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press freedom
Trump's New War on Press Freedoms Has Already Begun
Once again, the far-right Republican president will have all the levers of the state on his side as he continues his crusade against journalism that dares hold him to account.
Nov 16, 2024
“Revenge—it’s a big part of Trump’s life,” Mother Jones‘ David Corn (10/19/16) wrote just before Trump was elected to the presidency the first time:
In speeches and public talks, Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, to explain how he had achieved his success. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that successful people must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”
Knowing this about Trump, Democrats and liberals worry that he will use the Department of Justice, especially if Matt Gaetz is confirmed as attorney general, as an unrestrained vehicle to pursue the prosecution of political enemies.
But given Trump’s constant attacks on media—“the opposition party,” as his ally Steve Bannon called the fourth estate (New York Times, 1/26/17)—journalists fear that he will use the power of the state to intimidate if not destroy the press.
Defunding public broadcasting
Trump called for defunding NPR (Newsweek, 4/10/24) after a long-time editor accused the radio outlet of liberal bias in the conservative journal Free Press (4/9/24). Rep. Claudia Tenney (R–NY) introduced legislation to defund NPR because “taxpayers should not be forced to fund NPR, which has become a partisan propaganda machine” (Office of Claudia Tenney, 4/19/24). With Republicans also holding both houses of congress, bills like Tenney’s become more viable. Trump has previously supported budget proposals that eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Politico, 3/27/19).
The infamous Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda many see as a blueprint for the second Trump term, calls for the end to public broadcasting, because it is viewed as liberal propaganda:
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first president in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.
In other words, all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”
All of which means that the next conservative president must finally get this done, and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,” but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.
PBS and NPR, as FAIR (10/24/24) has noted, has for decades caved in to right-wing pressures—PBS by adding conservative programming, NPR by trying to rid itself of political commentary altogether. But the right will never let go of its ideological opposition to media outlets not directly owned by the corporate class.
‘Whether criminally or civilly’
Trump also has a well known track record of revoking the credentials of journalists who produce reporting he doesn’t like (Washington Post, 2/24/17, 5/8/19; New Republic, 11/5/24). It is realistic to assume that a lot more reporters will be barred from White House events in the years ahead.
While a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury broad authority to revoke nonprofit status to any organization the office deems as a “terrorist” organization has so far failed (Al Jazeera, 11/12/24), it is quite possible that it could come up for a vote again. If this bill were to become law, the Treasury Department could use this ax against a great many progressive nonprofit outlets, like Democracy Now! and the American Prospect, as well as investigative outlets like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The department could even target the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has already said in response to Trump’s victory, “The fundamental right to a free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, must not be impaired” (11/6/24).
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 10/27/24), an avid media observer, said there is no reason to think Trump will soften his campaign against the free press. She said:
In 2022, he sued the Pulitzer Prize board after they defended their awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers had won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
More recently, Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation over the way the anchor characterized the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual misconduct case against him. Each of those cases is wending its way through the courts.
She added:
There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression.
Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump has already gone after the New York Times and Penguin Random House since Sullivan wrote this. CJR (11/14/24) said:
The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.
It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”
And just before his victory, Trump sued CBS News, alleging the network’s “deceitful” editing of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris “misled the public and unfairly disadvantaged him” (CBS News, 10/31/24).
Expect more of this, except this time, Trump will have all the levers of the state on his side. And whatever moves the next Trump administration makes to attack the press will surely have a chilling effect, which will only empower his anti-democratic political agenda.
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Speaking Freely in the Age of Trump
Given what’s heading our way, we need a capacious view and robust defense of the First Amendment from all quarters—as we always have.
Nov 16, 2024
I thought I was done with free speech. For nearly two decades, I reported on it for the international magazine Index on Censorship. I wrote a book, Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, about controversies over it. I even sang “I Like to Be in America” at the top of my lungs at an around-the-clock banned-book event organized by the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression after the musical West Side Story was canceled at a local high school because of its demeaning stereotypes of Puerto Ricans. I was ready to move on. I was done.
As it happened, though, free speech—or, more accurately, attacks on it—wasn’t done with me, or with most Americans, as a matter of fact. On the contrary, efforts to stifle expression of all sorts keep popping up like Whac-A-Mole on steroids. Daily, we hear about another book pulled from a school; another protest closed down on a college campus; another university president bowing to alumni pressure; another journalist suspended over a post on social media; another politically outspoken artistdenied a spot in an exhibition; another young adult novel canceled for cultural insensitivity; another drag-queen story hour attacked at a library; another parent demanding control over how pronouns are used at school; another panic over the dangers lurking in AI; another op-ed fretting that even a passing acquaintance with the wrong word, picture, implication, or idea will puncture the fragile mental health of young people.
