The press shouldn’t be Trump Media’s unpaid sales force

Why do we keep repeating the brand name for free? Consider the arithmetic. Every story that opens ‘the president wrote on Truth Social’ delivers an unpaid brand impression for a Nasdaq-listed company whose controlling shareholder is the subject of the story.”

Stuart N. Brotman, Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute

On Aug. 1, Trump Media & Technology Group opened the Truth Social API for business. Institutional clients, including hedge funds, trading desks and anyone whose returns depend on reading a presidential post a few seconds before the rest of us, can now buy real-time access to the feed for a reported $100,000 a month. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether selling priority access to market-moving statements by a sitting president is compatible with orderly markets. That is a serious question, and it will take the SEC a long time to answer it.

Here is a smaller question that every news organization in America can answer, without waiting for anyone: Why do we keep repeating the brand name for free?

Consider the arithmetic. Every story that opens “the president wrote on Truth Social” delivers an unpaid brand impression for a Nasdaq-listed company whose controlling shareholder is the subject of the story. Multiply that by the wire services, the network chyrons, the morning shows, the push alerts, the cable banners that run it in 40-point type for six straight hours. Set the meter running in 2022 and let it run to today. What you have is one of the largest sustained brand campaigns in the history of American media, executed with professional discipline across every major outlet in the country, and nobody ever sent an invoice.

The API changes what that campaign is worth. For four years, the press supplied the attention that made these posts consequential. Now the company is selling the consequence back by the month.

Let me be clear about what is not at issue. “Truth Social” is a registered trademark. A newsroom’s use of it to report on the platform is nominative fair use; the press may name it and owes nothing for the privilege. Nothing in trademark law compels this usage, either. There is no legal question here at all, which is precisely the point. 

This is not a case where the law constrains editorial judgment. Rather, it is a case where editorial judgment has gone unexercised for four years because nobody noticed that a decision was being made.

The alternative costs nothing: “He posted on the social media platform he owns.” Or simply, “on his own platform.” Then link to the post, which is the citation; readers who want to verify can go straight to the source, which is more than the trademark ever did for them.

Now notice what the descriptor supplies that the brand name conceals. “Truth Social” tells a reader nothing about the president’s controlling stake, nothing about the public listing, nothing about the documented relationship between his posting volume and the share price. “The social media company he controls” tells them all of it in six words, in the same sentence, every time. The substitution is not a subtraction. It is a disclosure that conflict-of-interest standards would require in any other context.  

The press already knows how to do this. When printing a name confers a benefit the newsroom has decided not to confer, the newsroom withholds the name. That is the entire logic of the no-notoriety protocols that many outlets adopted for perpetrators of mass shootings. It is the logic behind the older broadcast convention that spoke of “a popular soft drink” rather than surrendering a free mention to fill a news hole. 

And the industry proved only recently that it can change a proper noun wholesale on an owner’s instruction: Twitter became X across virtually every American stylebook within months, because Elon Musk, who bought it, said so. If the press can adopt a rebrand on command, it can decline one on principle.

Three objections are worth a hearing:

#1: Specificity is accuracy.

The president posts in more than one place, and readers deserve to know which. Correct, which is why the sentence should name the platform as his own and carry the link. Precision about the account is not the same thing as free placement for the brand.

#2: Withholding a name looks like editorializing.

Every stylebook is a compendium of normative choices. Readers of Editor & Publisher have spent decades arguing over “illegal immigrant,” “pro-life” and “enhanced interrogation.” So, declining to donate advertising to a company that news media cover is a less tendentious entry.

#3: The ownership is what makes the platform newsworthy in the first place.

Yes. That is an argument for the descriptor, not the trademark. The descriptor says the newsworthy thing. The trademark says the marketing.

I would not overstate what is at stake. Changing a few words in a sentence will not restore public trust in journalism nor slow the president’s posting volume. What it would do is demonstrate that a newsroom can identify a reflex, examine it and decide it no longer serves readers. 

That capacity is not in great supply currently, and it is worth exercising here, where the cost of being wrong is close to zero.

On Sept. 17, our nation observes Constitution Day during America’s 250th year. The First Amendment protects American newsrooms from being told what they must print. It has never had a word to say about what a newsroom prints out of habit, and habit is where most editorial power lives.

No government official has ever ordered American publications to print the words “Truth Social.” They print them several times a day anyway, at no charge, for a company that has now found a way to leverage the audience they built. 

This is not a First Amendment problem. It is a stylebook problem, and stylebook problems are the unique kind that news organizations can solve without anyone’s permission.

Stuart N. Brotman is Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He can be reached at snbrotman@gmail.com.