President Donald Trump’s dynamic with the media is undergoing a seismic change in his second high-octane term.

Frank Sesno is a professor at The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and worked with me at CNN back in the early 1990s.

“Are the media treating the President somewhat better, or afraid to not treat him as badly as some of them did?” Full Measure asked Sesno.

“It may be both of those things,” he replied. “I think one of the things that's very different in Trump 2.0 from Trump 1.0 in what I'm going to call ‘the legacy media’ is that the amount of groaning, moaning, eye-rolling, finger pointing, shock, outrage is, is way down. And there was a certain showmanship around it, I think a lot of times where people trying to show just how tough they were. 

"In this second Trump administration, some media are more restrained because they've learned that lesson. Because there was a message, I think, from the voters themselves that suggested that more attention and respect needs to be paid even as the tough questions are asked.”

The Trump administration in 2025 is shaking up decades of tradition, rearranging the faces and seats of the favored White House press, awarding credentials for hundreds of nontraditional reporters.

Conservative media – like Breitbart, One America News Network, and the New York Post – have now scored turns rotating through coveted spots at the Pentagon, pushing out left-leaning legacy players like NPR and The New York Times. 

Meanwhile, the Associated Press (AP) found itself barred from certain White House and press pool events after rejecting Trump’s rebranding of the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.” This week, a court ordered the Trump administration to reverse its decision on the wire service.

Sesno says the media shift under Trump is a double-edged sword.

“I actually think it's high time that a change be made because the media landscape has changed so much,” he says. “What I don't think is healthy at the White House is to have adamantly pro-Trumpers or adamantly anti-Trumpers who are opinion media leading the way in places where we need facts and information.”

Full Measure pointed out that some traditional media, such as CNN, began blending opinion and news during Trump’s first term, blurring the lines. CNN’s Jake Tapper notoriously sparred with the president in high-profile events that made their own headlines.

“I think that's a huge problem. And I think it was a mistake that CNN made in Trump One,” Sesno told me.

Trump is taking on the media in court like never before. 

This year, he won a $25 million settlement from Meta, owner of Facebook, and $10 million from X from when it was Twitter. 

He claimed his First Amendment rights were violated when his social media accounts were canceled. He has a case pending against the Des Moines Register newspaper. It alleges election interference over an 11th-hour poll claiming Harris was up three points in Iowa. 

Trump actually won Iowa by 13 points. Trump is also suing journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher for $50 million. That’s a copyright dispute over the release of his private interviews with Woodward as an audiobook. 

He’s suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation. The board doubled down on awards it gave The New York Times and The Washington Post even after the premise of their Russia collusion stories proved false. 

There’s a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News. It alleges the network's 60 Minutes show deceptively edited a Kamala Harris interview to remove some of her word salad. And Trump won a $16 million defamation settlement from ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos wrongly repeated that a jury found Trump liable for rape. 

Sesno sees Trump’s challenges of the media in court as a mixed bag.

“If it prompts people in news organizations to lose their courage to report stories that need to be reported that might be unpopular, that would be a very bad thing,” he observes. “[But] some of these lawsuits are prompting news organizations to say, ‘Yikes, we better put things in place so that we can really be sure that we're right about this, maybe that's the silver lining.’”