, eventually maybe taking this to court. Just throw this out there just to get your response to it. There might be some people say, okay, AP, you really want to fight over a body of water, but it's not about the name of a body of water, right? I mean, AP, there's more at stake than just giving in and saying, oh, let's just call it Gulf of America because that's what he wants. This is the President of the United States or any other elected official dictating how a news organization will choose to refer to anything. So if I don't like the way you're responding or reporting on tariffs, I want them to be called something other than tariffs. Please start calling them. That's dictatorial power. That's what happens in, you know, banana republics to strong arm the press. And it does come down to one word, a style book, but the principle, the larger principle is really important, which is you don't tell us how to report what words, literally what words to use. We determine that. And by the way, calling it the Gulf of Mexico is for an international news organization like AP, how their clients in those places refer to it. The other part of this is the AP has thrown Trump a bone, not because he's banning them from the Oval Office, but because it's just a fact that they include the notation that Trump refers to it as officially changed its name to Gulf of America. So they kind of have it both ways. Trump wants it only one way. And that's just the kind of dictatorial power that in any democracy, the press should stand up to. We should also note too that Trump changed the name of Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley and the AP is honoring that because it's within the US borders. That distinction I kind of get, but if the AP wanted to call it Denali, I'd say knock yourself out. You're entitled to call a mountain whatever name you want to refer to it, but nobody remembers Burma versus Myanmar. And the regime in Burma, once they took power, decided they were going to change the name of the country to Myanmar. People still call it Burma and referred to it by its old name, even though the official regime name is Myanmar. So there's your parallel. People don't care quite as much about Myanmar and Burma as they do about the US president and the name of the Gulf down there by Florida. We've also seen too like the Pentagon, they moved out to New York Times and NBC and NPR and then eventually the Post and CNN out of their design, the designated working space, they didn't kick them out of the building. They can still, if they can find a desk, they can. But they moved in people like Breitbart and OAN and the New York Post. Again, is this just a stick in their eye? Is that the whole point of this? I think there's a the boiling frog analogy comes to mind here is like, yeah, we start with the Gulf of America and Gulf of Mexico. We hassle the press over workspaces in the Pentagon. By the way, the Pentagon is one of the biggest buildings in the world. You really have space constraints in the Pentagon. But all of it is sort of the creeping authoritarianism that where does that end? We'll start here and we'll keep moving down the line. So we're only a month into this administration and look at the steps they've taken. Do you think more is coming? I do. And I think we're going to see it a little by little. And like the boiling frog, I think what Trump is doing is testing the public reaction. The public has a lot bigger fish to fry than what's going on with AP. Symbolically, it is very disturbing, certainly to us in the press. But the average person, what's going on at USAID, Social Security, Medicare and all of the chaos that's resulting from that is a much bigger story. So yes, he's going to keep moving the line down or turning the temperature up little by little. So what does that ultimately look like? We say it's going to get worse. What does worse look like? You'd have to ask the president of the United States and his inner circle. I think what they do is they assess it, see how it's playing. And when they back down, they make no statement of having back down. They claim victory and move on. I don't think they're necessarily going to back down on this because it's a great way to torture a mainstream news organization. But when that happens, when the court says, nope, it's illegal, you can't discriminate based on viewpoint or, in this case, a single word. And the AP is restored to the pool, to Air Force One. They won't say a word and they'll just move on to the next thing. He's also used to courts. He sued ABC and George Stephanopoulos. ABC eventually settled. He sued CBS in 60 minutes. There's talks that Paramount is working on a settlement at this time. Is this a dangerous road that news organizations are going down by settling? Or are they just sort of like, look, we can't afford to fight the president. It's self-preservation that we're settling these things. Yes, the latter. Not that it's any news to people like us, but news divisions within very large corporations are a tiny little part of those corporations. The CEO of a corporation has to serve the shareholders' interests, the profit interests. He doesn't necessarily, it would be nice, but he doesn't necessarily have to serve the news division's interests. And that's kind of the internal conflict here. So Trump sues and these cases are really kind of absurd. He'd lose in court, but that's not what this is about. This is about the fear of unless you do my bidding, unless you agree to my terms, unless you settle out, I'll make your life, not your news division's life, but your corporate life very, very difficult. I have the FCC, I have the FTC, I have the Justice Department. In Paramount's case, Paramount wants to merge. It needs, it wants to merge with a company called Skydance Media, and it needs approvals for that. You want your approvals? Maybe you'll pay a few dollars to my presidential library in tribute to the absurdity of my lawsuit, but again, the merits of the lawsuit aren't really what's going on here. I wasn't crazy that 60 Minutes released the transcripts of the Kamala Harris interview and put out the full video. I just thought that was a, I thought that was a bad precedent. What were your thoughts on that? I did too. I actually thought the timing was bad. First of all, I think they would say we were compelled by the FCC to release that. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure they would have a legal precedent to say the FCC can compel us to give up our journalistic work product. It's private. It belongs to us. It doesn't belong to the government. And it's, again, unconstitutional, legal for you to compel us to release it. But my problem with it was, yes, it exonerates them. It shows them doing what every television news interview does, editing the interview for time, for clarity, et cetera. My problem was the timing of it. The day when Trump piped up about how this was election interference, they just said, you think so? Cause here's the transcript. Here's the video. It shows nothing more than us doing what we've done in 100 interviews with Donald Trump, which is to edit the video for the best and most clear way of presenting the information. That's not election interference. That's just basic communication. Yeah. I'm not sure that CBS had this in mind, but now if I'm another news organization like the New York Times or whatever, and Trump says, well, release your transcripts and the Times like, we're not going to do that. And then people are going to say, well, 60 minutes had no problem with it now. So what do you guys hide? I just thought, I don't know. I just didn't like that. Right. But you know what? This is a question of leverage. Does the New York Times need approvals for its TV licenses? No, it doesn't because it doesn't own any TV licenses anymore. What can Trump do to strong arm the New York Times or the Washington Post, which I'm sure he's got people working on this right now? What levers of government can he utilize to pressure and compel the New York Times to do what he wants, a la AP? What strengths can he pull? Well, in the Washington Post case, it's not owned. The Washington Post isn't owned by Amazon, but it is owned by the guy who is the executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. So how can we pressure Amazon to get the Washington Post to do it? I'm sure they're dreaming up scenarios right now. Let's take a quick break. We come back. We'll talk about a place that Paul's very familiar with, the Washington Post, right after this. Take your career to the next level. The University of South Florida, St. Petersburg is offering a master's degree in digital journalism and design. Do the entire program from home and complete it in as little as one year. The cost is reasonable. The experience is invaluable. For more information, call 727-873-4544. What keeps you up at night? This spread of misinformation has fostered distrust in our democratic systems. The Pointer Institute is a global nonprofit with an unmatched dedication to the pursuit of truth. Home of politifact, media-wise, and the international fact-checking network, we are committed to nonpartisan fact-checking and media literacy. Please consider making a meaningful contribution to ensure that Pointer's work continues. Visit pointer.org/give. All right, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, Paul, your longtime media reporter at the Washington Post, 35 years, quite the run. And then the Post offered buyouts at the end of 2023. You decided to take one. This was about the time. Daniel Lewis was starting, riding that time, right? They're almost, what's the word, contiguous, the day, my last day, the next day was his first day. Took over as CEO and publisher, yeah. And then what followed was a really topsy-turvy 2024. Let's hold off on Bezos just for a second and just go with some of the things that happened. Sally Busby stepped on as executive editor. They put this new structure in place that they're still, I think, sort of sorting out a little bit about how it's all gonna work. They had a guy come in, Robert Winnett, and then he left, didn't take the job. As you're watching all this in 2024, sort of attached to it, but no longer attached to it. Like, what's going through your mind as you watch this all get out? Well, I am now, because I no longer work there, no longer receive the paycheck, I'm free to say it's horrifying. We all, all the alumni, and there's an alumni chat group, trade impressions weekly, almost daily, and there's nothing but, can you believe this going on? Because all of it is so disturbing. And so contrary to what we, as Washington Post reporters worked on, in my case for decades, but for years, there's a before, a clear before and after here. And the after, I don't wanna say when I left, that's a coincidence, but definitely after I left, it's a Washington Post we don't recognize is what it basically comes down to. And all of it would be maybe justifiable or less horrifying if it served the larger purpose of making the Washington Post more economically viable, but I don't see any evidence of that. Something that they have done, hasn't really made things better. In fact, one of the most catastrophic things I've ever seen in all the history of the Washington Post was Jeff Bezos decision, I know you don't want to talk about Bezos, but Jeff Bezos Decision. No, I didn't mean it. We wanted you to keep going. In late October, not to endorse for president, in this case there was an endorsement by the editorial board of Kamala Harris. He decided, hey, oh, you know what, we're not gonna do it. So there went in protest, 250, maybe 300,000 subscribers, it is the single most damaging decision I've ever seen in the history of the Washington Post and maybe of a news organization. So Bezos was there for a while. You worked at the paper when Bezos was the owner, correct me if I'm wrong, he seemed like a dream owner, a billionaire who was writing checks and pretty much staying out of the way when it came to editorial decisions, is that first off, is that true? And second off, were you surprised that he stepped in with the Harris thing? Yes, I endorse everything you just said. And the way I said it over and over again is he's the best publisher, a newspaper or any news organization could have because he gave us two things, a lot of money and he didn't tell us what to do with the money. I mean, there was a lot of back room plumbing that was going on, improving our response times and everything like that, which was good, had nothing to do with the newsroom particularly. For the most part, I cannot tell you, even to this day, a case in which Bezos has interfered with news coverage. Has he interfered with editorial coverage? Well, it's obvious he did in late October when he said the Post will not endorse. So throughout his first 10 years, 2013 to 2023, it was going pretty well. He stayed out of the way, gave us money, gave us direction, gave the business side direction and he