The instinct to cover other people’s mouths, eyes, and ears is ancient and persistent and not necessarily restricted to those we disagree with.
The list ranges from the ditzy to the draconian, and it’s very long. Even conduct can get ensnared in censorship battles, as abortion has over what information healthcare providers are allowed to offer or what information crisis pregnancy centers (whose purpose is to dissuade women from seeking abortions) can be required to offer. Looming over it all, we just had an election brimming with repellent utterances financed by gobs of corporate money, which, the Supreme Court ruled in its 2010 Citizens United decision, is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
I suspect that if you live long enough, everything begins to seem like a rerun (as much of this has for me). The actors may change—new groups of concerned moms replace old groups who called themselves concerned mothers; antiracists police academic speech, when once it was anti-porn feminists who did it; AI becomes the new Wild West, overtaking that lawless territory of yore, the World Wide Web—but the script is still the same.
It’s hard not to respond to the outrage du jour, and I’m finding perspective elusive in the aftermath of the latest disastrous election, but I do know this: The urge to censor will continue in old and new forms, regardless of who controls the White House. I don’t mean to be setting up a false equivalence here. The Trump presidency already looks primed to indulge his authoritarian proclivities and unleash mobs of freelance vigilantes, and that should frighten the hell out of all of us. I do mean to point out that the instinct to cover other people’s mouths, eyes, and ears is ancient and persistent and not necessarily restricted to those we disagree with. But now, of all times, given what’s heading our way, we need a capacious view and robust defense of the First Amendment from all quarters—as we always have.
Make No Law
In a succinct 45 words, the First Amendment protects citizens from governmental restrictions on religious practices, speech, the press, and public airings of grievances in that order. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But if a devil is ever in the details, it’s here, and the courts have been trying to sort those out over the last century or more. Working against such protections are the many often insidious ways to stifle expression, disagreement, and protest—in other words, censorship. Long ago, American abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass said, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them.” It was a warning that the ensuing 167 years haven’t proven wrong.
Censorship is used against vulnerable people by those who have the power to do so. The role such power plays became apparent in the last days of the recent election campaign when TheWashington Postand the Los Angeles Times, at the insistence of their owners, declined to endorse anyone for president. Commentary by those who still care what the news media does ranged from a twist of the knife into the Post‘s Orwellian slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to assessments of the purpose or value of endorsements in the first place. These weren’t the only papers not to endorse a presidential candidate, but it’s hard not to read the motivation of their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, as cowardice and self-interest rather than the principles they claimed they were supporting.
Newspapers, print or digital, have always been gatekeepers of who and what gets covered, even as their influence has declined in the age of social media. Usually, political endorsements are crafted by editorial boards but are ultimately the prerogative of publishers. The obvious conflict of interest in each of those cases, however, speaks volumes about the drawback of news media being in the hands of ultra-rich individuals with competing business concerns.
Journalists already expect to be very vulnerable during Donald Trump’s next term as president. After all, he’s called them an “enemy of the people,” encouraged violence against them, and never made a secret of how he resents them, even as he’s also courted them relentlessly. During his administration, he seized the phone records of reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN; called for revoking the broadcast licenses of national news organizations; and vowed to jail journalists who refuse to identify their confidential sources, later tossing editors and publishers into that threatened mix for good measure.
It can be hard to tell if Trump means what he says or can even say what he means, but you can bet that, with an enemies list that makes President Richard Nixon look like a piker, he intends to try to hobble the press in multiple ways. There are limits to what any president can do in that realm, but while challenges to the First Amendment usually end up in the courts, in the time the cases take to be resolved, Trump can make the lives of journalists and publishers miserable indeed.
Tinker, Tailor, Journalist, Spy
Among the threats keeping free press advocates up at night is abuse of the Espionage Act. That law dates from 1917 during World War I, when it was used to prosecute anti-draft and anti-war activists and is now used to prosecute government employees for revealing confidential information.
Before Trump himself was charged under the Espionage Act for illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office, his Justice Department used it to prosecute six people for disclosing classified information. That included Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on conspiracy charges—the first time the Espionage Act had ever been used against someone for simply publishing such information. The case continued under President Joe Biden until Assange’s plea deal this past summer, when he admitted guilt in conspiring to obtain and disclose confidential U.S. documents, thereby setting an unnerving precedent for our media future.
