For the past three months, the Columbia Journalism Review has been interviewing journalists covering one of the most extraordinary moments in American politics. CJR has talked to bloggers and TV anchors, opinion columnists and reporters who were blacklisted by Donald Trump’s campaign. The result is an oral history, published here in edited form and in full on the review’s website.

CJR’s reporting team: Shelley Hepworth, Vanessa Gezari, Kyle Pope, Carlett Spike, Cory Schouten, David Uberti and Pete Vernon

16 June 2015: Trump announces his candidacy for president at Trump Tower in Manhattan, beginning a process that would see him eliminate more than a dozen better-established contenders in the Republican primaries

Olivia Nuzzi, political reporter, the Daily Beast: I’m 23, so I don’t have anything really to compare it to. During the primary process, before it became evident that basically nobody knew anything any more about American politics, I was deferring to all of the so-called experts about what was likely to happen, and it became overwhelmingly clear midway through the primary that the experts had been rendered obsolete by Donald Trump. To realize that the inmates were completely running the asylum was sort of a jarring moment for me during the primary process.

Andrew Kaczynski, senior editor, KFILE, CNN (formerly political reporter, BuzzFeed): I think if people had known that he was for real they might have covered him differently in the beginning. A lot of the criticism was that people were just airing his coverage live and were giving him so much attention. I think people did that because they just thought that he would be gone soon and that he was entertainment.

25 August 2015: Univision anchor and journalist Jorge Ramos is ejected from a Trump press conference in Iowa. Other media organizations are later banned from covering Trump events

Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision and Fusion: In that press conference only two journalists defended me: Tom Llamas from ABC and Kasie Hunt from MSNBC. All the other journalists didn’t say anything. I think that the way we covered Trump at the beginning of his campaign was seriously flawed. The New York Times, the LA Times, Politico and the Washington Post [in September] called Donald Trump a liar. [But] it took 13 months for them to do that. At the beginning, it was seriously inappropriate.

Steven Ginsberg, reporter, the Washington Post: When we got banned by the Trump campaign, we had to chase him on our own through commercial flights [and] go in through public entrances. It wears on you. Normally you would have one person on the plane and they get to stick with the campaign and they’d chronicle it. In our case, we had to have one person in one city and one person in the next city.

Hadas Gold, reporter, Politico: It’s always frustrating when your outlet is banned from the site. You always want campaigns to at least talk to you. A lot of times you would email the Trump campaign and it would go into an abyss that never came back. Hillary Clinton’s campaign would do that as well, but they tended to be at least a bit more responsive off the record.

Trump v the media: did his tactics mortally wound the fourth estate? Read more

Kaczynski, CNN and BuzzFeed: They never responded to a single one of my comment requests for something like five months. My emails were just like 40 unanswered emails to Hope Hicks, his spokesperson. The Trump campaign basically just blacklisted any press they didn’t like.

Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief and podcast host, the Slate Group: You hear him talk for five minutes and understand that he does not believe in free and independent media. And we know how threatening that is, not just to journalists, but to the idea of having accountability and the idea of democratic governance.

October 2015: Trump begins railing against the ‘crooked media’, leading to questions about perceived media bias

Chris Wallace, host, Fox News Sunday: The reasons Fox succeeds are because there are millions of people out there – and sure O’Reilly is popular and Hannity is popular and Kelly is popular – but I don’t think that is why Fox News succeeds. It’s because people think that the mainstream media has a single focus, and there are multiple foci on what’s important in the world.

Jonah Goldberg, senior editor and columnist, the National Review: When you talk to conservatives out there and you ask them, “How many Americans do you think watch Fox News on a regular basis?” – they think that because they all do, that the number is 20, 40, 60% of America. Then you tell them that a really good hour for Fox News is two million people, which means that about 308 million Americans aren’t watching it. One of the [ways] that conservatism got into trouble was by self-ghettoizing and not making this effort to reach out beyond our own institutions.