revived the Washington Post. We were growing, the revenue was growing, we were profitable, imagine that. And then we weren't. And then stuff got real and that's when it starts to wobble and go south. And that's when he brings in Will Lewis. And that's when the series of decisions began. And I'll just give you one example. In December, a petition inside the Washington Post went around signed by 400 people in the newsroom said, "We're in crisis here, Jeff Bezos, please respond. Please show that you are concerned, you care, make an appearance, address us, send us an email, zero response, zero response from Jeff Bezos." And I mean, I don't quite understand the thinking behind that. You could put out some boilerplate statement, you know, message I care, but not even that. And so it's demoralizing is ultimately what it comes down to. Does he care about demoralizing? I'm not sure. Look, I read the Post every day. I still like it. I still think it does great work, a lot of great reporters. I give the Post credit. Like, they've really reported on all this. They haven't shied away from it. And, to his credit, Bezos haven't stopped any of it either. Obviously, a lot of great people still work there. Not as many as maybe six months ago or a year ago. But I just want to say one thing, Tom, you know, and a shout out to the integrity of the newsroom there, when all of the issues arose about Will Lewis, the Post put it on its front page repeatedly, assigned a team of reporters to investigate and tell readers. Here's what we know about Will Lewis and his background and what he did for Murdoch back in the day when the British hacking scandal was going on. It was magnificent because that's the kind of news that usually gets buried, not at the Washington Post. But you know, Will Lewis is still the publisher, not that the intent was to drive him out. He really comes down to one guy. He comes down to Jeff Bezos. Does he believe in this guy? He does because he continues to be publisher and CEO. Should he believe in this guy? That's another issue. I know you probably still have a lot of connections there. Like, what's the vibe there now that can they dig their way out of this sort of, you know, crisis of confidence or however you want to phrase it? Yeah. The answer is I don't know, but the trend is not good. We've seen because we pay attention to this, a steady number of really top reporters leaving to go to other places, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, et cetera. A vote of no confidence, a vote with your feet, so to speak. That weakens the paper. I will say just to hit on something you just mentioned, the Post has done a great job covering Musk and Doge and the new Trump administration. So there's still a lot of strength there, and I'm still rooting for them, and I still think they're a great hope for tomorrow whether they're as good a hope as they used to be is another question. Before I let you go, I'm curious what you think about media coverage these days. Obviously, you were in the day-to-day of it back when you were with the Post. I imagine now you get involved when you want to get involved. Maybe, I don't know if you follow as closely as you used to, but just your overall thoughts on media coverage, and also sort of a part too to that, is how important are we in this country at this moment in really dissecting how the media does its job, and it's a type of media. It's not like I contributed all that much, but I think since I've gone, I see it more, I notice it more, and it's really, really good. I read your daily column, I read Brian Stelters, I read Oliver Dushy's Max Taney. There's a lot of great reporters on this beat producing a lot of important information. I'm now a sort of semi-pro, I read about it, and I learn about it because I'm interested in it, and I do write about it still. I don't cover it on the day-to-day, and I sort of miss that because there's so many stories to cover, but I also think that the coverage is really good, and it's telling us something important about the society we live in. About media, that's the word. We mediate information that people learn about the world. We are important, and it's important knowing what's going on in the foundations of the media and how it works. If you were a media editor right now, if you worked for a place like Semaphore, or you went back to the post and was an editor, what kind of media coverage would you want to see? Is there something that we're not doing well, or that we need to do more of, or something we need to focus on at this time? My basic thrust, and I'd sometimes get an argument about this, is cover the news. Just a regular shoe leather reporter doesn't matter what the topic is. Cover the news, you can't miss important stories, and that says we need about 20 people on the beat, 20 people at The Washington Post, or The New York Times, or whatever. There's so many stories, and they all should be reported. On the other hand, if that's all you gave people, it would be kind of a thin diet. You got to do some enterprise. You got to dig into it. You got to find out about stuff. Do everything. Get to work, as Marty Barron said. I wish every news organization had someone assigned to this most don't, but mainly because I love it, and I also think it's very important to know. All right. Great stuff. My thanks to Paul Farre. You can follow him on X at Farhip, F-A-R-H-I-P. Paul, I owe you, but now you were so good. You have to be a regular now. You have to keep coming back. Love it. One of the things about being semi-retired, or whatever it is I am, is you get to pop off, and here I go, popping off. Anytime you want to pop off, we have an open invitations for you. Hey, thanks for listening, everybody. If you get a chance, go back and check out some of our more recent episodes. We've talked to Richard Deich, Sports Media Commiss, at The Athletic. We had a great conversation with Angie Drop-Nicollin about Facebook. She's the Director of International Fact-Checking Network. If you like what you hear, give us a like and a nice review, and it helps us out a lot. Be well, and talk to you soon. Thanks again, Paul. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Porna Report Podcast. The podcast is produced by the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. Executive producers are Elliot Weiser and Ren LeForm. Producers are Noah Chase, Rhianna LeKaizek, and Tom Jones. Director is Christopher Campbell. And a special thank you, Neil Brown and Dr. Mark Wallace.