Stopping
the Press
After spending years
painting the media as the “enemy of the people,” Donald Trump is ready to
intensify his battle against the journalists who cover him.
November 30, 2024
Charles Dickens, a journalist of such Victorian energies
that he managed to write some fiction on the side, was a keen observer of human
vanities. Of a minor figure in “Our Mutual Friend,” he wrote, “Mr. Podsnap was
well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion.” In our time,
journalists have been made to realize that they are widely viewed as Podsnaps:
privileged peacocks, stubbornly unreflective, “happily acquainted” with their
“own merit and importance.” Reliable outfits such as the Pew Research Center
report that the news media, which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was
among the most highly regarded institutions in public life, now dwells in a
dank basement of distrust, alongside the members of the United States Congress.
And yet there is a difference between
criticism and demonization. Donald Trump has spent years painting the press as
the “enemy of the people,” though he is hardly the first modern President to do
so. “Never forget, the press is the enemy,” Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger,
in the thick of the Watergate scandal. “Write that on a blackboard one hundred
times.” Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s lieutenants, compiled an “enemies list,”
which included the names of several dozen editors and reporters. (Richard Rovere,
this magazine’s Washington correspondent at the time, made the cut.) The
government tapped journalists’ telephones; two of Nixon’s Watergate henchmen,
G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, discussed plans to assassinate
the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
Trump bears at least as much
resentment toward reporters as Nixon did, but his psychology is arguably more
complicated, because he was initially a creation of the media. In the
nineteen-eighties, as a real-estate hustler, he repeatedly called in to the tabloids
about his exploits, real or imagined. He was the Donny Appleseed of the New
York Post, tirelessly planting items in the soil of Page Six. More
recently, Trump’s obsession with the Murdoch press, particularly Fox News, has
grown so deep that he is attempting to fill crucial roles in his Administration
with Fox hosts and commentators.
Trump is keenly aware that the ecology
of the press has changed radically since Nixon’s day. Local papers have thinned
or vanished entirely. The Old Guard outlets are struggling for audiences,
subscribers, and ad revenue. So, while Trump finds refuge and amplification in
friendly ports––Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk’s X–––he has
increasingly made plain his intent on doing battle with the rest from a
position of strength. He often threatens violence and humiliation. Two years
ago, at a rally held months after Politico published a draft of Justice Samuel
Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump suggested a way to smoke out the
source of the leak: “The reporter goes to jail. When the reporter learns that
he’s going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner that’s extremely
strong, tough, and mean, he will say, he or she, ‘I think I’m going to give you
the information. Here’s the leaker, get me the hell out of here.’ ”
In his first term, Trump was so
agitated about his coverage on CNN that he reportedly pushed the Department of
Justice to block A.T. & T.’s acquisition of the network’s owner at the
time, Time Warner. (The Justice Department denied any White House intervention,
and eventually the deal went through.) Trump also is said to have urged the
doubling of shipping rates for companies such as Amazon, a move that would have
been onerous for Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post,
had the irritating habit of committing journalism critical of the
Administration.
Media lawyers now fear that Trump will
ramp up the deployment of subpoenas, specious lawsuits, court orders, and
search warrants to seize reporters’ notes, devices, and source materials. They
are gravely concerned that reporters and media institutions will be punished
for leaking government secrets. The current Justice Department guidelines
mandating extra procedural measures for subpoenas directed at journalists are
just that: guidelines. They are likely to be shredded. Nearly every state
provides journalists with at least a qualified privilege to withhold the
identity of confidential sources, but there is no federal privilege, and Trump
has opposed a bipartisan congressional bill that would create one, the
so-called PRESS Act. “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!” he
posted on Truth Social.
Retribution is in the air. “We’re
going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens,
who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” Kash Patel, a leading MAGA soldier, said on Steve
Bannon’s podcast. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump’s lawyers have already threatened or taken legal action against the Times,
the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, Penguin Random House, and others.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project
2025, meanwhile, calls for ending federal funding to NPR and PBS. It insists
that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press to have access to the White
House “campus.” Although Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, he
has selected one of its authors, Brendan Carr, who is also an ideological ally
of Elon Musk, to head the Federal Communications Commission.
A longer-range worry is that the
Supreme Court may weaken or even overturn the 1964 landmark decision New York
Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan limits the ability of public officials to sue
journalists for defamation, finding that the Constitution guarantees that, at a
minimum, journalists can write freely and critically about public officials, as
long as they don’t publish statements that they know to be false, or probably
so. Nixon regarded Sullivan as “virtually a license to lie.” Trump shares the
sentiment. The legal protections established between Sullivan and Watergate
have been eroding in recent years, and two sitting Justices, Clarence Thomas
and Neil Gorsuch, have been public about their eagerness to revisit the
decision. The Court might decline to take a Sullivan-related case and simply
let stand a state court’s or a federal district court’s limitation of it,
resulting in a de-facto patchwork of local standards for press freedoms.
All these threats and potential
actions are hardly the stuff of legal arcana or the frenzied obsessions of
self-involved Podsnapian journalists. They are the arsenal of a would-be
autocrat who seeks to intimidate his critics, protect himself from scrutiny,
and go on wearing away at the liberal democratic order. ♦