The press increasingly becomes a character in the election, particularly as a target for abuse by Trump. Journalists are publicly singled out for harassment

Ginger Gibson, reporter, Reuters: You had candidates that got up and insulted you every day. They told everybody that you were liars, that you were making everything up. Those are the things that challenge you when you’re at your desk and you’re talking about stories with your co-workers. You have to sort of talk through and be like, “How do we know we’re not dismissing something because the thing that got said is, You’re a liar and you make things up and you’re trying to throw the election?”

Nuzzi, the Daily Beast: For a lot of my time covering the Trump campaign, I was not in the media pen because we were blacklisted, so I would go in with the general public, not wearing a press badge, sort of just keeping my head down and trying not to have anybody notice me at all because I was afraid I was going to get kicked out. In those instances, when he would tell the audience to turn around and say mean things to the media, I never knew what to do. I’m obviously not going to take part in that exercise, but also if I just stand there and continue to face forward there’s a chance someone could say, “I saw you on CNN, you commie.” So I would just look down and off to the side and hope that nobody noticed I wasn’t yelling at my friends.

What Donald Trump will have to accept: without journalism, there is no America Read more

7 December 2015: Following the San Bernardino shooting, Trump calls to ban all foreign Muslims from entering the country

Sabrina Siddiqui, reporter, the Guardian: I was in South Carolina covering Rand Paul. We were in a more conservative part of [what] is already a conservative state, in Rockville. One of the voters actually told me that he was concerned about national security. He said the “biggest problem in this country is Muslims and I think it’s time we either force them to leave or we take matters into our own hands and we start exterminating them”. This was a situation where I didn’t identify myself as Muslim. I just said, “OK, sir, why do you feel that way? Did you hear anything from today that helped address those concerns [or] have you heard anything from another candidate where you’ve been impressed [on] national security?” I was very uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to do. Luckily he didn’t ask me about my background. But I was by myself in a rental car driving around the state. I don’t know how angry this individual is. I don’t know if he’s going to follow me if he figures out that I’m Muslim. I don’t have any sense what to do in that moment other than to just finish my interview with the voter and then just say, “Thank you for talking with me, and have a nice day.”

Sam Sanders, reporter and podcast host, NPR: I was in Iowa ahead of the caucuses, and a man living in West Des Moines was talking to me about certain things that Trump said that appealed to him. He said, “Well, Trump says it like it is: this country isn’t for everybody, we’ve got too many immigrants coming in from this country, that country.” He says basically, “This country was made for European immigrants.” He says this, and then he sees me looking back at him as the descendant of slaves here in America, and he stops, and he goes, “Ah, well, it’s here for European immigrants and the descendants of slaves, and we’re here together, and that’s awesome.” We end up having a pretty thoughtful conversation about race that I’m guessing he has been afraid to have with anybody else.

Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent, Slate: In 2012, I never saw open declarations of hatred, of misogyny, of bigotry. And those things are completely common at Trump events. They’re arguably even encouraged; it’s part of the festival atmosphere. And that’s different. And it’s left me, in the course of covering these events, feeling just like a little uneasy about being there not only as a journalist but also as an African American.

Sopan Deb, presidential campaign digital journalist, CBS News: In Reno, I was repeatedly asked by a man, in front of a group of Trump supporters, if I was a member of Isis. That came a couple weeks after a rally in Las Vegas, when a man interrupted an interview I was doing to tell me to go back to Iraq. With that said, the vast majority of Trump supporters I met were not like that. They were very kind and willing to share their views, and wanted to be heard.

19 July 2016: Trump becomes the Republican nominee for president. Media coverage adapts

John Dickerson, host, CBS Face the Nation: There was initially a lot of discussion about taking Trump seriously. My argument was whether you take Trump seriously or not, the Trump phenomenon you have to take seriously. There are a lot of people who are very upset and angry with the system and want a voice for their anger toward a system they think is rigged.