In his first term, Trump’s was a particularly leaky White House, but fewer leakers (or whistleblowers, depending on your perspective) were indicted under the Espionage Act then than during Barack Obama’s administration, which still holds the record with eight prosecutions, more than all previous presidencies combined. That set the tone for intolerance of leaks, while ensnaring journalists trying to protect their sources. In a notably durable case—it went on from 2008 to 2015—James Risen, then a New York Times reporter, fought the government’s insistence that he testify about a confidential source he used for a book about the CIA. Although Obama’s Justice Department ultimately withdrew its subpoena, Risen’s protracted legal battle clearly had a chilling effect (as it was undoubtedly meant to).
Governments of all political dispositions keep secrets and seldom look kindly on anyone who spills them. It is, however, the job of journalists to inform the public about what the government is doing and that, almost by definition, can involve delving into secrets. Journalists as a breed are not easily scared into silence, and no American journalist has been found guilty under the Espionage Act so far, but that law still remains a powerful tool of suppression, open to abuse by any president. It has historically made self-censorship on the part of reporters, editors, and publishers an appealing accommodation.
Testing the Limits
Years ago, the legal theorist Thomas Emerson pointed to how consistently expression has indeed been restricted during dark times in American history. He could, in fact, have been writing about the response to protests over the war in Gaza on American campuses, where restrictions came, not from a government hostile to unfettered inquiry, but from institutions whose purpose is supposedly to foster and promote it.
After a fractious spring, colleges and universities around the country were determined to restore order. Going into the fall semester, they changed rules, strengthened punishments, and increased the ways they monitored expressive activities. To be fair, many of them also declared their intention to maintain a climate of open discussion and learning. Left unsaid was their need to mollify their funders, including the federal government.
In a message sent to college and university presidents last April, the ACLU recognized the tough spot administrators were in and acknowledged the need for some restrictions, but also warned that “campus leaders must resist the pressures placed on them by politicians seeking to exploit campus tensions to advance their own notoriety or partisan agendas.”
The marginal might be—today or sometime in the future—what we ourselves want to say, support, or advocate.
As if in direct rebuttal, on Halloween, the newly philosemitic House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued its report on campus antisemitism. Harvard (whose previous president Claudine Gay had been forced out, in part, because of her testimony to the committee) played a large role in that report’s claims of rampant on-campus antisemitism and civil rights abuses. It charged that the school’s administration had fumbled its public statements, that its faculty had intervened “to prevent meaningful discipline,” and that Gay had “launched into a personal attack” on Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican committee member and Harvard graduate, at a Board of Overseers meeting. The report included emails and texts revealing school administrators tying themselves in knots over language that tried to appease everyone and ended up pleasing no one. The overarching tone of the report, though, was outrage that Gay and other university presidents didn’t show proper obeisance to the committee or rain sufficient punishment on their students’ heads.
Harvard continues to struggle. In September, a group of students staged a “study-in” at Widener, the school’s main library. Wearing keffiyehs, they worked silently at laptops bearing messages like “Israel bombs, Harvard pays.” The administration responded by barring a dozen protesters from that library (but not from accessing library materials) for two weeks, whereupon 30 professors staged their own “study-in” to protest the punishment and were similarly barred from the library.
The administration backed up its actions by pointing to an official statement from last January clarifying that protests are impermissible in several settings, including libraries, and maintained that the students had been forewarned. Moreover, civil disobedience comes with consequences. No doubt the protesters were testing the administration and, had they gotten no response, probably would have tried another provocation. As Harry Lewis, a former Harvard dean and current professor, told The Boston Globe, “Students will always outsmart you on regulating these things unless they buy into the principles.” Still, administrators had considerable leeway in deciding how to respond and they chose the punitive option.
Getting a buy-in sounds like what Wesleyan University President Michael Roth aimed for in a manifesto of sorts that he wrote last May, as students erected a protest encampment on his campus. Laying out his thinking on the importance of tolerating or even encouraging peaceful student protests over the war in Gaza, he wrote, “Neutrality is complicity,” adding, “I don’t get to choose the protesters’ messages. I do want to pay attention to them… How can I not respect students for paying attention to things that matter so much?” It was heartening to read.
Alas, the tolerance didn’t hold. In this political moment, it probably couldn’t. In September, Roth called in city police when students staged a sit-in at the university’s investment office just before a vote by its board of trustees on divesting from companies that support the Israeli military. Five students were placed on disciplinary probation for a year and, after a pro-divestment rally the next day, eight students received disciplinary charge letters for breaking a slew of rules.
