Managing the News in the Age of Trump

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1:45Zanny Minton Beddoes:Bloomberg Audio Studios.

1:47Alessandra Galloni:Podcasts, radio, news. I think the best way of characterising this administration, it is essentially the kind of monetisation of US hegemony. The less polite way is something about a mafioso shakedown.

2:10Stephanie Flanders:I'm Stephanie Flanders, Head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg, and this is Trumponomics, the podcast that looks at the economic world of Donald Trump, how he's already shaped the global economy, and what on earth is going to happen next. This week, well, we're widening the lens a bit because I just had a fascinating conversation I'd like to share with you. The occasion was Bloomberg's second Women, Money and Power event in London, and the conversation was with Alessandra Galoni, the editor-in-chief of Reuters News Agency, and Zanni Mintembedos, editor-in-chief of The Economist. The title of our session was Reporting on Money and Power in the Current Moment.

2:48Stephanie Flanders:And there was plenty of Trumponomics in the mix. But what you'll also hear is how all three of us have been grappling with not just the sheer volume of news coming out of Washington, but also the Trump administration's aggressive approach to handling the media. We see that obviously in the Jimmy Kimmel saga and the many lawsuits the president has filed against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, most of the traditional US news networks. but it's also something we've been living with behind the scenes since the White House took control of the White House press pool and dramatically cut the mainstream media's regular access to the president.

3:24Stephanie Flanders:So yes, it's a little bit more introspective than our usual discussions on Trumponomics but like it or not, Donald Trump is leaving his mark on journalism as well as the global economy and sitting at the helm of these two major news organisations, Zannie and Alessandra have a bird's-eye view of both. I started by asking Alessandra, eight months in, how this Trump administration had changed the way Reuters did its job.

3:57Zanny Minton Beddoes:I think there's sort of two buckets, right? There's what you have to do journalistically, and then it's sort of how you go about it and navigate some of the new rules that have come in. But journalistically, I think, you know, the bottom line is sort of a back to the future. You do what we always do, which is you report this administration. And what we try to do is we try to report what matters, you know, what the real effects of the executive orders are or what the real effects of changes in policy, new laws are. So, for example, just yesterday we had a story that looked at how prosecutions for drug abuse or for money laundering or for financial crimes that used to be prosecuted a lot in the U.S.

4:39Zanny Minton Beddoes:have now sort of given way to deportations because so much attention of the Trump administration is focused on deportations that a lot of the same sort of prosecutors and officers who were focusing on one type of crime are now focusing on what Trump classifies as another type of crime. So, again, what flows from changes in policy? That's just one example. I mean, this is worth perhaps mentioning a few of the restrictions that we've had. The new one is on the Pentagon reporting, which all of us have, which is that there's a new rule now or a new request for all journalists who cover the Pentagon to sign a piece of paper saying that essentially we wouldn't publish something that could be in a security interest of the U.S.

5:22Zanny Minton Beddoes:without checking with the Pentagon first, essentially. Now, of course, that is something that we can't do, right? And that is something that I think, you know, to my knowledge, virtually nobody has signed this, right? And you face the same thing. And so we're, you know, talking to the administration about how we can change this. And interestingly, what we understand is that it's actually aimed more at people who work in the Pentagon to avoid them from leaking. And of course, leaks also have been sort of more kind of criminalized, has been a criminalization of what the administration would call leaks.

5:52Zanny Minton Beddoes:So I think on the reporting side, we keep reporting on the news, trying to understand what is going on, and then sort of try to convince the administration that First Amendment press freedom is something important for everyone, no matter where you operate in the US, or in our case, in all the 200 other countries where we work.

6:10Stephanie Flanders:And as wire news services, obviously Reuters and Bloomberg have been affected by just taking the wires out of the Oval Office as a matter of course, off the plane. There was always a wire journalist previously on the plane or more than one. There's just a consistent sort of lack of people to ask questions or questions that aren't along the lines of, Mr. President, how do you look so healthy and so much younger than in your previous administration? But I mean, Zannie, you're in a slightly different position with The Economist, but I know, obviously, you have a much the same journalistic mission.

6:40Stephanie Flanders:How are you dealing with the different approach that this administration has?

6:44Alessandra Galloni:You know, what we do is to join the dots between geopolitics, business, technology, to help our readers understand where the world is going. And that mission is exactly the same as it always has been. And the Trump administration changed our framework because the Trump administration is so dominant in pretty much every global story. And so for me, one of the things that has changed is that I spend a lot of time making sure that we differentiate between the signal and the noise. If you're not careful, every story about every part of the world could start with a reference to Donald Trump. And so I spend quite a lot of time either literally or at least figuratively crossing out first paragraphs that mention Trump too much.

7:27Alessandra Galloni:It would be incredibly boring if you had every single story framed in a Trump way. Differentiating the signal from the noise also means, you know, not suffering from Trump derangement syndrome and being fair-minded about the way you cover this administration. We have a lot of Republican readers. We have a lot of Trump administration people read us and indeed Trumpians read us. And I think it's very important that even people who don't share the economist's worldview, we believe in liberal values. We were founded to champion them. They drive what we do. but I feel very strongly that even people who do not share that view should find our journalism useful.

8:04Alessandra Galloni:And so we need to be rigorous, fact-based. We need to really go the extra mile to make sure we are fair-minded in our analysis. And that's doubly important at this moment. In terms of the kind of way we deal with it, I mean, of course things have changed for us too. All my non-American journalists, when they go to the US now, including me, Carrier, I think it's a G29 form. It's a form that if you are stopped by the Customs and Border Patrol, you sign it. I'm sure you have it too. And they have to call our lawyer in the US. I look at my phone before I go, I scrub my phone to make sure that just in case, I have to say, I've gone to the US every week this month, and I've sailed in, and I have global entry, and it's all been fine.

