In 2018, at a White House press conference, PBS NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked President Donald Trump whether describing himself as a nationalist could embolden white nationalists. “That’s such a racist question,” Trump responded, calling it “so insulting to me.”

That same year, he called journalist April Ryan “a loser,” said she “doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing” and described her as “very nasty.” He told CNN’s Abby Phillip when she asked whether he wanted acting Attorney General Whitaker to rein in special counsel Robert Mueller, “What a stupid question that is. You ask a lot of stupid questions.”

Sarah J. Jackson , an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and author of A Second Sight: How Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom , describes Black journalists as “canaries in the coal mine” for harassment, censorship and public attacks.

The White House defends his relationship with Black female journalists. In a statement responding to questions for this article, White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster said Americans benefit from the president’s “candid, open dialogue” with reporters. Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said “as a constitutional matter, presidents are entitled to criticize or even insult journalists.”

The Cost of Challenging Power

The legal experts interviewed for this article do not agree on where criticism ends and unconstitutional retaliation or coercion begins. Constitutional attorney Mark Meckler says “A president has every right to criticize journalists, challenge their reporting, and argue that they are wrong.” Evan Gotlob thinks there’s a real legal case here, but says the hard part is proving the government actually used its power to punish journalists, not just talked tough: “The biggest hurdle is likely proving coercion or adverse state action, not simply hostility.” Harvard law professor Rebecca Tushnet says Trump actually wouldn’t even need to personally order an agency to retaliate for it to count as illegal, calling retaliation “the most plausible explanation.”

A woman can retain all of her formal professional authority while becoming increasingly aware that using it carries a cost. Just last month, an independent arbitrator ordered The Washington Post to reinstate columnist Karen Attiah , with back pay, after the paper fired her in September 2025 over social media posts following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Journalists are hired to ask questions and say statements powerful people may not want to hear. Their professional authority and expertise comes from their willingness to challenge what they see. Such is the case anywhere a woman’s expertise requires her to challenge a powerful man, especially where she’s the one asking tough questions or delivering unpopular answers. It’s the story of any woman deciding, in real time, what her subject matter expertise is actually going to cost her.

What happens when women whose jobs require them to challenge powerful men have to calculate the professional cost of doing exactly that? What happens to a woman at work before anyone can prove someone tried to silence her? Nobody has formally instructed her to stop, she only needs to self-monitor, to know what happened to the last woman who spoke up. She may have more to calculate before she speaks.

To Speak Up, Or Not To Speak Up

When a government official criticizes a journalist or allegedly uses government power to influence coverage, the issue can become a First Amendment question about coercion or retaliation. The Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between government officials trying to persuade or criticize and using government power to coerce a private party into suppressing disfavored speech. Still, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has said publicly that she has heard from broadcasters telling reporters to “be careful” about how they cover the administration.

That contradiction is just as frustrating inside the workplace. The U.S. Supreme Court says the environment must be sufficiently “severe or pervasive,” judged both objectively and subjectively. Courts consider frequency, severity, whether conduct is threatening or humiliating versus merely offensive, and whether it interferes with work. The Court has also said that “simple teasing,” offhand comments and isolated incidents, unless extremely serious, generally do not change the terms and conditions of employment.

Still, ask any woman who has sat in a meeting deciding whether to flag a manager’s conduct. Something can feel intimidating, humiliating or professionally costly without necessarily satisfying the legal requirements for an unlawful hostile work environment. The line between what’s illegal and what isn’t can be gray.

This past February, researchers looked at 80 workplace harassment cases . In 65% of them, judges decided the behavior wasn’t serious or frequent enough to count as illegal harassment. When ordinary people were asked to evaluate those same cases, fewer than 20% of them reached the same conclusion.

A female expert can still start doing the calculation in her head: What is this going to cost me if I say this out loud? She may soften the question, change how she deals with a boss or decide the point isn’t worth making again.

Self-policing has public ramifications. If a reporter never writes a story, the public may never know the story existed. If an investigation never begins, there is no record left behind for historians to find. If a female executive never raises the risk she sees coming as a subject matter expert, the failure may later look like something no one could have predicted. Meeting notes may show consensus where there was actually fear.

The frustrating part is that the law: it can help determine when conduct becomes legally actionable, but it cannot eliminate the professional cost. Federal employment law does not make every offensive or uncomfortable workplace interaction unlawful, and even where the legal standard applies, reasonable people can disagree sharply about whether it has been met.

So how does a woman at work protect herself without allowing the possibility of retaliation to silence her before anything has even happened? There is no satisfying answer to that, including from the legal experts in this article. A woman usually has to decide whether to speak up before she knows what will happen to her if she does. No one may have broken a law yet, but she may already know speaking could make her boss angry, hurt her reputation, cost her an opportunity or make people treat her differently. For a female expert in the workplace, speaking honestly can be difficult because she often has to do it without knowing what it might cost her.