In “Trump and the Press,” published March 3, David Enrich, the business investigations editor for The New York Times, frames the issue this way:
Bashing the press is a time-honored tradition for presidents of both parties. But Trump has gone much further, attacking the very notion of an independent news media, one that will refute his distortions. He wants journalists to parrot his views and face consequences if they don’t.
Mr. Enrich explains:
Trump’s crackdown on the press began almost immediately after he returned to office.
The White House excluded Associated Press reporters from events because the wire service wouldn’t reclassify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. It plans to select which reporters and news outlets are part of the press pool that covers the president, a tactic used by authoritarian leaders.
He continues:
For Trump personally, litigation remains a favorite cudgel. Last spring, he sued ABC News for defamation after an anchor erroneously said that Trump had been found liable for rape. (A jury found him liable for sexual abuse.) More recently, he sued CBS and The Des Moines Register, arguing that an edited TV interview and a faulty poll were akin to deceptive advertising. In addition, Trump’s lawyers and aides often threaten news outlets with litigation over critical articles.
Mr. Enrich points out that traditionally, lawsuits like these don’t work:
That’s because a series of Supreme Court decisions, starting with New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, made it hard for public figures to win defamation cases. The court didn’t want the rich and powerful to be able to use litigation to muzzle the press or stop it from informing the public and exposing abuses. So the justices required public figures to prove that reporters knew what they published was false or acted with reckless disregard for accuracy. That is a high — but not insurmountable — bar.
A recent episode of “The Daily” podcast, “Nixon Dreamed of Breaking the Media. Trump Is Doing It,” explains all of this and describes a further problem: The media environment has radically changed since President Trump was last in office, and now he can easily promote his agenda to tens of millions of people without journalistic fact-checking. Sources like X, owned by Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan’s podcast have become megaphones for the president’s messages, but they amplify them without traditional journalistic rules about grounding information in verifiable facts.
Why does all this matter? How does it affect the health of our democracy?