Tommy Craggs, politics editor, Slate: I remember when [Trump] won the New York primary and essentially clinched the nomination. I said, “Watch, they’re going to say – no matter what he does, no matter what he says – they’re going to say he was more presidential.” And that night, sure enough, MSNBC, CNN, they said Trump was more presidential, which just seems insane. He went up and didn’t swallow his tie in front of everyone and as long as he didn’t do that they were going to call him presidential. He could have gone up there and danced the hoochie coochie and they would have said, “This is a welcome change in tone from Donald Trump.”

Social media takes on an increasingly large role in the campaign, as Trump and Clinton use it to circumvent traditional media and journalists mine it for stories. Brutal harassment of journalists on social media becomes the new normal.

David Fahrenthold, reporter, the Washington Post: The first time I really used [Twitter] for reporting was back in May, when Corey Lewandowski basically lied to me and told me Trump had given away this million dollars to veterans when he really hadn’t. I still saw Twitter primarily as a place where journalists and Trump would gather; I didn’t really then understand the power of all the readers who are on Twitter and all the amazing knowledge they have and all the work they’re willing to do on your behalf. It was only later, when I started looking for Trump’s donations in general, that I started getting this incredible interest and feedback, that I realized how big it was.

Click and elect: how fake news helped Donald Trump win a real election | Hannah Jane Parkinson Read more

Nuzzi, the Daily Beast: Your likelihood of reaching idiots or crazy people increases with every 10,000 [Twitter] followers you get. It got to a point where I turned off my mentions completely so I don’t have to see the sort of terrible things people say to me.

Gold, Politico: I got plenty of antisemitic hate emails and really creepy pictures sent to me. I think it’s just become normalized now. They’re a nuisance, but they’re not going to stop me from doing my job.

Spring 2016-November 2016: The press has immense difficulty getting Trump and Clinton to focus on issues of importance to Americans

Wallace, Fox News Sunday: It has really been a campaign about, in the case of Trump, his temperament, his behavior, and in the case of Clinton, her ethics, her honesty. If you believe their campaigns, it’s the choice between a creep and a crook.

Gina Chon, columnist, Reuters: Trump has a tax cut plan, he has a healthcare plan, he has plans regarding the energy sector, but a lot of them, especially in the first few months of his campaign, were very vague and did not have a lot of detail. So it was really hard to figure out how to analyze them in terms of what effect they would have.

Adam Moss, editor-in-chief, New York magazine: The one thing that I think even quality media did terribly wrong in this election was that they – and I put us in the same boat – didn’t force a focus on actual content. The absence of conversation about climate change, and the fact that we have absolutely no idea today what Donald Trump actually truly wants to do about anything, is a catastrophic error on the media’s part, and lots of other people’s part.

David Scott, US political editor, the Associated Press: The hardest thing about this election was trying to do the best that we could to fact-check both candidates in real time. A lot of the times, what they say is shaded or just outright not true, and to keep up with the volume of misstatements was a challenge. And the news cycle is only getting faster.

Alec MacGillis, reporter, ProPublica: To start with Hillary, it was so mystifying all along that she was deciding once again to hold [the press] at arm’s length and to be so closed, when there had been all that talk early in the campaign that this time it was going to be different, and that she was going to be more freewheeling. There was that piece George Packer had in the New Yorker where she actually sat down with him for some time, and her remarks to him were so incisive, so wide-ranging, so impressive, talking about the economy and people left behind by today’s economy, and what it was going to take to spread the gains more broadly. I was blown away by it, because I hadn’t seen her talking like that at all in this campaign. Why weren’t we hearing more of this?

Throughout the general election cycle, accusations of false equivalency – treating both candidates essentially as the same – plagued the press

Weisberg, Slate: Trump had a really serious scandal, or something really outrageous, about every four to six hours. And part of the effect of that was nothing lasted. It was a weird kind of test line. If you just keep generating new scandals, none of your scandals will matter. Hillary Clinton had one sort of B-/C+ scandal, but there was nothing to replace it. But because of this structure of false equivalence, hers got way more attention than it deserved. He had 50 things that were all worse than her one thing.

