Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Library of Babble?

We begin today with George Packer of The Atlantic wondering if journalism is ready for a second-term Trump Administration.

As soon as Trump left office, readers and viewers disappeared—within a month, The Washington Post lost a quarter of its unique visitors, and CNN lost 45 percent of its prime-time audience. From exile, Trump summoned one reporter after another to Mar-a-Lago and gave interviews for books that both sides knew would attack his presidency and become best sellers. When he returned as a presidential candidate and criminal defendant, cable-news-network ratings climbed again.

It’s impossible not to feel that Trump has gotten the better of this codependent clench. His endless stream of grievance and invective eroded his supporters’ trust in the news media to the point where 58 percent of Republicans now say they have none. If half the country believes most of what the mainstream media report and the other half thinks it’s mostly lies, this isn’t a partial win for journalists, whose purpose isn’t to strengthen the opposition but to give the public information it needs to exercise democratic power. Trump’s purpose is to destroy the very notion of objective truth. The match was rigged in his favor, and being compelled to fight it has not been good for journalism.

Though reporters did excellent work covering Trump’s presidency, his effect was to make the American media a little more like him: solipsistic (foreign reporting nearly disappeared), divisive, and self-righteous. Trump corrupts everyone who gets near him—spouses, children, followers, accomplices, flunkies. He corrupts the press by obsessing it; by flooding it with so much shit that news becomes almost indistinguishable from fluff and lies; by baiting it into abandoning independence for activism; by demoralizing it with the recognition that much of the public doesn’t care.

Packer’s essay is one of 24 essays in the January/February 2024 issue of The Atlantic speculating on what would happen in a second Trump presidential term.