When Donald Trump won the White House for a second time last November, we all knew that he was going to launch a full-scale assault on American journalism. It wasn’t exactly a secret: he gleefully promised it, and his fans thrilled to the idea. “Trump Signals Plans to Use All Levers of Power Against The Media,” read a headline in The Washington Post in late December, before that paper became a victim of that very campaign, and its owner a quisling collaborator in it.
Six months into that second administration, we are seeing that attack fully underway.
This insidious campaign consists both of straightforward frontal assaults employing the power of the presidency, and more oblique ones, which is to say, legal action and the threat thereof, relying on that same power. “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting, says Marty Baron, former editor of The Washington Post, who compared Trump’s approach to Viktor Orbán’s. Worse, Trump’s efforts have been aided by a jawdropping degree of what the historian and author Tim Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” by some of the biggest newspapers, broadcast TV networks, and media companies in the country—apropos of the WaPo—a craven preemptive surrender to Donald before he even attacks, often because those entities are owned by billionaires or giant corporations wishing to curry favor with our Dear Leader. It’s disgusting—and dangerous.
In the eight plus years of this blog’s existence, I’ve written a lot about media. That stands to reason, as it’s what I’m trained in, and the professional sea in which I swim. In particular, I have written at length about the flaws of the Fourth Estate in the contemporary United States and what I (and others) think it could do better. All that remains top of mind, as re-taking control of the narrative is a paramount task for any kind of pro-democracy movement. (My friend Tom Hall, the polymath culture critic who writes The Back Row Manifesto, has been beating the drum on this very point since at least November 2020.)
But that’s not what we’re talking about right now. What we’re talking about is the de facto destruction of a functioning free press full stop.
KILL ONE, FRIGHTEN ONE THOUSAND
Dan Rather, once one of the shining stars of CBS News, including a stint as anchorman of its flagship Evening News, writes in his Substack newsletter Steady: “Trump has declared war on the mainstream media, using systematic intimidation, meritless yet potentially ruinous lawsuits, plus a spineless Congress and sycophantic Supreme Court—all looking to give the president anything he wants.”
Let’s start with the blunt part of the assault. (Imagine I have a big map and a laser pointer.)
“Trump has repeatedly talked about pulling the federal licenses from television stations that broadcast news about him he doesn’t like, and said last year that he plans to bring the FCC under presidential authority,” reported The Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr before the inauguration. Promise kept: he put a toady (and co-author of Project 2025), Brendan Carr, in charge of the FCC, whom The Atlantic reports “has reinstated complaints against NBC, ABC, and CBS that his predecessor had dismissed on First Amendment grounds (though he let stand the dismissal of a petition against Fox News’s parent company).” Carr has also launched investigations of NPR and PBS.
Trump shut down the Voice of America, which for decades had been a priceless beacon of soft power, broadcasting to every corner of the world. Most recently his GOP allies in Congress gutted public broadcasting by yanking $1.1 billion in federal funding. PBS and NPR will survive, but will be diminished, most of all in the red parts of the country that can use them the most.
Trump has even gone after individual journalists. He tried to get CNN to fire Natahsa Bertrand, the reporter who questioned the success of his attack on Iran, and pressured ABC to fire Terry Moran for tweeting that Trump is a “world-class hater.” (ABC complied, CNN did not.) And he has ended Biden-era policies that protected journalists in federal investigations of classified leaks, I suppose because Pete Hegseth doesn’t like any competition as this administration’s Master Leaker.
But most of the assault has been via the courts, in keeping with Trump’s lifelong litigious nature. His whole adult life Donald has sought to extract tribute, concessions, and outright submission with his trademark frivolous lawsuits….but until now, those suits have not had the threat of the full force of the US presidency behind them. Observe the difference. Trump has subjected the big legacy media companies to what Rather calls a “presidential shakedown, in the form of toothless lawsuits with comically large pricetags, none of which ever saw the inside of a courtroom.” In these, Trump has “triumphed not because the suits had merit but because he applied political pressure to force his opponents to settle.” Ellison and Barr:
The week before Election Day, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times, his campaign lodged a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post, and he sued CBS News for editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a way he said was deceptive.
(In late December 2024), he filed a consumer fraud suit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over an outlier poll it ran showing Trump trailing Harris in the presidential race in Iowa, a conservative state that he went on to win by 13 percentage points. The complaint does not hinge on a defamation claim—public figures must cross a high legal threshold to prove that they’ve been libeled—but rather a perceived violation of the state’s consumer protection statute.
Trump said he planned to continue suing the press. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” he said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
And it’s working. Rather notes that in the past few months, “ABC, Meta, and X have all settled suits with Trump to the tune of more than $50 million collectively.”
