WASHINGTON—The free press in the U.S. faces three big threats, says News Guild President Jon Schleuss: Financialization, corporate oligarchs and threats from right-wingers, including but not limited to Republican President Donald Trump.
Schleuss, whose union is now one of the fastest-growing in the nation—as journalists flock to the News Guild, often to try to protect themselves against those menaces—offered that analysis as part of a wide-ranging recent symposium on press freedom worldwide.
The March 4 International Federation of Journalists webinar, entitled “Trump’s attacks on press freedom and their global repercussions,” started with Trump. Its “news peg” was his ejection of the Associated Press, the world’s largest news-gathering organization, from White House press events.
Schleuss explained that Democratic lawmakers are far from blameless. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden “weaponized the Justice Department” by subpoenaing—and even jailing—reporters who received leaks of “confidential” documents and wrote stories about them.
Trump now has gone well beyond even that. He tossed the AP out of the White House because it wouldn’t kowtow to his imperialist renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America.” With limited space for reporters on presidential trips outside D.C., Trump has taken away selection of who travels as part of the “press pool” and provides information to colleagues who can’t. It is the way in which People’s World and many other news outlets get their information about what happens on those trips, without having to depend upon the White House itself.
Trump’s press staff, not the independent White House Correspondents Association, now selects the pool. That’s a form of censorship, letting Trump pick his right-wing favorites. And operatives from Trump puppeteer Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” recently invaded the offices of National Public Radio, an event that occurred after the IFJ webinar.
NPR and the Public Broadcasting System, which provides the independent network, especially smaller stations, with funds, have long been targets of right-wing vigilantes and pressure.
The session quickly moved beyond Trump to focus on violence against journalists around the globe—including 166 killed by the Israeli military during the ongoing war on Gaza—and arrests and violence against journalists by right-wingers, notably police, here in the U.S.
And that in turn led to the other threats Schleuss discussed: Oligarchs taking over and ruling newsrooms, even as financialization, via vicious, rapacious and secretive hedge funds, shrinks the numbers of newspapers and journalists in the U.S.
And that’s a threat to a continuing free society, Schleuss warned. When people are deprived of hard-hitting independent news sources—national or local—unafraid to dig and challenge both government and industry, they turn to often-biased “news” sources that reflect their own views.
The real big problem, though, Schleuss said, is that “In the U.S. in the last two decades we lost 3,300 newspapers and 45,000 newsroom jobs. That’s a 60% decline.”
Most of the decline occurred, Schleuss admitted, because “Google and Facebook gobbled up the majority of the advertising” from local papers. The two big news aggregators also steal local stories without paying for them.
Publishers were unable or unwilling to adjust. And it left the remaining papers—and their readers—vulnerable to predatory hedge funds and biased “news” social media sites.
Left behind news deserts
It’s also left much of the nation as “news deserts” similar to the “food deserts” in inner cities and rural areas now bereft of supermarkets and decent nutritional choices.
Even where papers have survived, job cuts have been severe. Gannett, the nation’s largest chain, alone cut 10,000 jobs in the last decade. A typical Gannett newsroom is now in a suburban shopping center or strip mall, with a skeleton staff of a few “content creators” who must juggle not just writing stories but photography and video. Once-widespread cross-checks for accuracy—and which often prevented errors—are gone.
“That means fewer journalists are covering local communities” and businesses “or have the time to do so,” Schleuss said. Corporate and government corruption not only goes unpunished, it often goes unreported. Non-profit national and statewide investigative news sites, such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, fill part of that void. But they can’t possibly cover everything.
So readers are “left to turn to national outlets or to social media, which are self-selecting.”
They’re also left to turn to media increasingly controlled by oligarchs who now dictate news content, editorial policy, and at social media, story placement and often what will run and what won’t.
The examples on the print side Schleuss used are oligarch Jeff Bezos, the Amazon czar, at the Washington Post, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times.
Schleuss, as an organizer, helped organize the Times and later the Chicago Tribune, whose staff unionized with the News Guild after a monster hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, bought the Tribune Co., and started trashing it, firing staffers—including at least one illegally for being a News Guild leader there—cutting coverage and selling off its famed Tribune Tower, too.
Alden, of course, installed its own editor at the Tribune, and has pocketed the proceeds.
Schleuss noted Bezos shocked the Post staff when he ordered its editorial board to pull its planned and agreed-upon endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential campaign. There was a mass protest by Guild members at the paper, followed by another when Bezos’s handpicked editor spiked a cartoon critical of Trump. The cartoonist quit, due to censorship.
More recently, Bezos declared the Post editorial page will restrict itself to conservative, pro-corporate and/or libertarian views only. And Soon-Shiong introduced a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage.
Financialization of newspapers seen
“We’ve also seen the financialization of newspapers,” with Alden and the Tribune Co. as a leading indicator, Schleuss said. The secretive capitalists, interested only in the bottom line and not in quality coverage, “cut jobs, cut costs and sell off assets.
“They do not care about reporting or the communities” they cover and are supposed to serve.
Arun Gupta, who introduced the session for IFJ before Schleuss took over as both lead commenter and moderator, said, “Trump encourages violence against media workers.” While Gupta did not spell out details, video of Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa., last year, where he was winged by an attempted assassin’s bullet which nicked his right ear, made that clear.
In the ensuing chaos, mobs of the Trumpites in the crowd surged towards media workers—print news reporters, camera operators, television reporters—who were in turn penned in at the back of the open field where he spoke. The mob’s intentions, expressed in shouts, raised fists, and more, were malevolent.
It’s also not the first time that’s happened at a Trump rally. Some of the more well-off media firms now hire security guards for their staffers, especially at Trump events.
The governmental threat to media independence predates Trump, though, Schleuss pointed out. Democratic and Republican administrations curbed access, indicted reporters who published stories based on leaks, and looked the other way when local police assaulted, beat and sometimes shot at clearly identified reporters doing their jobs.
The situation isn’t much better north of the border, added panelist Randy Kitt, director of communications for UNIFOR, Canada’s largest private sector union, which includes journalists, autoworkers and others. Just before he stepped down as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau tried to segregate Canadian media “in a separate room” from decision-makers, Kitt said.
“The other trend is to discredit journalists in a diabolical way,” Kitt added. Last October, former Conservative Member of Parliament Chris Alexander “even accused respected investigative journalist David Pugliese of being a Russian agent.” Canadian Media Guild President Annick Forest added, “we’ve had journalists personally attacked by political leaders.”
Other Canadian officials spurn the media and its questions in favor of direct communications of their views, unfiltered and unchallenged, in social media, Forest said.
Forest summed up the whole fraught relationship on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border in two sentences.
“You have to have boots on the ground to know what’s going on” and the state of the media in both countries shows there aren’t enough of those.
And as for the oligarchs, the financiers and the politicians, Forrest added: “What’s under attack is not just freedom of the press. It’s freedom, period.”
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