By Audrey Thibert
Sweeping new shifts under the new Trump administration have made markets reel and consumer confidence falter. In an uncertain economy, the business journalist’s role becomes more complicated – and more critical.
Since April, President Trump has proposed a universal 10% import tax, higher tariffs on countries that impose significant trade barriers on U.S. exports and 25% tariffs on most Mexican and Canadian imports. These tariffs have been successfully challenged in court and it’s still unclear to what extent they will be implemented or how they will affect the American consumer.
As the U.S. economy becomes fraught with uncertainty, average Americans are struggling to understand the implications of the Trump administration’s changes. Even seasoned economic reporters are grappling with how to inform the public without speculating, oversimplifying or sowing confusion.
News articles and analysis about the economy can help clarify, but the current economic unpredictability prompts some ethical questions for journalists: What happens when journalists don’t have answers about the economy? How can journalists say “I don’t know” in a way that doesn’t frustrate readers? How can journalists toe the line between making logical statements about the economy and making predictions that may not turn out to be true?
Cara Lombardo, the Wall Street Editor for the Wall Street Journal in New York, says responsible economic reporting “takes the reader along on the reporter’s discovery process as they sift through evidence about what might happen next.”
“And it reminds readers not to trust anyone who claims to know the future with certainty,” Lombardo said.
NPR’s Chief Economic Correspondent Scott Horsley also approaches his reporting with humility. He said the U.S. is an enormous country with “a lot of moving parts in a great big world with a lot of moving parts.”
“But you can’t just go to your editor every day and say, ‘I don’t know,’” Horsley said.
Instead, Horsley’s approach is to show what he does know and clearly state what he doesn’t.
“We have a general idea of how the economy works, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise,” Horsley said. “Even if the commander in chief is spouting misinformation.”
As a political reporter, Horsley covered all eight years of the Obama administration and the first two years of Trump’s first term, then moved back to business, where he had been before political reporting. He sees a difference between the new Trump administration and the one he covered previously.
“The economic team of the first Trump administration was a fairly mainstream Republican team,” Horsley said. “They were pro tax cuts and generally anti-tariff. Some of them were pretty hardliners when it came to trade with China and they were critical of the World Trade Organization. But they were pretty mainstream. The new team for Trump 2.0 is, generally speaking, less mainstream.”
As he reports on this second administration, Horsley avoids giving a platform to disinformation. For example, in response to Walmart saying they were going to have to raise prices due to the proposed tariffs, Trump posted on Truth Social in mid-May that Walmart should “EAT THE TARIFFS,” something Horsley said won’t ever happen.
We have a general idea of how the economy works, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. Even if the commander in chief is spouting misinformation. – Scott Horsley, NPR
“They’re not going to eat the cost of tariffs, and I’m not going to amplify that view,” Horsley said. “There may be a political story about why it’s important for Trump to take that posturing stance, but I cover the economy, and Walmart’s not going to eat the cost of tariffs.”
In terms of sourcing, Horsley prefers to look at the raw data, such as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic reports, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Department of Agriculture reports. He also looks to private groups such as the Institute for Supply Management, the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment and the Federal Reserve.
Horsley said he pays less attention to what the White House press secretary or president said about the economy — especially now — and he doesn’t listen to the Council of Economic Advisers in this administration either.
Most importantly, Horsley tries to talk to people living the story he is telling.
“The economists were kind of watching from 30,000 feet, and I tried to talk to people who are living the economy every day, which is most of us,” Horsley said. “If you cover the economy, some people have a lot of knowledge, everybody’s got an opinion and everyone has some personal experience.”
He added: “Whether it’s a clothing importer who just watched the cost of a truck container load of imports go up by 70%, a domestic manufacturer who had been losing business to China and suddenly feels like their product is more competitive now, a shopper who’s frustrated with the price of eggs or a restaurant owner who’s worried about what’s going to happen to customer traffic when wages go down.”
Lombardo said her team at WSJ has also looked to character-driven stories to capture sentiments that numbers don’t because, for a while, the U.S. has been in a “strange state where many of the key numbers remain quite strong but a lot of people don’t feel secure economically.”
“We made a big push in the recent years to not only report the various economic indicators such as the unemployment rate, inflation and more, but to infuse the coverage of data with people,” Lombardo said.
And, of course, business and economic journalists like Lombardo and Horsley often talk to economists for sourcing, such as Charles Nicholson, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nicholson said that while giving interviews to reporters right now, he always tries to highlight that the U.S. is in what he thinks of as “uncharted territory in terms of decision making and policy uncertainty.”
“I try to find some target set of impacts that seems reasonably likely and talk about that, but then also say we really are in unprecedentedly uncertain times,” Nicholson said.
Lombardo, too, said she draws on history to report on the present.
“When in the past were the economic conditions similar, and what happened then?” Lombardo said. “What are the key differences between then and now that could make the outcome different?”
Horsley often includes a “To Be Sure paragraph” — a qualifying paragraph anticipating any critiques of the article’s information by acknowledging concerns and countering them.
But both-sideism in the case of economics reporting should be approached carefully, Nicholson said.
“My understanding of the role of the journalist is to often highlight the differences of opinion,” Nicholson said. “In many cases, that can be a useful framing. However, when 97% of researchers agree and then different perspectives are reported as if they are roughly equal, that is a little bit of an issue.”
When in the past were the economic conditions similar, and what happened then? What are the key differences between then and now that could make the outcome different? – Cara Lombardo, Wall Street Journal
Nicholson said when he is a source for stories about the economy, it matters how journalists ask their questions. He advises journalists to ask economists about likely impacts rather than asking them to make direct predictions.
“Sometimes we can talk about the direction of change even if we’re not sure about the magnitude of change,” Nicholson said. “Framing it as the uncertainty of the current science is also helpful as an alternative to saying, ‘we have no idea.’ Because often we have an idea of impacts, even if it’s just a rather broad idea.”
Lombardo said WSJ’s news coverage refrains from making bold predictions though they cover many public figures who do. In those cases, Lombardo said a big part of a reporter’s job is including the right context.
“It would be irresponsible to just say someone predicted ‘x’ if that someone frequently issues dire warnings about the economy, such as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, we should note that so readers know how much weight to give it,” Lombardo said. “Or if a person stands to benefit should their prediction come true — and this happens a lot when we’re reporting on investors placing big bets — we should note that.”
In addition to tariffs, which Nicholson calls “maybe the most striking and the biggest departure from our previous policies,” Nicholson and Horsley agree that the implications of recent changes in immigration policy on the labor market will be a major economic story to watch.
Nicholson is also watching to see whether Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” – which includes cuts of about $300 billion over the next nine years to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — passes, as it would have substantive effects on the agricultural sector of the economy.
Meanwhile, Lombardo said her team is looking at the growing influence of billionaires in culture and politics, and how they influence the communities and economies around them.
Audrey Thibert is journalist who has reported in Wisconsin, Algeria and Tunisia. She was the 2023 UW Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium Reporting Fellow, which won her an Overseas Press Club Scholar Award. Most recently, she was a reporting fellow at RNS/Interfaith America. Audrey is a former three-time fellow at the UW Center for Journalism Ethics and is the recipient of the inaugural Anthony Shadid Memorial Scholarship for International Reporting.