Dylan Miettinen, 22, senior, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minn.

Miettinen is triple majoring in journalism, English, and sociology of law, criminology and deviance. He is the current editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Daily, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper and has interned with CNN, the Minnesota Reformer and MinnPost.  

For four years, every word uttered, action taken, and tweet sent by Donald Trump dictated the day’s media coverage. I hope that changes, though I am unsure whether journalists will have much of a choice; once a reality star president, always a reality star president. Whether Trump migrates back to reality television, joins the ranks of conservative talk show radio hosts or starts his own news network, he seems unlikely to fade into the (relative) obscurity of a private citizen that the past two presidents largely have.

Those erratic, erroneous tweets that we’ve become all too accustomed to? I don’t think they should appear above the fold. But I anticipate retrospective journalism to blossom, with deeper dives into Trump’s finances, pandemic response and relationships to Russia, among other stories. Reporters, however, must provide the Biden administration with the same critical scrutiny and the same in-depth coverage as the preceding one.

Trumpism will far outlive the Trump presidency and to ignore that fact—to be lulled into a sense of complacency and “normalcy” that a Biden administration may seem to indicate—would be a grave mistake for news organizations. Covering a real-world caricature like Trump is easy, but I hope journalists opt to push themselves to do the harder work of self-reflecting and acknowledging (and correcting) the distrust of the media that Trump sowed.

Journalists have done a better job of covering those who helped elect Trump in the first place, and I hope they don’t think the value of covering those communities is lost without him at the helm. I also worry that communities already left behind in newsrooms and coverage — Black, Latinx, queer and immigrant communities, among others—may be further alienated if the news industry goes back to “the status quo.” It is imperative that journalists have real, hard and necessary conversations about language (calling a spade a spade and a liar a liar), recognize the harsh limitations of “objectivity” and work to accurately reflect the communities they serve.