Rebecca Traister, writer, New York magazine: I think a lot of the press treated Hillary like she was going to be the president, and held her to account for that. There was great journalism done on Donald Trump. But the daily, relentless hammering on these bullshit stories: the emails. It shouldn’t have been the story every day for a year and a half. That’s where the incongruity is. It’s not that people didn’t do great journalism on things that were wrong with Donald Trump. It was the daily hammering of the comparatively minor things that were wrong with Hillary Clinton.

Dan Roberts, Washington bureau chief, the Guardian: Both candidates deserve equal scrutiny. I do think that is something that we in the media have failed to properly explain and integrate rather than the other way around: why some of the people are drawn to this crazy candidate.

Molly Ball, politics writer, the Atlantic: You’d write stories saying both candidates are historically unpopular, but [people would] say, “Yes, but Trump is a bit more unpopular,” or “Yes, but Trump is more of a liar,” or “Yes, but Trump is more this or that.” And sure, we should be noting in the pieces that there are differences of degree, but in a two-party system you’re always going to be comparing the two candidates. A lot of liberals wanted us to portray a Hillary Clinton who didn’t exist, a Hillary Clinton who was thronged by adoring fans. I covered Hillary Clinton. I never covered a candidate before where you would go to her own events and half the people there would say they didn’t really like her.

Gold, Politico: People are still screaming at me about how the media paid too much attention to the [Clinton] emails, but you know what? The FBI was investigating the emails, so [how] are we not supposed to write about it?

Maria Ramirez, political reporter, Univision: When you are interviewing people, people say things that are not true at all, and I’m still sometimes conflicted about whether I should say: “No, that’s not true.” Most of the time I just smile and keep recording. It’s not your job, I guess, to fact-check voters.

MacGillis, ProPublica: I got a lot of flak over the last few months for having written so much about [Trump] voters and their towns and their worlds. I had a whole lot of people saying to me, “Why are you writing so many stories about these poor woebegotten people and their poor woebegotten places? We’re so sick of hearing about this all-hallowed white working class and their troubles.” My response always was we’re writing about these people because they have been more than any other group behind the rise of Donald Trump.

Major mainstream media organizations like the New York Times went further than ever in terms of calling out lies

Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent, the New York Times: If any other candidate [did] these sort of things – talked about somebody gaining weight, questioned somebody’s religion, mocked their marriage, questioned the impartiality of a federal judge because of his ethnicity – coverage would be very tough. We’re covering [Trump] for what he says and not trying to impose some faux balance for the sake of some platonic ideal of equilibrium.

Gerard Baker, editor, the Wall Street Journal: I’m really proud of the journalism we did. Other people were so focused on Trump’s apparent flaws and questions about his own character that they simply looked past the bigger political phenomenon going on. Some reporters saw it as their role to stop this man from becoming president. They put themselves in the role of partisans. They were saying that if you voted for Trump, you were implicitly a racist. It’s easier to write about someone and his character than it is to go out into the country and report.

Goldberg, the National Review: This is the first presidential election where I’ve had no idea what to do, as a professional opinion journalist. I’ve found it utterly dismaying; I feel like I need to search Amazon for deals on hemlock. I feel like a therapist should be asking, “Show me on the doll where 2016 touched you.”

Wallace, Fox News Sunday: The problem I have with the Times, and frankly a lot of other newspapers, is that at some point they decided that Trump was beyond the pale, and that he should not be treated as a legitimate presidential candidate. You’re entitled to your opinion, I just don’t think you’re entitled to your opinion on the front page of the paper.

Moss, New York magazine: We don’t pretend to objectivity, but we do, as a rule over the years, try to maintain some kind of even-handedness. We abandoned that because we felt the threat of his candidacy and presidency was too great.

