How to Wrest the News Agenda Back from Trump

Accepting the pace of social media need not mean embracing its transience

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

When Ronald Reagan came to the presidency, he brought a new approach to setting the news agenda. It often focused on establishing what we would now call a message of the day, and relied heavily on the construction and rationing of visuals offered by the White House. It was designed for a news ecosystem dominated by broadcast television, and, with strong management from chief of staff James Baker and orchestration from communications chief Michael Deaver, it was executed with discipline. Reagan was re-elected with 60% of the vote, a number unheard of in the ensuing 40 years..

It was some time before newsrooms really figured out how to regain the ability to set a modicum of the news agenda themselves. But all that handwringing in recent years about how the press, way back at the turn of this century, used to function as a gatekeeper but doesn’t anymore, serves as a reminder that they did eventually, sort of, figure it out.

When Donald Trump first came to the presidency, he, too, changed how the news agenda was set. His approach was designed for an age of social media, “flooding the zone,” but Trump largely executed it, as he does so much, on his own, and with breathtaking indiscipline. In daily terms, at the White House, it mostly worked, but in the larger environment it did not, and Trump became the first president in almost 30 years to fail of re-election.

While Trump’s second term ruthlessness in the exercise of power, especially when combined with the most supine Congress in 60 years, might make you think it’s working better now, Trump’s remarkably weak approval ratings, especially given the condition of the economy, strongly suggest otherwise.

What is happening is that much of the press has still not figured out how to regain that essential editorial role of informing readers, listeners and viewers what’s truly new and significant. This week I want to talk about how they might do that.

Beware “Thank you for your attention”

Knowing wheat from chaff

If you are alone covering the White House beat, you probably have to cover whatever craziness is happening there today. But if you’re an editor for whom the White House beat is just one among many to which you have people assigned (or if you have the luxury of having multiple reporters at the White House), you don’t have to take that story too seriously, or to play it too big, or linger on it. So the first task, as quickly as possible, is to separate the lunacy misdirection—Annex Canada! Invade Panama! Annex/Invade Greenland! Seize the commanding heights of the Kennedy Center! Celebrate Apartheid South Africa! Celebrate small-time autocrats from most anywhere! Executive Orders decreeing the reversal of the tides and baying at the moon! —from enduring news.

Every time Trump types, “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” editors should read that as a warning to think instead for themselves.

Next, and even more important, is not to move on from stories that may fly by too fast to be grasped, or that, if revisited, may not turn out to be what they at first appeared. While a few select stories have done well on this—I might not otherwise know of them—there have been too few, and the effort to report them is not yet nearly as systematic as it needs to be.

Remembering who we serve

Beyond that, I am reminded of one of the key insights from my journalistic hero, Barney Kilgore, that it’s critical to write for bank depositors as well as bankers, in part because there are so many more of them. The same applies to taxpayers vs. tax collectors, consumers vs. businesses, patients vs. doctors, and so on.

With those thoughts in mind, here are a few examples of the kind of work we should be doing:

• What the heck is actually going on with tariffs? The Wall Street Journal (of which Kilgore was the guiding spirit), for instance, recently reported that, so far, tariffs have, in their implementation, been lower than generally noted, but that higher effective tariffs are just ahead, even with no further action (assuming the tariffs are legal, of course). That kind of story has enormous implications for understanding the pace of inflation, which Americans consistently identify as a top concern. Trump talks of the billions in tariff tax revenues. How do they compare to his billions in tax cuts, and revenues foregone? Who is benefitting and who is paying?

• What is the actual impact of the various cuts to the federal workforce? Take two agencies that millions of citizens need to deal with all of the time. Social Security has lost one out of every seven employees, the IRS has lost one out of every four. What difference does this make in people’s lives? What, if anything, does it reveal about previous efficiency or inefficiency? What is the impact on access to benefits? On tax cheating?

• In an era of increasing climate change, we have moved quickly from government policy that was premised on the notion that the biggest thing an average person could readily do to help was to convert from a gasoline-powered car to an EV, to the eradication of that policy. What does that mean: for air quality? for the planetary effects of emissions? for consumer wallets? for auto workers? for auto companies? for oil companies?

• When big changes like the federal defunding of domestic public broadcasting are pushed through, what actually happens? The most commonly cited study of the projected impact on rural stations is almost 15 years old, which seems unlikely to be a great guide. As I noted recently, the role of the states in parallel funding has received far too little attention. The necessary insight is unlikely to come from spot coverage of individual cutbacks.

• What about changes that have yet to occur, but are now surely coming. Chief among these may be the Medicaid cuts scheduled to kick in next year, and in 2027 and 2028. What are the impacts on the finances of particular states? What trade-offs are state officials undertaking? Are we explaining to readers, listeners and viewers why services are being cut or taxes raised? Are we holding accountable state and local officials who are trying to defer days of reckoning until after next year’s elections?

• When the pandemic struck in 2020, the American people largely gave the government a pass for its lack of readiness, as if a meteorite had hit. They won’t do that when the inevitable next time comes. Yet, we are quickly becoming willfully even less ready, undermining mRNA vaccines and vaccination rates, decapitating the office of pandemic preparedness, cutting the federal health department’s staff by a quarter, gutting the CDC. The politics of this seem mad, running a huge risk for a neglible return. Why is it happening?

Yes, we live in an age where the pace of news is set by social media. Yet, in accepting that pace, we need not defer to, or worse mimic, that attention span.

The lives of real people do not actually change that rapidly, nor are they driven by hundreds of transient stories. Rather, they improve, or deteriorate, more gradually and fundamentally, moved by such things as whether a relative or friend has lost a job, what groceries cost, whether your family’s needed healthcare is available or affordable, the quality and affordability of your housing or education, whether or not the government services on which you have come to depend are delivered effectively. These are also, at the end of the day, the forces that move our politics. Such matters should drive our news agenda as well.