Trump Is Targeting Media and Chilling Free Speech

I was thrilled when the technological revolution pushed aside the old media gatekeepers and Americans could, finally, gain access to a treasure trove of information. After the internet came into its own, the mainstream media could no longer tell us what to think. We could read and publish stories that never saw the light of day. With a few keyboard strokes, people could now watch legislative proceedings, access court documents and delve into academic reports.

I naively thought that a new dawn of truth telling was emerging. Sadly, that dawn often looks like the dark of night. I’d never want to go back to the old media days, but people now largely exist in their own information bubbles. No one can even agree on basic facts. Partisanship so severely distorts how we see the world that even the best reporting can’t compete with some cockamamie YouTube video offered by some basement-dwelling poseur.

Even the basic concept of free speech has become another truncheon in the nation’s ongoing battle between tribes. Each side claims to be its champion, but neither consistently supports such principles. Conservatives were rightly aghast when the Biden administration tried to muscle social-media companies into quashing alternative views about pandemic-related policies.

That wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment—a point with which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed given that social-media platforms are private entities. But it was tawdry, nonetheless. Shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that claimed to restore our free-speech protections. Nice, but Trump continues his attacks on free speech through a variety of disreputable strategies.

Multiple lawsuits he’s filed against media operations are “chilling attempts to convert Trump’s complaints about press coverage into causes of action are legally baseless and blatantly unconstitutional,” notes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. He used as an example Trump’s recent social-media post after MSNBC cancelled a TV show: “Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN! The whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country.”

Trump, who calls the media the “enemy of the people,” is all for a free press as long as it’s parroting his political line. He recently booted the Associated Press—which despite its biases provides mostly nuts-and-bolts reporting—from presidential events after it refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, following our Chief Mapmaker’s childish edict. This is bullying.

The New York Times reported that the administration “would start handpicking which media outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, the small, rotating group of reporters who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public.” This is not just an assault on protocol, but a glaring attempt to punish outlets that don’t bend the knee. A California Assembly speaker once denied my reporting team press passes for dubious reasons. It’s hard to do one’s job as a journalist if the government denies you access to its activities.

Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, recently threatened criminal investigations of members of Congress and the media who have criticized Elon Musk and his team of DOGE budget-cutters. It’s preposterous for prosecutors to treat feisty comments as “threats,” which is the justification used by Martin’s office. And, as a letter from various civil-rights groups points out, it is certainly not a crime “to identify individuals openly conducting government work that is of the utmost public concern.”

A Trump executive order relating to anti-Israel protests called on universities to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff.” It’s fine to deport visiting students who engage in violence and law-breaking—but the highly respected and non-ideological rights group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), argues that this edict “would make universities monitor students’ constitutionally protected speech.”

There are plenty of other examples to belie MAGA’s boast that it champions free-speech absolutism. It clearly supports its own speech rights, but not its enemies’. But the bigger problem is that the administration’s continuing fusillade of distortions, threats and conspiracy theories makes it impossible for Americans to separate truth from fiction. By the way, this is the playbook used by the noxious dictatorships that Trump so admires.

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” wrote Hannah Arendt, who chronicled authoritarianism. “And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

So this Trump approach isn’t just a war on the media, but a war on our ability to govern ourselves.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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