An authoritarian anti-journalism playbook

At this seeming inflection point for the future of news, I put the question to the most famous expert of them all and prompted ChatGPT to answer: “What will happen to journalism in 2025?”

The response it spat out was a compendium of the bland but familiar, as if it had digested a decade’s worth of previous Nieman Lab predictions (which, after all, it probably had): “Journalism is likely to undergo continued transformation driven by a mix of technological advancements, shifting media consumption habits, and evolving business models.”

It went on to highlight a host of familiar “trends and developments” including:

• personalization and automation through growing use of AI
• increasing dependence on subscription and membership models due to continued erosion of the industry’s revenue
• further experimentation with video and multimedia formats
• a redoubling of efforts around trust-building, media literacy, and other strategies to combat misinformation
• a reinvigorated emphasis on local news and community-centered journalism
• more cross-border collaborations and new platforms for global reporting
• embrace of the “solutions journalism” movement
• new scrutiny of ethics and a redoubling of efforts to regulate media platforms

Unless you count an oblique reference to news outlets needing to “prove their credibility and combat the rise of ‘alternative facts,'” missing entirely from this list was any mention of Donald Trump. That omission is glaring for many American observers of the news media at this particular moment.

After all, the once and future U.S. president just recently closed out his campaign by musing to a Pennsylvania crowd about how he wouldn’t mind if “somebody” were to indiscriminately start shooting journalists. In the weeks since, he has named a replacement for director of the FBI, Kash Patel, who previously warned that the new administration would “go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.” Patel added ominously, “We’re going to come after you.”

Sure, some of this rhetoric may be bluster — and even if not, a second Trump administration may well prove just as incompetent as the first when it comes to executing on its many governing priorities. But Trump and his allies have signaled a take-no-prisoners willingness to use lawsuits, regulatory agencies, and even private-sector acquisitions, to silence news media viewed as “enemies” and boost only the voices it deems appropriately deferential. The actions taken by some wealthy owners of news media both before and after the election does not inspire confidence around the ability of American journalistic institutions to withstand a sustained assault on their independence and wherewithal. While ChatGPT can handily summarize the broad trends battering the news business, the survival of the industry in the immediate future depends on something new: what a small number of specific individuals will choose to do in the face of an erratic, existential threat.

The future of news is ultimately a much bigger question then the future of news in the U.S., and independent journalists relentlessly pursuing the truth have been and continue to be critical forces for democracy in far more treacherous environments. But just as Trump has shown a willingness to borrow from the playbook of authoritarians elsewhere, what happens over the next year to American journalism will almost certainly be imported from abroad.

As the first Trump administration showed and the most recent campaign laid bare, the best, most rigorous journalism in the world is powerless to effect change unless it reaches and is trusted by the wider public — however profitable it may be to serve a niche, hyper-engaged subset of the public (itself an open question). No doubt there will be some who rally in defense of journalism — perhaps even triggering another temporary “Trump bump” among the news-loving resistance — but publishers and broadcasters risk fates worse than irrelevance if they double-down on the hardened few without regard for the rest of the public. For that public, what used to be called the mass public, the allure of “information” devoid of any connection to the newsgathering processes needed to uncover and verify it, remains strong. Many prefer that information organized and passively curated by platforms — even ChatGPT itself — and they do not care that those platforms are increasingly hostile to the press. Nor do they care what they are missing. They will not save journalism because they remain unconvinced — even blissfully unaware — it needs saving.