Each of the articles from this week depicts methods through which Donald Trump and his administration have used political slippery slopes to prosecute or pressure their dissidents. Many of these articles specify that this pressure is achieved through indirect methods, but is nonetheless an insidious attack on press freedom: through forcing all journalists to use a Trump-supporting billionaire crony’s social media platform to obtain their information, or defunding public channels of information under the guise of creating more ‘unbiased media’, for example. As Hamilton puts it in the Just Security article, “none of these decisions reflect government censorship, but direct censorship is not the only way to undermine a free press. Instead, creating an environment in which news media start to self-censor in deference to the views of those with State power is a less costly way to achieve the same outcome.”

One thing that piqued my interest was the concept of ‘explanatory journalism’ that Hughes referred to in her article for the Harvard Kennedy School, where she mentions that “investigative reporting is often about accountability and therefore often focuses on failure” while ‘explanatory journalism’, on the other hand, “is looking at where we are and how things work.” She proposes explanatory journalism as a kind of solution to the stark ideological divide that the nation faces, as the increasing scarcity of ‘shared facts’ makes collective national discourse on contentious topics difficult.

I was skeptical of this idea for two reasons: one, because Trump already has a history of litigating against journalists for what many would already consider ‘explanatory’ (like when he sued 60 Minutes for Harris’ edited interview), and two, because I think that it does little to provide journalists working for the public interest with any additional self-agency. When even the explanatory is construed as political, I’m unsure if altering the font through which journalism is delivered would do much to empower a free press (and I am also convinced that it would prove somewhat beneficial to Trump and his administration, benefitting from a media landscape shifted towards explanatory neutrality.)

This skepticism tied well to my second point of interest: the fact that Trump, as Nancy Gibbs puts it in the HKS article, has a distinctly “uncanny understanding about attention, how to capture it, hold it, divert it.” Gibbs’ words reminded me of a book I read last semester for a History class that was dedicated entirely to the history of attention: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, a book that explored the history of the advertising industry and its distinctive commodification of the human experience previously deemed outside the realm of profit. Wu argues that this signals a kind of moral crisis that’s a direct byproduct of late-stage capitalism.

Trump has, I think, a very strong understanding of how this commodification can benefit him and hurt his opponents. There’s much to say about the president’s ability to commodify, for example, the field of journalism itself. The White House executive order makes a direct reference to this: “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” it reads. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” Journalism, a field historically dedicated to informing the public with public interest at the heart of its philosophy, remains a viable entity according to the federal government, despite being privatized. Access to free and unbiased media, then, is becoming increasingly and forcibly compatible with private benefit; Trump has effectively put a price tag on journalistic freedom.