Reacting to this climate, numerous major media outlets have decided to surrender before any shots are even fired. (Or in other cases, saw their owners emboldened to foist their own right-leaning policies on the entities they own.) The Washington Post, the newspaper that brought down the Nixon administration, is now openly devoted to “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” in the words of its own billionaire owner, spaceship penis captain and Venetian wedding enthusiast Jeff Bezos. The Los Angeles Times is now owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who flexed his muscles in the presidential campaign by vetoing his paper’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris. (The whole editorial board resigned.) Last fall, even reliably progressive MSNBC—which is frequently (and unfairly) accused of being the left wing Fox—shelved Errol Morris’s high profile feature documentary Separated, about the family separation policy during the first Trump administration, based on the book of the same name by Jacob Soboroff. It also fired a whole slew of on-air personalities, most of them women or people of color, including stars like Joy Reid, Katie Phang, and Jose Diaz-Balart, and foisted pay cuts on others along with a general shakeup of its programming.
In The Atlantic, Paul Farhi writes:
Ever since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has fulminated against “the fake news.” But only in his second term has Trump gone beyond such rhetoric to wage a multifront war on media freedom with all of the tools at his disposal: executive actions, lawsuits, a loyal regulatory bureaucracy, a compliant Republican majority in Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Each of his actions has been extraordinary in its own right; collectively, they represent a slow-motion demolition of the Fourth Estate.
The principal question isn’t just whether anyone can stop Trump, but whether anyone in power really wants to.
Or as Sun Tzu told us 2500 years ago, the best victory is when your foe is persuaded is not to even fight.
SUING ME, SUING YOU (AH-HA)
Seeing how well the strategy is working, Trump’s weaponization of lawsuits has ramped up of late.
He sued CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, for $10 billion over a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris that he didn’t like. Paramount settled for $16 million, but by capitulating at all instead of standing on principle behind its reporting, the company has bent the knee, which of course is Donald’s real objective. Paramount’s hope was to appease Trump in order to gain approval for its purchase by Skydance, a glorified vanity company owned by the callow son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The kid, David Ellison, has promised to turn CBS’s once-storied news division into a clone of Fox, including—I shit you not—rumors that right wing provocateur and bad-for-the-Jews poster girl Bari Weiss will be put in charge, or at least be given a high-ranking and powerful position. Trump has also claimed that Skydance will give him $20 million in “advertising, PSAs or similar programming” in exchange for letting the merger go through.
So CBS News will now be just another right wing propaganda outlet controlled by an oligarch. Murrow and Cronkite and Sevareid are rolling over in their graves.
“This kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles,” quipped Stephen Colbert. “It’s a ‘big fat bribe.’” Soon after, Colbert was fired and his show—whose legacy goes back thirty years, to David Letterman—was cancelled, with no plans for a replacement. As Rather writes: “Donald Trump is making an all-out effort to silence dissent and truth-telling by quashing the American press. That directive now extends to late-night comedians who dare to make fun of him.” Foolishly, Paramount is keeping Colbert on the air until next May, when his contract is up. He immediately responded with a parody of the Coldplay concert brouhaha, which featured all his fellow late night hosts, plus Weird Al and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Dear CBS: When you fire somebody, you gotta escort them out of the building immediately, carrying all their possessions in a cardboard box. Otherwise, they’ll spend 10 months doing stuff like that to you. (Indeed, I predict Dave Ellison will pay off Colbert’s deal and remove him from the air before Christmas.)
And then there’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of “South Park,” who just signed a $1.5 billion dollar streaming deal with Paramount Plus, which also commissioned them to make fifty more episodes of their long-running, satirical animated series. Almost immediately the two let loose a scabrous takedown of that very company, and of Trump, giving him the same Satan-cuddling treatment they once gave Saddam Hussein, and for good measure adding a hyper-realistic AI fake PSA showing a grossly fat Trump with a tiny, talking penis. Even though I’m a lifelong comedy nerd, I have long been skeptical of the political power of satire (see: Peter Cook). But in this case it likely has more impact, simply because Donald is so thin-skinned, impulsive, and unable to resist clapping back, which just makes him look even more foolish.
Will Paramount shut “South Park” down, which Parker and Stone are all but daring them to do? Or do the two make too much money for the company? It will be interesting to see how Ellison negotiates that rock and a hard place.
But CBS is far from alone in its supplication.
