The mainstream media has two huge upcoming opportunities to prove that it prioritizes democratic principles over placating President Trump and his base. I hope the journalism community, which has been far too accepting of this autocratic administration, finally rises to the occasion. I am not optimistic.
Tonight, Trump will give a prime-time address that his aides have said will largely be about supposed problems in America’s election system. The president will reportedly cite newly declassified intelligence to claim that there was interference by foreign nations against him during the 2020 election. He is likely to focus particularly on the 2020 results in Georgia and imply that the victories of Joe Biden and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the Peach State are illegitimate.
Foreign interference and election irregularities are important issues. If a normal president were giving a speech on these issues, it would merit major news coverage. But we can’t ignore the context here. Trump has long been angered by the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that the Russian government tried to help him win the 2016 election. Trump (perhaps rightly) feels that assessment undermined his victory. He has never acknowledged that he lost fair and square to Biden in 2020. So it seems likely that on Thursday, Trump will use the power of the presidency to both release mischaracterized intelligence that undermines Biden’s election and Ossoff and Warnock’s Senate careers and try to force the media to give these claims huge coverage by unveiling them in a prime-time presidential address.
But journalists and news outlets don’t have to allow themselves to be played. There is no rule dictating that prime-time presidential speeches be aired live by news organizations. The major networks chose not to air live some of Biden and Barack Obama’s prime-time speeches. And those speeches weren’t full of lies undermining legitimate election results. Knowing that Trump is likely to make false claims, ABC, CBS, and NBC should not interrupt regular programming to broadcast this speech. That treatment should be reserved for State of the Union addresses, declarations of war, and other clearly consequential presidential remarks. If Trump says something that is actually hugely important and accurate, the networks can then interrupt programming, air the tape of his remarks, and have their reporters discuss them.
I have no problem with CNN, PBS, MS NOW, and organizations such as The New York Times that specialize in covering major news airing Trump’s speech live. But how they cover his remarks matters. This isn’t the time for deference to a president because he is citing intelligence information that reporters don’t have access to.
Nor should reporters approach this speech with open minds and neutrality. Trump has been dismissing proven election irregularities (the Russian involvement) and touting false ones (that he actually won Georgia) for a decade. He has zero credibility on this issue. The coverage of this speech should be filled with words like false, lie, and unproven if Trump goes in the direction I expect that he will.
I obviously don’t expect CBS, run by Bari Weiss, who is shifting the network to the right, to cover Trump’s remarks with the skepticism they deserve. And I’m worried about CNN too. The Ellison family, which bought Paramount and put Weiss in charge of CBS, is now trying to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN. There is a broad coalition, including the state of California, trying to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.
But there’s a good chance it eventually happens and CNN’s journalists are under the thumb of Weiss or another Trump-friendly conservative. My message to my friends at CNN is that Weiss has probably already decided which anchors, reporters, and executives she will dismiss for being insufficiently conservative. You won’t save yourself by not calling out Trump’s lies in this speech. So do your journalistic and patriotic duty, and cover it honestly. If you don’t have your job (after being fired by Weiss), you’ll at least have your dignity.
Next week (July 24) brings the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was interrupted and then postponed in April after a gunman ran through a security checkpoint. I know some people feel strongly that the dinner has always been inappropriate, too closely associating incumbent presidents and the Washington elite with a media that is supposed to be a check on them.
I have attended the dinner several times and don’t have strong feelings about its existence. But this year’s dinner comes after a year and half in which the Trump administration has aggressively attacked individual reporters, news organizations, and the broader role of journalism in democracy.
Trump has sued numerous news outlets; the administration barred news organizations from the Pentagon unless they followed draconian coverage restrictions; the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter. Earlier this month, the administration not only subpoenaed Times reporters to try to force them to give up the names of their confidential sources for a story that was unfavorable to the president but had subpoenas delivered to the reporters’ homes instead of the Times’ offices, a clear act of intimidation.
Trump is scheduled to attend the dinner. So this is a chance for journalists to forcefully defend their colleagues, their profession, and democracy itself, directly in front of the president.
The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which puts on the dinner, is CBS White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang. She is under the thumb of Weiss and therefore risks being fired or demoted if she criticizes Trump. But the other journalists at this dinner can and should seize this opportunity.
There’s a precedent. At the 2025 Correspondents’ Dinner, Alex Thompson, a reporter at Axios, was presented with one of the WHCA’s journalism awards for his coverage of Biden’s aging and its effects on the administration. In his acceptance speech, Thompson excoriated the Biden White House for not being transparent about the president’s condition and the media for not covering the issue enough. If Joe Biden’s age is enough for a White House reporter to give a fiery denunciation, surely a president trying to undermine the entire journalism profession deserves much sharper criticism.
It’s obviously easier for me, working at a left-leaning publication with an overwhelmingly liberal audience, to be critical of Trump than journalists working at places committed to nonpartisanship and trying to reach independent and Republican voters. But I’m not asking journalists at these outlets to be liberal. I’m asking them to be honest and civic-minded. Donald Trump didn’t win the 2020 election. Journalism can’t exist if the president is constantly suing journalists and threatening to put them in jail. If you can’t say either of those things, you shouldn’t call yourself a journalist.
