The News Media Coping with the New President-Elect
The US election made clear that the news media were not objective when it came to their favorite candidate. Of course, in America, the news networks don’t have to be objective. Furthermore, free speech is the highest good for news magazines. That’s why it is not surprising that they condemned Trump and his populist and even fascist utterances causing a fear that the freedom of press, speech and other constitutional rights could be endangered during his presidency. They even denied to take him seriously to some degree. I watched the CNN debate after the election and was interested how CNN and the other broadcasters would deal with Trump as president-elect. After the elections, the news media tried to figure out how his presidency could look like and they tried to reflect upon themselves as media and on ‘the American’. CNN published the article “What Donald Trump taught us about ourselves.“ In that article, the attitudes that were ridiculed initially are now looked at again. “When Trump called himself ‘Mr. Brexit,’ too many of us laughed.“ Before reading the article, I thought it is going to be similar to the reports I read in Germany. They all tried to calm down the readers and said that nobody should panic. But instead of being at peace with the president-elect, the CNN article does not seem to look for harmony:
Especially because of the loyalty of Trump voters, the media have to be cautious not to separate the country further without holding back their views and opinions.
The election caused a big controversy about news that can be seen in Germany, too. The AFD talks about the “Lügenpresse” and now also Americans struggle with their trust in news media. The internet is full of reports that the news media is trying to influence everyone and therefore only giving people information they want them to have. This selection process is part of their power and extremely criticized by some people. As an example, I looked at the first meeting of President Obama and Trump. These are the pictures and impressions of the BBC:
Trump is again ridiculed and seems to sit there like a child. Of course Trump supporters reacted to the coverage and this is one reaction on social media:
This made me think about how the media in America is going to change. Maybe it is just a coping process having an insecurity about how Trump’s politics is going to look like in reality.
