Trump Inviting Influencers to White House Press Briefings Is Likely to Usher in a New Era of Fake News

Undermining Public Regard for Journalism
But there may be another, insidious function of inviting these influencers to the White House press briefing room. Their presence beside professional journalists from traditional media outlets is likely to undermine public regard for journalism in general. This could sow even greater mistrust in the US media, which is already at record lows.

In recent years, there has been a gradual blurring of lines between traditional and digital media. But while research consistently shows, across a wide cross-section of countries and within those countries, traditional media is still more trusted than new media, this is not to say that all new media outlets should be excluded. Many of these organizations and individuals have a track record of holding power to account.

Bellingcat – a coalition of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists – typically uses open-source information to uncover important stories of public interest. Individual journalists such as Taylor Lorenz, who covers the tech and creator industry, and Ken Klippenstein, who is well known for getting hold of internal government documents, are also good examples of journalists who produce quality reports from outside the traditional mainstream.

It should ideally be journalists such as these, with track records for solid and impartial reporting, who are invited into the White House fold – although there’s every chance they would get the same sort of treatment as reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta, whom Trump famously branded an “enemy of the people” when refusing to answer a question from him in 2018.

Acosta, incidentally, has just left CNN after the network moved him to the midnight “graveyard” slot. Shortly after signing off from his final CNN broadcast on January 28, Acosta appeared on his own Substack feed to announce he would go it alone.

It seems unlikely, though, that he will be awarded one of the coveted new independent media accreditations, given Trump’s recent attack on him. Celebrating Acosta’s apparent relegation by CNN, Trump took to his TruthSocial media site to call him “one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history, a major sleazebag”.

Polarized Media, Divided Audiences
It’s likely that America’s news media will only become more polarized during this second Trump administration, including an increasingly toxic mix of content creators dominating social media platforms. And now that Mark Zuckerberg has decided to remove Meta’s factchecking mechanism in favor of “community moderation”, research suggests this is likely to incentivize political messages which polarize and provoke rather than inform people.

We’ve already seen that the incoming president was more than willing to use lawsuits to intimidate journalists. Trump recently won a legal case over ABC when its journalist George Stephanopoulos defamed him by falsely saying he had been found liable for rape.

This, combined with Trump’s threat to sue the Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer over their allegations of election interference, are likely to increase the chilling effect on free speech. Legal threats such as these may serve to discourage close scrutiny of his second administration.

Meanwhile, the steady rise in prominence of partisan influencers using increasingly dangerous language is only likely to lead to the American public having less faith in the institutions that are critical to a functioning democracy – the press included.

Steven Buckley is Lecturer in Digital Media Sociology., City St George’s, University of London. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.