ABC—facing no such extenuating pressures surrounding a potential merger—nonetheless caved to a similar lawsuit last winter over George Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape,” per his civil conviction in the E. Jean Carroll case. (Trump was found “liable for sexual abuse,” which a US district judge made clear was tantamount to rape as the term is generally understood, in response to a filing by Trump’s lawyers.) Yet like CBS, ABC settled anyway, agreeing to pay Donald $15 million, of which the network forced George to pony up a million personally, and even agreed to attachan online note saying that “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump.” Because to Trump and his allies, inflicting humiliation is just as important—or more so—than money. The objective, per above, is to terrorize others and foment obedience.
Ellison and Barr again:
According to three people familiar with the company’s internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss legal strategy, ABC and Disney executives decided to settle not only because of the legal risks in the case but also because of Trump’s promises to take retribution against his enemies.
The settlement delighted Trump allies and supporters, who saw it as a momentum-building victory and validation of Trump’s pugilistic approach to his second term.
You can’t spell cowardice without AB and C (or at least not without A and C).
APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE (DE MERDE)
Ellison and Barr (and Farhi as well) make the obligatory notation that all presidents clash with the press, but dutifully report that “legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.”
We are seeing it in action now. Indeed, what we are approaching is in the United States is much like how media works in Russia.
One of the distinguishing features of modern autocracies is the illusion of a free press. Instead of kicking down doors, arresting reporters, and shuttering news outlets, the modern autocracy simply marginalizes the lüugenpresse to the point of uselessness, the better to appear “democratic” and fend off accusations of censorship. Putinist Russia is the textbook example (though the Kremlin is not above simply murdering journalists as well), and the aforementioned Mr. Obran is pretty good at it too. In such a system, a few independent media outlets are allowed to operate, albeit under tremendous pressure, to give the impression of liberalism, while in fact the state severely restricts and controls the news. The mainstream American media is currently undergoing a transformation into precisely that kind of system.
It is no surprise that an autocracy seeks to control the narrative that defines public intercourse: that is why pro-democracy forces must not let that happen. To that end, the autocrat prefers to suppress (if not totally destroy) legitimate journalism and replace it with a steady stream of its own BS. As Garry Kasparov wrote way back in 2016, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” The Kremlin has proven to be expert at sowing doubt and confusion that exhausts one’s capacity for rational thought, at clouding reality with a fog of disinformation, and at generating cynicism that causes the average citizen to simply give up. Or, in the earthier terms of Steve Bannon, at “flooding the zone with shit.”
And it’s working. An AP/NORC-University of Chicago poll recently showed that a large majority of American feel the need to limit their news consumption due to fatigue and information overload.
I get it. I feel it too. For eight years, I had my television tuned to MSNBC nearly every waking minute. But after November 8, I couldn’t face it, and have hardly watched a frame since. I know many many people who have done the same thing. That’s probably good for our mental health, and I feel no less informed in just getting my news from the print media. But that stat also reflects the success of the Bannonist strategy. A citizenry that feels so overwhelmed that it just tunes out is a citizenry ripe for abuse by its despotic rulers.
Naturally, a political movement that insists that reality is whatever its maximum leader says it is will be hostile to a free press that stands irritatingly in the way of the autocratic endeavor. If the facts cannot be readily dismissed, the best and easiest solution is to attack the credibility of the messenger who announces them. Not for nothing do despots, Trump very much included, demonize journalists as “the enemy of the people.”
Ellison and Carr report that in the two months before the 2024 presidential election, “Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks.” The Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (formerly the public editor of The New York Times) writes of her shock at being at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and seeing tT-shirts for sale emblazoned with the image of a noose and the words: Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required. But such frothing hatred, both for individual reporters and journalism at large, became the right-wing norm in the Trump era.
Trump has taken that demonization to a neo-Stalinist extreme, but it is not a new tool in the Republican kit. During the previous administration, the American right waged a relentless war on the facts in its campaign to destroy Barack Obama at any cost, and by extension to undermine criticism of conservatism’s own agenda: on tax policy, on the climate emergency, on foreign adventurism, and more. It succeeded all too well. By 2016, a large chunk of the American electorate was accustomed to dismissing any inconvenient truths that did not jibe with its pre–existing worldview. Confirmation bias became the guiding principle of news consumption.
While that instinct cut across ideology, it found especially fertile ground on the right, where contempt for the media, resentment toward “elites,” and susceptibility to conspiracy theory are traditionally highest. And the more august the journalistic source—The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN—the more urgent the need to discredit it. (The same impulse also applies to individuals, from Robert Mueller to Anthony Fauci to Jack Smith.) The fragmentation of journalism driven by the Internet and other new technology, and the concomitant capacity to spread stories virally regardless of whether they are true or not, has contributed mightily to this phenomenon.
