President-elect Donald Trump has long cast the press as “the enemy of the people.”

When uttered early in his first term, the declaration represented a remarkable rebuke, and later, a regular refrain in Trump’s successful campaign. On the verge of a second Trump term, how should the news media prepare for the return of an adversarial American president?

Three veteran journalists – Mike Allen, Jeff Mason and David Weigel – urged a renewed commitment to seeking the truth, a mission that will require a deeper understanding of competing views in a divided country where public trust in the media has been eroding for years.

“Do good work, and it’s as simple as that,” Mason, Reuters White House correspondent, told the National Press Foundation’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship class.

“I remember saying it repeatedly in 2017 that our job is to just filter through the noise and do good work. That means telling the stories, getting the truth out, standing up for the rights of the press when needed, but otherwise not drawing attention to ourselves just doing the work.”

Axios co-founder Allen said journalists would benefit by listening to their skepticism as well as to disparate voices.

Often, Allen said, those forces can be obscured by a blind pursuit of the news of the day, ignoring important truths “in front of your face.”

“If I told you on paper that two-thirds to 70% of the country said that the country was going in the wrong direction, if I told you that inflation and immigration are the two biggest issues, and if I told you that incumbents around the world were losing on inflation, immigration, direction of the country, I would’ve looked at those facts and I would’ve said, ‘This is not a feasible environment for an incumbent to get elected in.'”

Those baseline realities in the 2024 race, Allen said, always shadowed Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, even as the polls showed a neck-and-neck race.

Semafor political correspondent Weigel encouraged listening to voices beyond Washington in search of a fuller appreciation of the forces driving politics and policy and – ultimately – election outcomes. He said his own understanding of the race benefitted from devoting “more attention to the conservative media.”

“You can’t walk in any situation with the Trump or with the modern Republican Party and be shocked,” Weigel said. “You just can’t. I feel like it’s like showing up in the House of Parliament in 1777 and saying, ‘But I don’t get it. They’re not allowed to secede. That’s still our colony.’

“The world changed,” Weigel said. “If the approach is: ‘well, this is a wild thing that no one’s ever heard of before,’ I just want to say: get used to it.

“So, that’s the first thing I’d say just approaching this is … don’t be surprised,” Weigel said. “Don’t say, ‘that can’t happen.’ Yes, it can happen. The second is definitely have a very wide aperture of what media you’re reading.”

Access the full transcript here.