Why Fight It
The right to free expression is the one that other democratic rights we hold dear rely on. Respecting it allows us to find better resolutions to societal tensions and interpersonal dissonance than outlawing words. But the First Amendment comes with inherent contradictions so, bless its confusing little heart, it manages to piss off nearly everyone sooner or later. Self-protection is innate, tolerance an acquired taste.
One of the stumbling blocks is that the First Amendment defends speech we find odious along with speech we like, ideas that frighten us along with ideas we embrace, jack-booted marches along with pink-hatted ones. After all, popular speech doesn’t need protection. It’s the marginal stuff that does. But the marginal might be—today or sometime in the future—what we ourselves want to say, support, or advocate.
And so, I return to those long-ago banned book readings, which culminated with everyone reciting the First Amendment together, a tradition I continued with my journalism students whenever I taught about press freedoms. Speaking words out loud is different from reading them silently. You hear and know them, sometimes for what seems like the first time. Maybe that’s why our communal celebration of the First Amendment seemed to amuse, embarrass, and impress the students in unequal measure. I think they got it, though.
I recognize that this kind of exhortation is many planks short of a strategy, but it’s a place to start, especially in the age of Donald Trump, because, in the end, the best reason to embrace and protect the First Amendment is that we will miss it when it’s gone.
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'Potentially Ominous Trend' for Press Freedom as Trump Wages Legal War on News Outlets
"Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries," said one journalist.
Nov 15, 2024
"The press freedom fire is at our door step now," said one Washington Post journalist on Thursday night after news broke that two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office, he has already begun to wage legal warfare against on the news media.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)reported that days before the election, a lawyer for Trump, Edward Andrew Paltzik, sent a letter to The New York Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages for publishing articles and a book that were critical of the president-elect, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year.
Trump's legal team took issue with a book by Times journalists Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. They also said they were demanding damages over "false and defamatory statements" in the October 20 article "For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment" by Peter Baker and the October 22 piece "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator" by Michael Schmidt.
The former article covered numerous wrongdoings by the president-elect and accusations against him, pointing out that he "is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges, and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact)," and that he has also boasted about sexually assaulting women and spearheaded numerous businesses that went bankrupt.
The latter article detailed comments by Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, who told the Times that the definition of fascism accurately describes Trump.
The president-elect himself said while campaigning that he planned to govern as a dictator only on "Day One" of his term in office.
"Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."
Paltzik told the newspaper that the articles demonstrate the Times' "intention of defaming and disparaging the world-renowned Trump brand that consumers have long associated with excellence, luxury, and success in entertainment, hospitality, and real estate, among many other industries, as well as falsely and maliciously defaming and disparaging him as a candidate for the highest office in the United States."
The CJR reported that the Times responded to Paltzik's letter, telling him the newspaper stood by its reporting on Trump.
As Barry Malone, deputy editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said on social media on Friday, Trump's legal threats may be designed not to actually win billions of dollars in damages but "to tie the media up with time-consuming and often prohibitively expensive cases."
The Times and Penguin Random House threats were reported two weeks after Trump suedCBS News for another $10 billion, claiming an interview with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the November 5 election, was unfairly edited to present her in a positive light and qualified as "election interference."
CBS said it would "vigorously defend" its journalistic practices and called the lawsuit "completely without merit"—a similar response to the one by The Washington Post, which was accused by Trump on the same day of making an illegal in-kind donation to Harris.
Anne Champion, an attorney who has represented several journalists and CNN in legal cases initiated by Trump, told the CJR that the legal threats will likely have "a mental chilling effect" on reporters and news outlets in the United States as Trump prepares to take office.
"It is both conscious and unconscious," said Champion. "Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don't want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process."
Trump has a longstanding disdain for the media, saying numerous times during his first term that journalists were the "enemy of the people." During one campaign rally just before the election he said he wouldn't "mind" if reporters at the event were shot, and he called the media the "enemy camp" during his victory speech last week.
During his first term he also threatened to "take a strong look at our country's libel laws"—which are actually controlled by states, not the federal government—and ensure that "when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts."
The American Civil Liberties Union pointed out at the time that the First Amendment and the lack of federal libel laws would stand in Trump's way, but on Thursday Lachlan Cartwright wrote at CJR that "the drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump's second term in office."
As Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah noted on the social media platform Bluesky, "governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."
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