The role of the press shifts with the inauguration of President Donald Trump as he and his administration have made numerous accusations of the media’s unreliable reporting and release of fake news.

“We are mainly concerned about the way Trump, both as a candidate and now as president along with senior officials and his administration, have been speaking about the press,” said Courtney Radsch, Advocacy Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “We’ve seen a sharp deterioration in the United States of press freedom so President Trump and his administration officials have verbally attacked reporters and news outlets and generally continue to vilify the press which creates the threatening environment for journalists.”

Trump announced that he believes reporters as some of “the most dishonest human beings on earth” during a press conference at the CIA headquarters on Jan. 21.

“Of all the stupid things that he’s said the past couple of weeks, that’s not the stupidest; it’s wrong, but it’s relatively harmless,” said Neil Chase, executive editor of the Bay Area News Group, the publishing company for the San Jose Mercury News. “It’s hurt the relationship between journalists and some of their readers, but that’s an ongoing battle. If he picks journalists as the worst people in the world, he’s not cut out to be president.”

Trump claimed during a speech at the CIA on Jan. 21 that journalists falsely reported the size of his inauguration crowd, declaring that 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration as opposed to journalists’ and photography analysts’ estimates of at most 900,000 people.

Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, backed Trump’s statements in a press briefing on Jan. 23.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer wrote in the briefing. “This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, has also made public statements against the press.

“The media is the opposition party,” Bannon said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t understand this country. They still don’t understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

While the relationship between Trump and the press is tense, Chase attributes this to the administration taking a disliking to the media exploring certain sensitive topics.

“[The relationship between Trump and the press] is a pretty lousy relationship,” Chase said. “It’s supposed to be an adversarial relationship, not a negative one, but it’s the media’s job to ask questions and find out what the truth is and dig deeper sometimes than the person who they’re talking to wants to go.”

Trump has also taken his stance against the press to social media. He tweeted on Jan. 28 that coverage about him in The New York Times and the Washington Post was “false and angry,” claiming that the publications “have not changed course, and never will.”

“As a student journalist, it’s kind of depressing how combative [Trump]’s being towards the media, but as a citizen, I think it’s very scary,” Meilan Steimle (12), co editor-in-chief of the Winged Post, said. “The media traditionally is one of the few major watchdogs that keeps people held accountable; given that the media is responsible for holding people in power accountable for their actions, speaking truth to power, it’s very concerning to have the person who holds the highest office in the land be so openly combative towards them.”

Despite Trump’s accusations towards the press, the role of journalists will remain the same throughout the Trump administration.

“We’ve got the same job we’ve always had to do. Through the whole campaign, I had people tell me we were too liberal and we were too conservative; on the same day, somebody might think we had too many favorable things about one candidate and not enough negative things about the other.” Chase said. “I’ve had people call up and tell me they’re furious that we printed pictures of how many people were on the mall during Trump’s inauguration. People have their opinions.”

Similarly, organizations like the CPJ continue their job of protecting the numerous journalists across the nation even with the new administration.

“We are here to focus on protecting journalists and ensuring the environment in which it is created, in which press freedom can thrive,” Radsch said. “We’re going to keep doing what we do best, which is making sure that we’re documenting what is happening, that we’re treating the United States the same as we would treat any other country in which we are documenting these attacks on journalists.”

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on February 21, 2017.