We Haven’t Survived. ‘We Are Surviving .’

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic ’s editor in chief, spoke with Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS NewsHour , and Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times , about the state of independent media.

In his second term, Donald Trump has escalated his confrontations with the press.

The New York Times was personally sued by Trump for $15 billion and, separately, the paper’s journalists were recently served subpoenas for reporting on the Qatari jet gifted to the White House. (The Department of Justice subsequently withdrew these subpoenas.) Federal support for PBS was scrapped last year.

And as self-styled journalists proliferate online, public trust in the media is at record lows.

Evan Smith, the panel’s moderator and The Atlantic ’s managing director for events, referred to the guests as outliers for having weathered these attacks—“You’ve survived.” Nawaz responded, “I wouldn’t put it in the past tense.

We are surviving .” With so many “content creators” and pundits now claiming to be journalists, Goldberg reflected on how the internet has changed the journalism industry.

“There was this view for a while—in the last 20 years—that the democratization of media was an unadulterated good thing,” he noted.

Indeed, for decades, the media was “too stringent about who gets to talk.” But with that shift, “standards were lowered.

Standards for what counts as actual verified information.” Public distrust in the media, and the president’s frequent attacks on reporters and their employers, have made the work of journalism more difficult.

“I remember, back in 2017, boarding a plane with my then-4-year-old daughter, and the man ahead of us was wearing a T-shirt that said in block letters on the back: Journalist.

Tree.

Rope.

Some assembly required ,” Nawaz said.

To restore public faith, the panelists agreed that journalists need to be transparent about the work that they do.