16 September 2016: Trump performs a bait-and-switch with the media at a press conference, which turns into an infomercial for Trump’s new hotel

McGann, Vox: CNN took a lot of heat for leaving Trump on the air, and his surrogates were talking and when Trump finally did come on, he was plugging his new hotel. I was in the moment like, “Well, that’s a hard call to make.” I was sympathetic to their position of, “Why would you think that this was going to be an infomercial for Donald Trump’s hotel?” They thought this was going to be an actual newsworthy event.

Siddiqui, the Guardian: He was able to really work himself into the day-to-day news cycle to the point where the entire campaign from the moment he launched has largely been about him.

Matt Murray, deputy editor-in-chief, the Wall Street Journal: He’s the culmination of many different trends, and not necessarily as anomalous as we would like to think. All successful politicians have to learn how to be performers. He’s all performer.

Nuzzi, the Daily Beast: Obviously cable news has its own demons that are pretty evident to anyone who watches it, but I vehemently disagree with anyone who says that cable news created Donald Trump. I think that removes voters’ agency in a way that is incorrect.

Craggs, Slate: Trump identified a weakness in the way online political media, or just online media in general, operates. He won the primary largely by sucking all the oxygen out of the room. In this crowded field his was the only name that people saw out there all the time. People didn’t get a chance to know who John Kasich was or what Chris Christie had to say. Trump can command the attention from a country’s entire political media by just being an idiot on Twitter at 3am.

1 October 2016: The New York Times breaks the story that Trump may have avoided paying taxes for nearly 20 years

Susanne Craig, reporter, the New York Times: Well, the way that they came to us was certainly unexpected. My first reaction when I went to my mailbox and I opened the letter, when I saw that it was from an address from Trump Tower – you sort of can’t believe it. I knew even if they were real, the chances of being able to confirm them were slim to none. To get this to publication for the New York Times, the bar was so high. We were going to have to source this and get somebody to confirm them. So there was a lot of, “Even if we have them, because they come from an anonymous source it’s still going to be a pretty difficult reporting feat to get it done.”

9 November 2016: At 2.29am the Associated Press announces Trump as the 45th president of the United States

Scott, the Associated Press: It’s kind of an interesting moment when you’re in the AP newsroom on election night because we call the race and we count the vote. You have this moment where you’re one of like five people in the country who knows who the next president is going to be. It was pretty incredible. I got that call sheet and then I tapped our news alerts editor on the shoulder and said, “OK, we’re calling Wisconsin,” and he sent that out, and I sat back down at my desk and hit the button on the news alert that said, “Donald Trump elected president.”

Deb, CBS News: I was at Trump HQ. As the night went on, you could sense that something is wrong here in terms of what we expected tonight. Not just reporters, but campaign staff. As the momentum shifted Trump’s way, you could see his supporters getting more elated. And then suddenly, even when it hadn’t been called yet, you knew Trump was going to win.

Traister, New York magazine: I was at the Javits Center [at the Clinton event]. Imagine the worst party you’ve ever been to and multiply it by a million. The beginning of it was like a preview of a future that I’m not sure we will ever see again. I have never seen women and men so sure that the country was better than they thought it had been historically. And we will never have that assuredness again. Never.

Martin, the New York Times: There’s no question that part of the Trump story is that institutions in this country do not have the authority and gatekeeping capacity that they used to have. I think everybody recognizes that. That said, Trump is the most unpopular major-party nominee in American history. So, when I hear the casual references to, “Nothing can pierce the Trump armor,” that’s not totally right. There’s a reason why he is so unpopular and deeply polarizing. It’s because people do read the coverage, watch the coverage.

The media looks in the mirror

Who is to blame for this awful US election? Read more

Ginsberg, the Washington Post: The notion that we didn’t cover or didn’t understand the Trump movement is off base, certainly at the Post. We covered it extensively for a long time.

Gold, Politico: I think the media properly informed the public, and I think the public just did not care. When people blame the media, I remind them the media did not go into 50 million voting booths and pull the lever for Donald Trump. That was an individual person’s decision.