8:42Alessandra Galloni:You're not well

8:42Stephanie Flanders:known for your scurrilous posts. Exactly, but I just think it's prudent.

8:45Alessandra Galloni:And that is a weird feeling. I've been to China many, many times, and I have never scrubbed my phone. I've taken a burner computer. So there are different behaviours that I do there. But so the environment has changed, undoubtedly. It's a long answer to your question, but it makes me value our independence more. This sounds incredibly pretentious, and I don't mean it to be, but I think we should all be thinking not just about the here and now, but how are our successors going to look at what we did? Did we go overboard with Trump derangement syndrome, or did we normalize totally non-normal behavior and fail to, you know, raise enough red flags about what is potentially happening to American democracy.

9:24Alessandra Galloni:And I think the balance between those two is what I'm figuring out.

9:28Stephanie Flanders:I think we do find that the White House team particularly, I think, is having to use its thesaurus very often on different words for unprecedented. That's the way you put it in perspective and don't normalise it while still reporting it. Just to come back on you, Zannie, because I was struck by this a couple of weeks ago. There's a version of Trump derangement syndrome when one's thinking about global affairs and global events. And I was struck the Shanghai summit and then the parade in China, a lot of the coverage saw everything that was happening in Beijing as a response to Trump and indeed India, Prime Minister Modi's going to China, all of that as being entirely a response to what Donald Trump had done and the trade wars and other things, which in many ways was true or at least was one way of looking at it.

10:14Stephanie Flanders:But there was another way which I got from talking to my Indian colleagues and our geoeconomics analyst in India, that it was entirely in line with Prime Minister Modi's own objectives. He needed to have a relationship with China because it's a key part of his manufacturing, domestic manufacturing agenda, that he needed access to these inputs from China and we could show how many inputs he relied on, etc, etc. It struck me that was true for almost every country there, that you could also just re-describe what they were doing as not putting two fingers up to Donald Trump, but pursuing their national interests in a world in which the US has, to some extent, stepped back.

10:47Stephanie Flanders:So how do you guard against that? That's an aspect of the same issue.

10:51Alessandra Galloni:Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. That's sort of another way of framing the too much focus on Trump. I think two ways. Firstly, you know, what is happening right now is a period of extraordinary uncertainty because we've got at least three massive great shifts going on in the world economy. One is the geopolitical shift, which is driven in part by the administration, but was also starting long before the rise of China, you know, the kind of authoritarian axis. There were big shifts going on before the Trump administration. Secondly, the huge economic shift, which again predated the sort of, I'm afraid, the sort of end of the unfashionability of the worldview of The Economist started long before Donald Trump became president.

11:28Alessandra Galloni:But he's taken it a step further with massive protectionist turn. And then the third one is the technological revolution, who wins the AI race. And all three of those are driving the world. And all three of those are driving what Prime Minister Modi is doing or Brazil is doing or any country is doing. And so you're right. If you only think of this through the prism of the US and through Trump, you're missing something. And one stat for this, I think the US is what you'll know exactly. I think there's a 16 % of global trade. It's a relatively small proportion. Of course, it's dominant in global finance.

11:58Alessandra Galloni:But that suggests that a lot of what is going on is actually external to the United States. And so we have to we have to absolutely make sure that we don't overemphasize the impact of this hyperactive and, of course, extremely important administration.

12:14Zanny Minton Beddoes:I completely agree. I think nobody doubts that. U.S. administration is important and what has been happening with issues like global trade, you know, geopolitics is no question something that we need to cover. But the risk is if we only cover it from the vantage point of the U.S., we miss what's actually happening in other countries, and we may find ourselves, to your point, about 10 years from now, 20 years from now or more, we may miss epical shifts in places like China and India because we've only been focusing on them as a result of the U.S. administration. And then equally, this counts on one of the key thing for journalists is to be open-minded.

12:50Zanny Minton Beddoes:You have to be open to the possibility that your ideas, your original idea, your original hypothesis is wrong. And I think that the mainstream press as we sometimes were called, has a certain view of this administration. And we need to be open to the possibility that the U.S. economy is not going to collapse because of what is happening, because that inflation is not going to be what people feared because of the tariff policy, that, you know, the institutions of the state of law, the institutions in the U.S. will not collapse necessarily, that they're strong and that they will last some of the attacks, right?

13:25Zanny Minton Beddoes:I mean, I mentioned before in passing some of the new attorney general's rules against leaks by journalists. Well, you know what? Actually, what it reversed was a policy of the Biden administration. It went back to a policy of the Obama administration vis-a-vis journalists. And so I think everybody was ready. So even though we are there in the rooms and we are fighting for press freedom, we also have to put it into context, right, and not criminalise everything that is done by this administration while standing firm to fact-check everything that is said.

14:22Stephanie Flanders:as the day gets going.

14:24Zanny Minton Beddoes:From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now.

14:30Stephanie Flanders:And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy.

14:35Zanny Minton Beddoes:We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.

14:40Stephanie Flanders:So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens.

14:45Zanny Minton Beddoes:It's smart, calm and to the point.

14:48Stephanie Flanders:And it fits into your morning.

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14:56Stephanie Flanders:On Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:03Zanny Minton Beddoes:For decades, people travelled across the world to see John of God, desperate for cures no doctor could offer. And when they arrived, they saw things they couldn't explain. This is real. This guy's actually doing surgery and it's a miracle. I never believed that And miracles were real until that point. But behind those adoring crowds was something much darker. One of the reasons why I never went to the police is because I saw at least five or six men with guns everywhere he went. That was clear to me, like, close your mouth, don't open your mouth, don't say anything. I'm your host, Martina Castro.