As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his return to the White House, media experts are sounding the alarm over the potential consequences for press freedom.
In the latest episode of “The Poynter Report Podcast,” Kelly McBride, Poynter senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership outlined three ways Trump could “intimidate or destabilize the environment in which reporting happens” during his second term: influencing federal regulations to target media owners, leaning on the Department of Justice to go after anonymous sources and leveraging the Sedition Act to prosecute government leakers.
"This will both hurt those individual reporters and those organizations, and it will have a chilling effect, because it will make sources less likely to come forward, and it will make other journalists less likely to push hard on vigilant coverage," McBride told Poynter senior media writer and podcast host Tom Jones.
Ren LaForme, Poynter’s managing editor, acknowledged the concerns. “I'm nervous,” he said.
"The business of journalism ain't good," LaForme said. "We write about that every day, right? There are some bright spots. There are some folks coming up, nonprofits. It's local folks who really care, who are doing great work. But overall, the structure that underpins some of the legacy news organizations is looking pretty rickety, and I think we'll see some of it collapse.”
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