Nuzzi, the Daily Beast: I’m proud of how print journalism in general has been covering Trump. I think everyone has been appropriately aggressive and has asked appropriately difficult questions.

Goldberg, the National Review: One of the reasons [the mainstream media is] in so much trouble right now when it comes to Trump is that they have a huge “cry wolf” problem. It was Daniel Schorr, in 1964, who said Barry Goldwater’s trip to Europe after he had secured the nomination was really a clandestine trip to meet up with neo-Nazi elements. They have been doing this for a very long time. So when the press says that every Republican who’s nominated, including Mitt Romney of all people, is a monster, and then the Republican party nominates a monster, you guys don’t understand why half the country couldn’t give a rat’s ass. That’s on you guys to a considerable extent.

Ramos, Univision and Fusion: I think our social role is to challenge those who are in power and on many occasions the press has failed in doing that. It took Hillary Clinton hundreds of days to have her first press conference, and that is not right, and Donald Trump chooses who covers his press conferences or not. This is completely unprecedented. I think we’ll remember this election as unique and very concerning for the future of the press because if [this] becomes the norm, we are in serious trouble.

Scott, the Associated Press: I think we all need to look at the role of horse-race polling. Is the story of the day really who’s up and who’s down in the latest poll? Or would we be better off spending more time talking with voters, trying to learn a little bit more about what they’re thinking? The only poll that matters is the one that’s taken on election day.

McGann, Vox: Last summer, I was giving out responsibilities and beats and one of my top reporters asked to write a long, in-depth piece on Donald Trump and I told him, “No.” I assigned the piece to an intern instead and I regret that decision. She was an extraordinary intern, but nonetheless I regret not taking Donald Trump more seriously a year ago than I did.

Bouie, Slate: I think the big thing is that I would’ve taken the Trump thing more seriously when it dropped last summer. I think I was among those who were sort of like, “This can’t possibly last.” And I regret thinking like that.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason: I think both things can be true: the media definitely fucked up in this campaign and, also, the self-flagellation is reaching Opus Dei levels of hysteria at this point.

Looking forward: covering a Trump administration

Nando Vila, vice-president of programming and correspondent, Fusion: People’s trust in the media and journalists it is at an all-time low, and that should terrify us. I think when you go around the country and you talk to people about this stuff you just realize that what we’re providing for them is not what they are asking for or need. We’re just very, very separated from them and that’s a problem.

Traister, New York magazine: Yesterday I was seeing reports in major newspapers about the appointment of Steve Bannon being couched in these normal terms that we might use about politicians. Like, “There’s been hand-wringing over the appointment of Steve Bannon.” Hand-wringing? No. The thing that we need to see from political media is constant reinforcement that this is not normal. That what we have thought of as fringe – racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-gay – hate in this country is being mainstreamed and normalized every time we cover one of these stories as a normal, if slightly controversial, choice.

Ginsberg, the Washington Post: The message I’ll give to the staff is that this is really the story of a lifetime and we are lucky to get it.

Moss, New York magazine: One of the things we learned from all this is that the media as it used to be thought of is just not that important any more. It didn’t matter that some people were doing good work because most places – the New York Times, us, the Washington Post, Bill Maher, God knows – we’re just talking to ourselves and we’re talking to people who already agree with us.

Asma Khalid, reporter, NPR: It’s been sort of sad the way the country seems to be moving apart. The vitriol that we’ve heard has created a culture or a climate that feels, at this point, irreconcilable.

Weisberg, the Slate Group: I think that journalists’ fundamental responsibility is to tell the truth and describe reality, and journalists are now going to have to do it under this tremendous pressure of normalization: to treat Trump like a normal Republican within the range of our political experience, to take his ideas seriously, to not constantly bring up the outrageous things he’s said and done. The press has to resist that pressure. He’s an outlier, and you have to describe him as an outlier and not start to think that you’re the one who’s crazy and he’s the one who is normal.