That phenomenon is often characterized as “siloing,” but Masha Gessen notes that the analogy is unfair and misleading, implying the existence of competing media ecosystems equally circumscribed by partisan ideology. But consumers of The New York Times and Washington Post (at least in its pre-Bezos era) are regularly exposed to opinions from columnists and op-ed contributors representing a wide range of ideological belief, many at odds with their own. Consumers of Breitbart and Fox News are not, and instead daily bathe in comforting propaganda that reinforces their existing biases.
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE
One of the strongest journalistic weapons in the pro-democracy fight is the local press. But working against it is the growing consolidation of major media outlets by a handful of giant conglomerates and hedge funds, for whom maximization of readers and viewers (which is to say, dollars) is the prime directive. That militates against reportage that alienates anyone, or speaks truth to power, as the much-abused saying goes. There is also the minor matter of those interests sharing the ethos of the right wing in many cases, and benefiting from its policies. Yes, Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal, of all news organizations, has taken the lead in exposing Trump’s complicity in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes (Trump is suing them for $10 billion), but his broadcast network continues to function as the White House’s propaganda arm. The archconservative Sinclair Media Group is the largest owner of TV stations in the US, with 173 to its name, most famous for forcing its stations to air “must-run” verbatim 10ten-minute political commentary segments promoting the messages Trump wanted heard.
“Local news is the oxygen of democracy, the most trusted source for the most essential information,” says Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, “and we’ve long known why dying newsrooms damage communities.” And yet the disturbing pattern of local newspapers shuttering has become routine. Since 2005 roughly 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed, leaving fewer than 6,500 nationwide, a drop of almost 40 percent. Two more disappear every week, and most communities that suffer that fate will not get a digital replacement, let alone a print one. Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University and a leading expert on this worrying phenomenon, has mapped “dead zones”—some 200 American counties with no local paper, and another 1,600 with only one outlet. She also found a third of US newspapers that existed roughly two decades ago will be out of business by 2025.
The challenge is even greater in the non-urban parts of the country that are right-wing strongholds, with the remotest, poorest, least-wired areas hit the hardest. “Invariably,” Abernathy states in a report for Northwestern University’s Medill School for of Jjournalism, “the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations.” Among the consequences: a decline in voting, a rise in graft and corruption, and fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation. According to Margaret Sullivan, the report asserts that “Seventy million Americans now live in areas without enough local news to sustain grass-roots democracy.” Facebook groups, rife with rumors and lies, are a shitty replacement.
But it’s even worse than that, since as Gibbs writes, “(t)he very places where local news is disappearing are often the same places that wield disproportionate political power.” Gibbs notes that “(a)bout half of South Dakota’s 66 counties have only a single weekly newspaper. Seven counties have no newspaper at all.” In other words, “The citizens whose votes count the most might have the hardest time learning about the issues and candidates running in their communities—because there’s no longer anyone reporting on them.” That suits the right wing just fine.
STOP THE PRESSES
At the very dawn of the first Trump administration, Masha Gessen predicted the fate of the press under the new regime, suggesting that journalists would have to decide whether to “fall in line or forfeit access.” Her predictions largely proved correct, and in fact have begun to look overly optimistic in the second administration. The AP was thrown out of the White House press pool for refusing to use the idiotic term “Gulf of America.” The Huffington Post and Reuters and even the WSJ have suffered similar banishment for various sins. Meanwhile, “reporters” from fringe right wing outfits like Gateway Pundit, Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, and even Lindell TV (owned by My Pillow’s Mike Lindell) have been welcomed in. The attacks on CBS, ABC, and others—and their willingness to concede—is just another aspect of that same dynamic.
Anyone still looking to the MSM for stalwart journalism in the face of an authoritarian takeover is beyond naïve. (Every time I listen to NPR and hear its relentless normalization of Trump, and then think of how he still demonizes and wants to destroy it, my mind reels.) But the authoritarian eagerness to destroy the MSM is deeply destructive nonetheless. As Putin and Orban have shown, it’s no problem to keep the likes of The Atlantic and The New Yorker and The New Republic, with their relatively minuscule readerships among the chattering classes, while the vast majority of American get their news from Fox and CNN and the once-Big Three networks, which are fully under the government thumb.
Likewise, let’s not pretend there was a time when all American media companies were bastions of truth, justice, and progressivism. No such generalization or rosy-hued nostalgia is remotely correct. But there was a time when the free press operated without such wanton, neo-fascist pressure from the White House.
We are only six months into the second Trump regime. At this pace, will there be anything left of “mainstream” American journalism three and a half years from now?
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Photo: Control room at RT—Russia Today—Moscow’s English language television network broadcasting state-sponsored propaganda to the outside world.
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