Walt Disney Television (CC BY-ND 2.0)
ABC News's George Stephanopoulos behind the anchor desk, February 2016.
There is good reason to be concerned. President Donald Trump has laid bare his enmity toward the press, which he has repeatedly branded the “enemy of the people” and sought to delegitimize at every opportunity. He has filed spurious lawsuits against news organizations, endangered reporters whose job it is to cover him at public events, and threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of major networks.
And now that the U.S. Supreme Court has bestowed upon him immunity for whatever abuses he may wish to commit, it is highly likely that Trump and his henchpeople will weaponize the Justice Department into a cudgel with which to bash the media. Move over, Meet the Press, it’s time for Beat the Press.
“Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE?” Trump raged in a typically hysterical Truth Social post in 2023. He urged that the left-leaning network MSNBC, in particular, be investigated for its “Country Threatening Treason.”
Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to install as the director of the FBI, has declared his intention to turn the power of the state against Trump’s perceived enemies, explicitly including journalists. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel vowed in a 2023 podcast hosted by Trump adviser Steve Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
In a book published in 2022, Patel drew up a list of sixty targets of retribution, from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. While no journalists made the cut, Bannon has given his assurance that they will be included.
“I think there will be a massive investigation,” Bannon told The Bulwark in an interview just before Christmas, referring to delusional claims that the FBI was somehow behind the attack on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021. Bannon alleged a “vast criminal conspiracy” on the part of the media and former federal officials who appear on networks including MSNBC. “I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do.”
Or, as Bannon said at the New York Young Republican Club Gala in mid-December, the media “need to learn what populist national power is, on the receiving end. I mean investigations, trials, and their incarceration.”
Besides seeking to lock up reporters, Team Trump has other tools of repression to use against the Fourth Estate, such as habitual threats of legal action.
Trump has a pending libel lawsuit against the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes for issuing a statement defending its decision to bestow this top honor on The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Nothing in the papers’ coverage or the Pulitzer board’s statement was incorrect.) He’s also suing The Des Moines Register for running a poll of Iowa voters shortly before the 2024 election that showed him trailing then Vice President Kamala Harris, calling it “brazen election interference.” (This makes absolutely no sense, since skewing this poll result, which no one did, would serve mainly to energize Trump supporters to turn out, which is what happened.)
“It’s clear that Trump is waging war on the press,” Samantha Barbas, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, told The New York Times. “Trump and his lawyers are going to use any legal claim that they think has a chance of sticking. They’ll cast a wide net to carry out this vendetta.”
While lawsuits like these almost never succeed in court, they are costly to defend against and thus constitute a kind of tax on the practice of journalism. (Trump’s costs are less onerous, not just because he’s rich but also because he often finds ways to make his followers pay his legal bills.)
In October, Trump sued CBS News, claiming it engaged in “deceptive manipulation of news” in the way it edited a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. The suit seeks $10 billion in damages. It’s a ridiculous lawsuit that stands no chance of success but could end up costing the network millions of dollars in legal fees and perhaps make it more wary of causing Trump further offense.
Such corrupt motivations appear to have prevailed in a defamation suit brought by Trump against ABC News last March, when one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos, said Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, to whom two juries awarded $88 million in damages. This statement was only slightly incorrect—Trump was found liable for sexual abuse under New York State law, but the judge noted that it was for conduct that met the commonly understood definition of rape.
This case clearly does not meet the high standard for defamation of a public official set by the Supreme Court in its 1964 ruling in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, because there was no evidence that Stephanopoulos made his statement with “actual malice,” knowing it to be false. But in December, ABC News threw in the towel, agreeing to apologize and give $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.
It was a cowardly capitulation for which the network has been rightly criticized. But in terms of preserving press freedom, it actually may have been a strategically prudent thing to do, which is frightening in and of itself. Besides avoiding a pricey and protracted legal fight, ABC’s surrender denied the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority the chance to revisit and revoke the standard set in Sullivan, as conservatives have been itching to do.
But libel law is not the only weapon Trump may have at his disposal in his second term. There’s also a very real possibility that the Republican-controlled Congress will empower him to shut down a huge array of journalistic outlets—those, like The Progressive, that operate as nonprofits.
On November 21, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, in a vote of 219-184, that would allow federal authorities to revoke the tax exemption for nonprofit groups, including news organizations, that some government bureaucrat thinks has contributed to terrorism, even accidentally.
The bill, H.R. 9495, titled the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” did not receive a vote in the previous Senate, then under Democratic control. But it’s sure to return in the new 119th Congress. It would give the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, a Trump appointee, unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any group deemed a “terrorist supporting organization.” Officials will not have to provide evidence or even explain why this designation has been made, and the proposed legislation provides no meaningful avenue of appeal.
The bill has drawn concerted opposition from multiple quarters. Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said its passage “would hand the incoming Trump Administration a dangerous new tool it could use to stifle free speech, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups.” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a letter cosigned by the Associated Press, the Center for Investigative Reporting (Reveal), Mother Jones, and ProPublica, said the bill would let the executive branch “target perceived critics,” something administrations of both parties have long sought. The letter questioned the bill’s necessity, noting that “material support for terrorist organizations is already and unambiguously a crime.”
A majority of House members voted for the bill anyway, with fifteen Democrats and all but one Republican in favor.
All of these developments present real dangers, if not existential threats, to press freedom in the United States. Making matters worse is the fact that trust in the media is now at an all-time low, even as the importance of the function it performs is at an all-time high. And that’s because people in power have been so tremendously successful at denigrating the journalistic profession, and truth-telling in general.
There are, of course, legitimate grounds on which the press can and should be criticized. Members of the media have biases and blind spots; they sometimes get things wrong. But aside from some ideologically driven media outlets, most people in the news business care a whole lot more and do a much better job than politicians when it comes to getting things right. That’s precisely why criminally inclined compulsive liars like Trump fear and loathe them.
Now is the time to rally support behind the journalistic profession. All Americans, and certainly all progressives, should do what they can to defend and protect the role of the press—by writing letters to the editors, subscribing to newspapers and magazines, opposing bills like H.R. 9495, and being that dissident voice in the room when others unfairly put down the profession.
Our democracy may depend on it.