Smothering the Press
When Donald Trump was running for president in 2024, he frequently inveighed against censorship. “I will bring back free speech in America because it’s been taken away,” he declared at a rally in Wisconsin. Significantly, one of his first acts after taking office last January was to sign an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which promised to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.” The stated purpose of the order is worth quoting at length:
The previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms…. Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.
Every word of this has turned out to be disingenuous. In the year since the order was issued, Trump and his administration have repeatedly abused their power to advance their own “preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.” The speech rights of U.S. citizens, about which Trump the candidate claimed to be so concerned, are famously set forth in a constitutional amendment that also protects the freedom of the press. But Trump is much less enthusiastic about that freedom. He seems not to understand that free speech and a free press are logically inseparable. And so, while paying lip service to the former, he and his lackeys have consistently sought to undermine the latter through lawsuits, regulatory abuses, funding cuts (to NPR and PBS), and intimidation campaigns.
Let’s start with the lawsuits, which began during the campaign. Trump is, of course, famously litigious: over the course of his career, he has sued anyone who gets in his way. But even by his own standards, the blitz of lawsuits he’s filed against media companies in the past two years is impressive. In March 2024, Trump sued ABC News for defamation after George Stephanopoulos claimed that a New York jury had found Trump “liable for rape,” when in fact he was found liable only (!) for sexual abuse. Most legal experts say the case had little merit, but ABC agreed to settle for $16 million. Then, in October 2024, Trump sued CBS News because of the way it edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. This suit had even less merit—the editing in question is a standard practice from which the verbally incontinent Trump has often benefited—but CBS agreed to settle the case, again for $16 million, because the owner of its parent company, Paramount, needed the blessing of the Federal Communication Commission for a merger. Now the president is suing the BBC and The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion apiece, The New York Times for $15 billion, and even The Des Moines Register, because it had the gall to publish a pre-election poll showing Trump behind Harris in Iowa. The aim is not so much to win these cases in court as to harass and intimidate in the hope that these and other media companies will avoid unflattering coverage of Trump in the future.
The CBS/Paramount episode has had a particularly alarming sequel. After its merger with Paramount last August, Skydance is now trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery by means of a hostile takeover. (As we go to press, the outcome remains in doubt.) If successful, Skydance’s founder, David Ellison, would control not only Warner Bros. and HBO Max but also several cable channels, including CNN. Ellison has reportedly assured Trump that he plans to overhaul CNN the way he has overhauled CBS, removing journalists judged to be hostile to the current administration. In theory, the president has no direct control over media mergers, but Trump says he plans to be “very involved” in this particular deal. He is preparing the pikes for a few more talking heads.
Apart from the carrot of regulatory favors and the stick of frivolous lawsuits, Trump has found various other ways to limit Americans’ access to impartial coverage of his administration. Early in his second term, he barred the Associated Press (AP) from major presidential events because, in defiance of another early executive order, it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. AP sued and won, but the “reporters” admitted to White House press briefings now regularly include handpicked propagandists with no serious journalistic experience. In October, Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, issued a new rule banning credentialed Pentagon reporters from soliciting information from government employees without prior Defense Department authorization. Reporters from almost every American news organization, including Fox News, chose to hand in their badges rather than comply.
Some of Trump’s attacks on the media are merely petty, but others are a real threat to the availability of reliable information about what our government is up to. There has also been a systematic effort to suppress government data about public health, climate change, and the economy. In August, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after her agency released a disappointing jobs report.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked that one is entitled to one’s own opinions but not to one’s own facts. Trump disagrees. As president, he feels entitled not only to his own “facts” but to a docile press corps that will repeat them uncritically. And his critics, if they know what’s good for them, are entitled to keep their mouths shut.
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