Bank Phrom/Unsplash
By now, we’ve all seen ample evidence of President Donald Trump’s raging antipathy toward the media.
He’s branded the press “fake news,” “the enemy of the people,” and “dangerous and sick.” He’s called women reporters who ask questions he doesn’t like “stupid and nasty,” a “terrible person,” “ugly, both inside and out,” “piggy,” and, perhaps most tellingly, “insubordinate.” He’s endangered reporters at events by singling them out for derision, filed baseless defamation lawsuits against media outlets, and slashed federal funds for public broadcasting.
In recent months, the Trump Administration has imposed new restrictions on reporters covering the White House and the Pentagon; raided the home of a Washington Post reporter; and even arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a protest in a church.
These are dreadful developments that endanger the First Amendment rights of all Americans, not just members of the press. But they are not unprecedented.
John Adams, the nation’s second President, signed the Sedition Act and used it to prosecute journalists who criticized his administration. Abraham Lincoln’s administration shut down more than 300 newspapers, in some cases even having editors arrested. Teddy Roosevelt banished reporters who criticized him from the White House. John F. Kennedy directed the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Communications Commission to target conservative broadcasters. Richard Nixon referred to the press as “the enemy” and used his Justice Department to go after journalists he didn’t like. Barack Obama used the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and secretly seized reporters’ phone records and emails.
None of these presidential attacks have succeeded in undoing the First Amendment’s protections of press freedoms, which have significantly expanded over time. That doesn’t make the attacks harmless or even less alarming. But, in the long run, they may not be as destructive as what the press is currently doing to itself.
Lemon, formerly of CNN and now an independent journalist with a strong social media presence, and Fort, a prominent independent journalist in the Twin Cities, were arrested along with participants in a January 18 protest at a St. Paul, Minnesota, church, which was targeted for disruption because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, is also a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the arrests were made, at her direction, over what she called a “coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
Lemon and Fort have plausibly contended they were just covering what was going on, as journalists do. But, of course, Trump’s Justice Department tried to make their conduct seem as sinister as possible—just as it does when people are murdered in cold blood by heavily armed and masked federal agents.
The two journalists, the indictment alleged, “largely surrounded” a (different) pastor and proceeded to “pepper him with questions” in what was described as an “attempt to oppress and intimidate him.” They were charged with conspiracy to deprive the congregants of their right to worship.
These charges are, on their face, ridiculous. A federal magistrate judge and a federal appeals court both refused to sign an arrest warrant sought by Trump’s Justice Department against Lemon and others, citing an absence of evidence. Trump’s legal goon squad had to turn to a grand jury to green light these charges, which have zero chance of sticking.
But that doesn’t mean filing these charges will not achieve its intended purpose—sending a chilling message to other journalists and journalistic organizations about the danger they face for doing their job.
For Trump, the spectacle is the point. That’s why, rather than let Lemon turn himself in, as he had offered to do, Trump’s Justice Department sent a dozen federal agents to scoop him up while he was in Los Angeles to cover the Grammys. Lemon was placed in a holding cell for more than twelve hours, during which he was not allowed to contact his lawyers or anyone else.
Everything about this situation is awful. Arresting journalists on Trumped-up charges and forcing them to spend enormous amounts of time and money defending themselves represents a serious threat to the journalistic profession.
Equally objectionable is that the FBI, in mid-January, raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, seizing her phone, two laptops (one for work and one for personal use), and smartwatch. The feds say they were gathering evidence to use against a contractor charged with illegally retaining national defense materials, but the devices also contained information about Natanson’s other confidential sources.
Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, dubbed the search “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.” It is also a point-blank violation of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which in most instances bars the government from seizing the unpublished work of journalists or news outlets.
And then there’s the case of journalist and author Seth Harp. In January, the House Oversight Committee approved a subpoena against him for posting a publicly available bio of a high-ranking U.S. military colonel who played a role in the U.S. raid to snatch up Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. More than twenty press freedom organizations signed a letter affirming Harp’s right to do so.
“There is zero question that Harp’s actions were fully and squarely within the protections of the First Amendment, as well as outside the scope of any federal criminal statutes,” the letter states. “We urge Congress to reverse course and rescind this dangerous, unconstitutional subpoena.”
Such umbrage is appropriate. But there is, in the bowels of the reporting on this matter, a revelation even more jarring than the spectacle of Harp being targeted out of what appears to be spite. According to the news website Semafor, both The New York Times and The Washington Post knew in advance—unlike members of the U.S. Congress—that Trump was planning to invade Venezuela and abduct Maduro, but they agreed to not say anything.
Such acquiescence to the dictates of official secrecy arguably does far greater harm to the press than anything that might happen to Harp. (As of press time, this subpoena has still not been served, perhaps due to the blowback it has received.)
If the press is to survive this wave of attacks, it must do a far better job of standing up for itself and for the principles on which the journalistic profession is founded. Instead, we see evidence of cowardice, accommodation, and retreat.
Take CBS News, which last July agreed to donate $16 million for Trump’s presidential library to settle his frivolous lawsuit quibbling with its editing of a 60 Minutes news segment. Parent company Paramount was, at the time, seeking federal approval for an $8 billion merger, which was subsequently granted. When television talk show host Stephen Colbert cracked wise about this, CBS announced that it was canceling his show.
CBS News has since hired a new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, a self-described “radical centrist” who is busily winning Trump’s heart. “I think you have a great new leader,” he told longtime anchor Norah O’Donnell in an October interview, following which Weiss and Trump met for the first time and exchanged kisses on the cheek.
Weiss delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes segment about Team Trump’s use of a brutal Salvadoran prison facility for expelled Venezuelan immigrants to give the administration more time to come up with lies about it. And she has installed the exceedingly centrist Tony Dokoupil as the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, prompting a staff exodus and a sharp viewership decline. On February 9, CBS News aired a segment that vastly overstated the percentage of ICE detainees who have violent criminal histories.
And then there’s The Washington Post, now owned and apparently controlled by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The once-storied newspaper yanked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 race for President, and later realigned its editorial opinion toward “personal liberties and free markets” and not the nation’s urgent need to condemn Trump’s constant transgressions. These moves resulted in the loss of more than 250,000 subscribers.
Additionally, in early February, the Post laid off more than 300 employees, about a third of its total, in what it labeled, with Trumpian obfuscation, a “strategic reset.” Martin Baron, the paper’s former executive editor, called it “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” He blasted Bezos’s “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” which have produced “a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
What is happening here is instructive. Much of what Trump says comes to nothing. His goal is to command attention, not get things done. Lemon, Fort, Harp, and others will survive their ordeals, and perhaps even emerge stronger for it. But the damage that once-great journalistic organizations are doing to themselves to protect the larger business interests of their owners is real, and likely irrevocable.