The media’s coverage of President Trump’s White House highlights many of the challenges faced by journalism broadly, such as legal altercations and corporate calculations, the growing relevance of nontraditional journalists, and the splintering of audiences.
All mingled with what Nancy Gibbs, the Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy, calls the president’s “uncanny understanding about attention, how to capture it, hold it, and divert it.”
We spoke with Gibbs, the former editor-in-chief of Time magazine and, since 2019, the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, about the media landscape, how universities can rise to meet this moment, and the value of explanatory reporting.
Q: How does this administration’s strategy toward the press differ from past presidencies?
There is a long history of administrations picking fights with the press, that’s nothing new. I think the difference now is more a matter of significant degree.
Much of the pressure has focused on financial leverage and legal leverage aimed particularly at parent companies, as major newsrooms are part of even bigger corporations with much bigger financial interests and dealings with the government. This administration is exploiting that vulnerability. It’s one thing to have a lawsuit against 60 Minutes. It’s another if its parent company, Paramount, is looking to close a merger. It’s one thing to sue ABC news; that has implications for Disney.
There also has been a lot of talk about how Jeff Bezos’s interests for Amazon and Blue Origin affects his decisions involving the Washington Post. So, between the lawsuits and the threats of other repercussions like regulatory rulings or blocked mergers, that dramatically raises the financial stakes of being at odds with this administration. I think that’s where we’re seeing the biggest departure from how these things have played out in the past.
It’s also a departure to have the president’s biggest campaign donor become a critically important member of the administration. However you characterize Elon Musk’s role, he is the richest man in the world and owns a major media platform. We have not seen that convergence of power, influence, and levers before. And this president has an uncanny understanding about attention, how to capture it, hold it, and divert it.
In some ways he is the most transparent president we’ve ever seen. If you have someone who is expressing their grievances, anger, hopes, insults at three o'clock in the morning, you don't have to do a lot of investigative reporting to find out what he thinks about this or that development.
Q: How has the media itself changed, and how have those changes affected how voters consume information and understand policy issues?
The changes are massive as more information becomes available from more sources. People are finding it in a wider variety of places and formats. It is much more visual, much more social, often shorter and often mediated by friends and family.
When the Shorenstein Center was part of a big survey before the election about where people were getting their news about the election, the number one source was friends and family. Now of course, that represents a huge financial challenge to high-cost newsrooms and media organizations. And it vastly expands the opportunity for unreliable information to penetrate and contaminate information streams.
It dissolves the idea of shared facts, but it also means that it is much harder to have anything like a single national conversation about an issue. We are having all of these separate conversations in separate formats on separate platforms, sometimes talking past each other, often not even hearing each other.
Q: What role does the press play in helping the public understand an administration’s policy actions?
All the research I see suggests that the mainstream, traditional press, as we’ve understood it, is a less influential part of the broader information ecosystem of shaping people’s attitudes. That is a hard trend for dedicated journalists to reckon with. They are still doing their best at difficult jobs under hard circumstances and in the face of enormous financial uncertainty. As the business model of print journalism, broadcast journalism, digital journalism has been challenged over the last 15 years, it is very hard for any institution to reckon with loss of influence.
On the other hand, I think some of it is a little misleading. In many cases there are traditional newsrooms that send reporters out to find out what is happening and report on it. And then an army of podcasters and content creators and YouTubers and TikTok influencers rely on that original news gathering in order to create the content that they are promoting and sharing and monetizing. So, the reporting that is being done by those reporters is influencing public opinion, it is just mediated through many other people distributing their insights.
“All the research I see suggests that the mainstream, traditional press, as we’ve understood it, is a less influential part of the broader information ecosystem of shaping people’s attitudes. That is a hard trend for dedicated journalists to reckon with.”
Q: The Shorenstein Center is introducing a new series, Unlocked. What is it designed to do?
We are seeing the disruption of so many practices and norms, and challenges to things that maybe we’ve taken for granted.
Our goal with the series Unlocked is to figure out what the questions that journalists are having to answer and explain, and making sure that we are providing really accessible, digestible explanations of some of the basic workings of government, of policy, of how people normally get hired and fired in government agencies or what constitutes a conflict of interest for a government official.
With a series of podcasts, tip sheets, and video projects, we will make sure that this is explained clearly by people who have the expertise and yet can explain things in straightforward, understandable terms. It is a very basic explanatory series, meant to be a complement to our , which has been supporting newsrooms for years in providing research insights in a way that is relevant and accessible to the work that they’re doing.
I think this is a place where academic institutions have a particular opportunity. It is not that there isn’t any news to report about how government works, but that news will make more sense if you have explained the way government is supposed to work, the way it was designed to work, the way it has been working in the past. The work of explanatory journalism becomes much more important at a time when there are a lot of competing agendas looking to characterize or mischaracterize the way the government and policy is supposed to be functioning.
Q: The new Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting, which the Shorenstein Center administers, is being awarded to The Washington Post’s series “Who is Government.” How does this category differ from investigative reporting?
Investigative reporting is often about accountability and therefore it very often focuses on failure, on abuse of power, on corruption, on ways in which things are not working the way they're supposed to.
The foundation of explanatory journalism is looking at where we are and how things work. I think it has never been more important than now.
We are living through a massive and unprecedented experiment in the rapid disassembly of government before our eyes. We are going to find out what happens if no one answers the phone at the Social Security Administration or if cancer trials are suspended or access to education for the disabled is suddenly curtailed. Our learning curve is vertical. We are in territory that is unexplored.
“Who is Government” is such an incredible series because it took agencies and bureaucracies that people know very little about, and employees that no one has ever heard of, and created absolutely riveting windows into the functioning of government and how it affects people’s lives, their healthcare, their safety.
It is the ultimate journalistic challenge. Take wonky topics, feature unknown characters, enlist some of the greatest writers in the country to do it, and make it absolutely riveting.
Marrying the artistry of the literary arts with the educational and civic necessity of explaining how things work is why I’m so excited about what their series did. But it also is why I think the Kennedy School has an enormous opportunity and even obligation to apply its knowledge and expertise to help fill in some of the gaps. Those gaps do not serve us well as a country when it comes to understanding what’s at stake when we are watching an executive order come down. We don’t want gaps in people’s understanding of how government is supposed to work.
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