Media Contacts: Carmen Ramos Chandler, carmen.chandler@csun.edu, or Matthew Bragulla, matthew.bragulla.004@my.csun.edu, (818) 677-2130
Amidst the chaos that has marked the start of 2025 and President Trump’s second term, California State University, Northridge journalism professor Melissa Wall argues that the future of traditional journalism and the role it plays in keeping people informed and serving as a watchdog to protect public interests are very much up in the air.
Wall, a veteran educator and journalist who has reported on stories from around the world, said that in this new political climate and at a time when media comes in many forms and on a variety of platforms, she has doubts that journalism as we know it will survive.
“It’s quite dangerous that we don’t have a shared narrative,” said Wall, who teaches in CSUN’s Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication. “That’s why when you talk to people, they say all these things and you think ‘that’s crazy.’ It’s because they’re getting their information from somewhere completely different and that seems legitimate to them. You’re getting your information from over here, and they’re getting it from over there and the two different spheres don’t even overlap. It’s getting to the point where we live in two different worlds, yet we’re living side-by-side.
She argued that “the collapse of traditional, mainstream journalism institutions reflects the decline of traditional institutions themselves,’ including religious organizations, government and the press. “When you don’t believe or trust any of these institutions, you’re going to have a collapse of society. That’s just inevitable, historically.”
To understand the turmoil mainstream media currently finds itself in, Wall pointed to the 1972 presidential race between Republican President Richard Nixon and Democrat Sen. George McGovern and two books about the contest, “The Boys on the Bus” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” written by Timothy Crouse and Hunter S. Thomson, respectively.
“In elections past, the coverage was pretty much the same,” she said. “But these younger journalists looked at it more critically. Thompson even called Nixon a criminal, called him crazy. Crouse pointed out that the journalists on campaign bus were reporting pretty much the same thing, engaging in pack journalism. What Crouse and Thompson did was pull back the curtain on the coverage of political activities in the U.S. in terms of campaigns and opened the eyes of a lot of people, including the journalists who followed them.”
Then came the 1980s and the rise of CNN, “which meant that if you were going to have cable news coverage, then you were going to have to generate news all the time,” Wall said. “So, you end up creating news for the cable news network to cover.”
Political campaigns moved even further from seriously talking about issues voters care about to “performance” and “image projection,” Wall said, to keep cable news’ attention.
“The way Trump performs all the time, that’s not new. People have been performing all along” she said. “It’s just that it’s gotten much more exaggerated.”
Trump has taken that performance to the next level, Wall said, and as long as he stays true to his narrative, his supporters have no problem.
“President Trump’s image is very much outrageousness,” she said. “When you go to individual voters — not the ones who stand in line 16 hours to see him — and you go through his agenda, their response is ‘Oh, he’s not really going to do that. He’s just performing.’ His narrative is performance, bigger than life, bombastic: ‘I’m a regular guy, even though I’m worth billions and I’ve never actually swept a floor.’ The tensions come when the media reveal that there’s a conflict between what voters think he’s going to do and the reality of what he does, and they blame the messenger — the media.”
Blaming the messenger would not be so extreme if everyone shared an understanding of the narrative, Wall said, noting that until the end of the 20th century, people relied on the same news media outlets, whether it was the local newspaper or the evening news, to learn what was going on in their communities, nation and world.
Today, people are less likely to turn on the evening news or read their local paper. Instead, Wall said, most people are getting their news in snippets, often out of context, on social media and from an “influencer.”
“Many of these are not trained journalists,” she said, and they may not care as much about the accuracy of their information as generating clicks so the algorithms send more people to their site, and they can make money.
The same could be said of the owners of traditional news organizations too, she said. She pointed out that most media outlets are no longer owned by a local person or family who have a vested interested in the community. Instead, they are owned by huge corporations of which the news outlet is only a small portion of their holdings, or a hedge fund.
“The hedge fund’s responsibility is to make money,” Wall said. “They want to get their money and leave the shell of whatever business was there. This is why you have news deserts across this country and why people are not getting news about what is happening in their own communities. It’s also why the owners of some of these large news organizations are not willing to stand up for their news divisions. They’re more concerned about getting approval for their next deal with the government than fighting for the public’s right to know.”
While “citizen journalists” are trying to fill the vacuum, Wall worried that they don’t have the training, the safeguards nor the legal protection that comes with traditional, mainstream journalism.
“There’s a flood, there’s a fire and you get a video, and you post it,” Wall said. “Does that make you a journalist? I think that makes you a witness. Journalists are witnesses, but they do a whole lot more than just grab video. They also trying to help you make sense of it.”
Wall said all may not be lost when it comes to journalism. People in some small towns have opened new newspapers, often online, to cover the community’s news — whether at city hall and the planning commission or the local high school football game.
She also pointed to the importance of nonprofit new organizations, from the LAist and Philadelphia Inquirer to ProPublica, that are filling gaps left by mainstream, traditional media.
“I tell my students that journalism is becoming a craft,” Wall said. “Like we tell our art students, you’re probably not going to make a lot of money, and you may have to have a secondary job to make ends meet, but you are doing important work that the community needs, whether they realize it or not.”
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