Tommy Washbush / Freepik
A pile of newspaper clippings formed around a silhouette of Donald Trump.
Just one week into the administration of Donald Trump, the widespread panic from the news coming out of Washington, D.C., was palpable. There were the executive orders, a federal funding freeze, a court-ordered administrative stay on said funding freeze, the rescission of the funding freeze, and the administration’s insistence that there was no rescission of the funding freeze.
Since then, we’ve seen a truly astonishing move by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payments system and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, along with other legally dubious power grabs.
These actions raise questions not just about the fate of our country and the state of our democracy, but also about the role of media in particularly turbulent times: How should news organizations cover the Trump Administration as it delivers on its promise to massively disrupt government operations, practices and norms?
As a local paper, we won’t be the ones announcing the news of the latest executive order. Thank goodness there are national outlets and independent journalists who are providing a window into what is happening within the executive branch and covering the details of this constitutional crisis.
We are going to take it slow in general given how much confusion Trump’s abrupt policy directives generate (and because it seems like creating chaos is part of the strategy). I like how Nicole Carr, an Atlanta-based investigative journalist and journalism professor, put it in a LinkedIn post: “Coverage cannot continue to be ‘he says this, he signed that, they got this email.’ The rapid speed of delusion and chaos is the point. We need context and impact. Is it legal? How is it happening? How will it be challenged? What’s the history of the policy and agency and why is this unprecedented?”
In the most simple terms, our plan for coverage is to proceed carefully and thoughtfully, with a focus on context and impact on the local community.
That said, we did move quickly in our first piece on Trump’s orders, after being alerted by a reader that the Department of Military Affairs, Wisconsin Emergency Management and the Wisconsin National Guard had taken their websites offline in order to comply with the president’s Jan. 20 order that requires “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” the termination of federal DEI and environmental justice programs, as well as all DEI offices, positions and grants.
Staff writer Liam Beran contacted the Department of Military Affairs as well as Gov. Tony Evers’ office, but did not get any response. We published that piece about two hours after first learning of the website changes. In this instance, we thought it was important to report that the process of complying with one of Trump’s first executive orders was underway in our own state and that these agencies could soon delete information related to DEI. About an hour after we published his story, two of the websites were back online and we updated the piece with that information.
We continued to try to determine exactly what information was being targeted and eliminated but got little response from official sources. So Liam, using cached pages of the old websites, did some analysis himself. He was able to identify for a follow-up piece (see here) that several programs related to equal opportunity policies had indeed been scrubbed from the sites.
Liam spent much of his time the week of Jan. 27 reporting on other Trump-related news. Once the president’s funding freeze was announced, we started putting out feelers to sources but also anticipated that, due to a pending lawsuit, a judge might pause the freeze before it was supposed to go into effect at 5 p.m. That’s what happened and it bought us some time to do more research and interview sources.
On Jan. 29, Liam covered a town hall hosted by U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan that drew more than 300 people and was standing-room only; it was a good illustration of the concern Trump’s policies are generating. People had questions about what will happen to Social Security and funding for nonprofit groups, among other things. We published a story on the town hall, with additional reporting, later that day.
Liam had concurrently been working on a story about the potential impacts of a funding freeze on UW-Madison. He spoke at length with Dr. Patrick Remington, UW-Madison population health sciences professor emeritus, who told him, “As one grant ends, the next begins. Any delay in that process can be devastating to a researcher who has to lay off staff, who can’t commit to hiring graduate students. Even if the funding turns out not to be delayed, the uncertainty can have a paralyzing effect.”
While we were not able to get much of an official response from UW-Madison, it would be hard to fault the reasoning of spokesperson John Lucas. “We’re unable to accommodate interviews this week,” he said. “A lot of this seems fairly fluid at the moment.”
There are, we know, some readers who simply can’t stomach reading the news given the recent developments in Washington. To them I say, we don’t just do hard news!
In this issue alone, you’ll find stories on Unidas por Hilos (“United by Threads”), a community art project that brings local immigrant women together to make art and food; cheesemakers in Wisconsin’s Driftless region; the delicious focaccia at Casetta Kitchen; a review of a newish Ramen restaurant on Cottage Grove Road; the status of Troy Farms’ CSA; a brewery with a cooperative business model; and a preview of Children’s Theater of Madison’s Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Enchanted Edition.
There’s no shame in a little escape.
And if you don’t get our weekly newsletters, do yourself a favor and sign up for them now at isthmus.com/newsletters. Word of Mouth, which won top honors in the 2024 AAN Publishers contest, a national competition, is a light read with tips for books to read, series to stream, food to try, music to listen to, and more. On Tap delivers our weekly entertainment Picks to your inbox. And Isthmus Insider, written by yours truly, is a handy guide to our weekly coverage — your choice if you want to skip the news links and go right to food and arts stories.
As we all forge forward, we want to cover stories not just about the impact of cuts and funding freezes, but also stories of resistance and resilience. Got any ideas for these? Please email me at jdavidoff@isthmus.com.
