Trump’s Campaign to Crush the Media
President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the news media came in the form of another lawsuit last week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had allegedly written a birthday note, complete with “bawdy” doodling, to the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump boiled over with indignation. He denied writing the note and filed a libel suit the next day, demanding $10 billion in damages from the Journal, its parent company, and its principal owner, Rupert Murdoch, a sometime Trump ally.
Although Trump faces considerable legal obstacles to win in court, betting against him would be unwise. In his first six months in office, he has been on a winning streak in his campaign to punish and diminish the press. His dispute with the Journal, after all, hijacked the news cycle from another Trump “victory”: eliminating federal support for public broadcasting. Early Friday morning, Congress voted to cancel $1.1 billion in subsidies for NPR, PBS, and their affiliated stations, marking the first time Congress has cut off public broadcasters since its funding began nearly 60 years ago. Trump had pushed for the defunding, repeatedly asserting that NPR and PBS offered “biased and partisan news coverage.” Republicans in Congress apparently agreed.
“The independent press in the United States is facing what media outlets in too many other countries with aspiring autocrats have confronted,” the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me on Thursday. He compared Trump’s “repressive measures” to those of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán: “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting.
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.
One of Trump’s early targets was the Voice of America and other government-funded international news broadcasters, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. These outlets—unlike commercial media—had a mission to advance American interests and extend U.S. soft power dating back to the early 1940s. But they also served a crucial role in reporting important stories that other outlets did not and reaching an international audience with little access to reliable news. By slashing the administration’s support to the bare minimum and firing employees, he has all but destroyed these broadcasters. The White House says they deserve their fate, because they, too, are rife with bias.
Trump has also given a baleful master class in so-called SLAPP litigation—strategic lawsuits against public participation—to bring independent media corporations to heel. He hasn’t won a single case in court. Instead, the prospect of presidential retaliation has been enough to lever some $67 million in settlement payments out of news and information companies. These began last year, when Disney-ABC paid $15 million in December to Trump’s presidential library, to settle his assertion that anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him by saying he’d been found “liable for rape” (in fact, a jury had found Trump liable for “sexual abuse” of the author E. Jean Carroll). The list of settled suits continued with Meta’s agreement in January to pay $25 million (of which $22 million goes to the Trump library); a February deal with X, to write Trump a $10 million check; and this month’s deal with CBS’s parent, Paramount Global, which agreed to fork over $16 million to the presidential library.
The odor of corporate appeasement is so strong that even seemingly unrelated decisions have taken on suspicious cast. When CBS announced last week that it was axing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, ending the long tenure of the network’s most prominent and popular Trump critic, many questioned the network’s claim that the decision was strictly a financial one. The timing—just days after Paramount settled with Trump—suggested Colbert’s sacking was another bone being thrown to the president.
At the same time, Trump has used his bully pulpit to intimidate reporters and news organizations. After CNN broke the news of a Pentagon assessment raising doubts about the success of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, Trump sought the dismissal of the story’s lead reporter, Natasha Bertrand (who was formerly a staff writer for The Atlantic). The White House press staff attacked the ABC News reporter Terry Moran after he called Trump a “world-class hater” on X. ABC got rid of Moran a few days later; CNN has stood by Bertrand.
Alongside the pressure campaign against the news-media industry’s big players, Trump has reconfigured the presidential press operation in self-serving ways. In one of his first anti-press actions in February, he banned the Associated Press from Oval Office press conferences, White House events, and Air Force One over its refusal to use his preferred terminology. He’s given preference to MAGA-friendly outlets at news conferences and special briefings, and commandeered the press pool that covers him at certain events, ensuring a reliable stream of softball questions.
A key Trump stratagem was his appointment of a loyalist, Brendan Carr, to head the supposedly independent Federal Communications Commission; that appointment put a rabid anti-media activist and co-author of the conservative Project 2025 policy plan in charge of the broadcast industry’s chief regulatory agency. Almost immediately after the chairmanship, Carr 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. The FCC’s lone Democratic appointee, Anna Gomez, told me on Thursday that the agency is “playing a dangerous game” by injecting politics into broadcast regulation, and that she would continue to oppose it.
Finally, the Trump administration has rescinded Biden-era policies that had protected journalists in federal investigations of classified leaks, creating a potential chilling effect on reporting. Previously, the Justice Department had ruled out demanding reporters’ phone and email records in such probes; Trump’s attorney general decided that the tactic should be more available.
Every president has had his beefs with the press, of course. But only rarely has a president lined up his powers to hobble it. In the late 18th century, John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act, which, on the pretext of national security, was intended to suppress criticism of Adams and his administration. In the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson backed another Sedition Act to stifle dissent about the U.S. entry into World War I. Allies of Richard Nixon, at the president’s urging, challenged broadcast licenses held by CBS and the Washington Post Company, in retaliation for their aggressive coverage of his Watergate crimes.
Over time, courts, Congress, and popular opinion doomed such actions as insults to the First Amendment—but that pushback has not occurred, at least so far, in Trump’s second term. In the face of such threats, many of the news media’s corporate barons have mostly responded with timidity, even capitulation. A handful of leaders—the New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger, for one—have mustered some courage, but the bravery of the few has exposed the cowardice of the many. The most emblematic case may be Jeff Bezos, the once-resolute owner of The Washington Post, whose recent efforts to mollify Trump look like a gross sellout.
Other top media executives have pretended that the president’s predatory behavior is just business as usual. At Paramount’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, co-CEO George Cheeks characterized the company’s settlement with Trump over a disputed 60 Minutes interview as a rational response, given that the corporation would have faced “significant financial as well as reputational damage” if it had lost in court. True as a general matter, but few legal experts, including Paramount’s, believed that Trump had any chance of winning. A more honest assessment came from Colbert, who noted on the Late Show: “This kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s ‘big fat bribe.’”
Little suggests that the American public is greatly aroused or agitated by any of this. The indifference to Trump’s march against the media may reflect declining trust in mainstream news organizations, or merely their diminished visibility in an information landscape remade by cable-service cord-cutting, social-media influencers, and TikTok videos. This erosion has also been accompanied by the steady disappearance of professional reporting, creating so-called news deserts in hundreds of counties across America.
The short-term forecast is for more of the same. Trump’s next chance to torpedo a few more “enemies of the people” will come if the parent companies of MSNBC and CNN need to seek government approval to spin off their cable-TV channels. This could provide new choke points for Trump to demand more tribute: Another round of shakedowns looms.
“The sky’s the limit with him right now,” Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor and reporter, told me last week. Trump briefly banished Acosta from the White House during his first term, an instance of presidential retaliation that seemed shocking then, but looks almost quaint now. “Right now,” said Acosta, who left CNN in January and now streams on Substack, “he’s taking on whole news organizations, the information system we’ve had in place since the end of World War II.”
For the moment, as exemplified by the Journal’s Trump-Epstein story, reporters are continuing to report without fear or favor. As far as is known, no news organization has spiked an unflattering story about the Trump White House out of concern for the backlash. Baron is guardedly optimistic. “The everyday tenacity, resourcefulness, and dedication of journalists covering this administration deserve admiration and support,” he said. A free and independent press, he declared, “can survive this administration.”
That assessment places great faith in the journalists working in the trenches of Trump’s war against the news media.
So far, that faith is justified. How long it can be sustained is another matter.
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