“60 Minutes” reporter Leslie Stahl admitted she feels “very bleak” about the future of press freedom given President-elect Donald Trump's return to office.
In November, Stahl attended an event with columnist Peggy Noonan at the 92NY Cultural Arts Center, where the topic was reflections on the 2024 presidential election.
In the conversation, they lamented the decline in trust and attention in mainstream media.
“The press is exhausted,” Stahl said.
“Yes, absolutely,” Noonan replied, but insisted this had been a common attitude for the past 20 years. “Nothing stands in the way of freedom of the press.”
“You're a really sunny person, aren't you?” Stahl said. “I'm very concerned about the press and I'm very concerned about the press.”
Stahl said legacy media maintains record-low trust levels “with lawyers,” largely because people like Trump and Elon Musk claim “legacy media is dead.” He pointed out that he continues to do so.
Stahl added: “But right now I'm kind of limping. And I don't know how I'm going to recover. I feel very gloomy about it.”
Noonan was pessimistic about the future, adding other issues contributing to legacy media struggles, such as the rise of technology.
“We're talking about something so important that you don't want to say, 'Well, let's see.' Or maybe, 'The world is going to end, we'll see.' . But if America loses freedom of the press and freedom of speech, it will lose everything,” she said.
A Gallup poll in October found that for the third year in a row, Americans have historically low views of the press, with respondents expressing either “a lot” or “a lot” of trust in the media to report the news fairly. It was found that only 31% of respondents were Exactly.
The same poll found that 36% of Americans don't trust the media, and an additional 33% trust the media “not very much.”
