Deadline Pressure

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Two weeks ago, I wrote in this newsletter about a horse called Journalism, which was the favorite going into the Kentucky Derby, ultimately losing out to a rival named Sovereignty—a result that was inevitably cheered, in a metaphorical sense, by Trump administration officials and right-wing populists and taken as an ominous sign by many journalists. This past weekend, Journalism got a second chance, at the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore; it looked like it would fall short again, the victim of some jostling—but this time surged back, heroically, to triumph. Sovereignty was not on the track this time, but the symbolism was reversed regardless; Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, took the opportunity to declare that “Journalism is alive and well.” (Not that he’d initially backed the horse: “I’ve learned not to bet against America’s Promise,” he said earlier, referencing a different entrant.) Among members of the press, some of the metaphor-making was less self-serious: The Bulwark’s Sam Stein quipped that Journalism “looked lost, stumbled, couldn’t quite find the lane, struggled to get a lede down and then it all sort of came together right before the deadline.”

If the ill-fated battle between Journalism and Sovereignty was an almost-too-perfect stand-in for the events of the week leading up to the Derby—most notably, Trump had just moved to fire members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board, then issued an executive order attempting to defund NPR and PBS, to which the CPB funnels money, despite all of this appearing to be extremely illegal given those entities’ congressionally mandated independence—one could, perhaps, marshal Journalism’s Preakness win as symbolic of a fight back that took shape last week. CPB was already suing the administration over the removal of its board members; last Monday, NPR’s Stephen Fowler reported, citing documents filed in that case, that the Elon Musk–conceived Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had subsequently attempted to worm its way into the organization, only to be told where to get off. On Wednesday, a federal judge held a hearing in the case and sounded skeptical of the administration’s authority over the board members. (“The statute is pretty clear that the executive is not supposed to be controlling the CPB,” he said.) On Thursday, seemingly in response to questioning from the judge, the CPB changed its own bylaws, making it harder for board members to be removed. Meanwhile, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, public media executives descended on Washington to strategize and to lobby lawmakers to protect them; already, one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, had expressed her support. Folkenflik also noted that officials in New York State have stepped up to bolster funding for public radio stations there amid the federal threats, and that individual donor contributions to NPR have “jumped up appreciably.”

But not so fast, Journalism! If individual donations are up, Folkenflik reported, public radio leaders are not counting on that trend to be sustainable in the long term; if New York was stepping up to boost public media, at least one other state, Indiana, has moved sharply in the opposite direction. And if Murkowski expressed continued support for funding public broadcasting, other Republican senators—and not necessarily the usual suspects—suggested that they might finally be ready to pull the plug; on Friday, Politico’s Natalie Fertig reported that whereas PBS’s provision of a diverse range of children’s programming, for example, has shielded it from congressional cuts in the past, the profusion of options in the modern streaming space may have undercut the argument for its necessity. (“Why are we funding this when we have a two-trillion-dollar deficit?” James Lankford, of Oklahoma, asked. “There’s nothing against Sesame Street. It’s a fiscal question.”) The same day, Jordyn Holman, of the New York Times, published an interview with Paula Kerger, the CEO of PBS, who said that the organization had had to furlough “a ton of people” recently. She added that the current effort to take down the broadcaster feels different from past arguments for federal funding cuts, describing it as “an all-out effort to take us out.” (A reminder: unlike public broadcasters in many other countries, PBS gets only 16 percent of its funding from the public purse, and the figure for NPR is even lower—but cuts would still be devastating, and could well prove existential for affiliated public media stations, especially those serving rural areas.)

There was the same mix of positive and negative developments on another familiar front last week: Trump’s push to gut the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees international broadcasters including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Last week, the latter three outlets reportedly received their congressionally allocated funds for the month of April, following an exceedingly confusing legal back-and-forth. (RFE/RL said that USAGM paid it twelve million dollars after “the full US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit administratively stayed an earlier decision by a divided three-judge panel of that court that had allowed USAGM to avoid complying with a district judge’s temporary restraining order requiring USAGM to pay RFE/RL its April funds.” Got that?) RFE/RL also noted, however, that the delay in payment had already led to reductions in programming and staff—and it is, of course, now mid-May. Then, later in the week, the administration fired some six hundred staffers at VOA, amounting to over a third of the broadcaster’s personnel, and put its DC headquarters up for sale—all in spite of a recent court ruling ordering officials to restore VOA’s operations (and after a Trump official announced a content deal with the pro-Trump One America News Network).

If a horse race is one sporting metaphor for the fight between the administration and journalism, perhaps a better one, which I’ve also returned to in this newsletter, is that of a tug-of-war—or, better yet, “several going on at once, each against a formidable adversary, but each involving shifts back and forward in position and momentum,” as I put it last month. The outcome of each of these is still in play, complicating the overall picture of the fight. But by last week, one high-profile observer had seen enough to weigh in: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, in a talk at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute that the Times then published. Sulzberger’s occasional big-picture interventions (including one for CJR) carry weight within the news business, as was the case prior to last year’s election, when he warned, in the pages of the rival Washington Post, that a future Trump administration might draw on the playbook of foreign autocrats to muzzle the press. Back then, “we knew how ruthlessly effective this campaign against journalists had been in other countries, and we knew those in President Trump’s orbit wanted to implement it here,” Sulzberger said last week. “Even so, it’s startling to see how quickly these warnings have come to pass.” He then ticked through what he sees as the pillars of Trump’s anti-press campaign, including the sowing of distrust in the media, the harassment of news outlets with (often frivolous) lawsuits, the abuse of regulatory authority (see: NPR and PBS), and the boosting of propagandists (see: VOA turning to OANN).

Sulzberger finished by urging citizens to seek out rigorous journalism and make room for it in their lives. Over the weekend, a data-driven story in his own paper suggested that there’s work to do on this front: Ruth Igielnik explored a recent poll from the Times and Siena College that found that voters who have not heard so much about some of the major news stories of Trump’s first hundred or so days in office tend to give him higher marks. (Trump’s approval rating on immigration, for example, was nearly ten points higher among respondents who hadn’t heard about the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to a Salvadoran mega-prison, compared with those who had.) As is always the case with data about news consumption, there are reasons to be cautious about this finding; as Igielnik noted, for instance, Trump has traditionally done better with so-called “low information” voters, and so correlation may not equal causation here. Still, Igielnik floated one other possible reason for this dynamic: that Trump’s intensified—and intentional—second-term tactic of “flooding the zone” with news has helped some major stories slip past the public’s attention.

This recalls another metaphor for Trump’s relationship with the press that I’ve discussed in this newsletter since he returned to power—the idea that, by unleashing a fire hose of actions and outrage, he is attempting to overwhelm the act of critical scrutiny. At times, this metaphor has been challenged; back in February, Stein, of The Bulwark, argued that the real story of the new administration’s early days was the opposite: a striking lack of transparency as to what it was up to, especially when it came to DOGE et al.’s reshaping of the federal bureaucracy. I wrote at the time that this apparent contradiction—the flooding of the zone versus the draining thereof—wasn’t really a contradiction at all, and should instead be seen “as twin tracks of a broader censorship strategy, one that seeks to keep what matters from the media by withholding it in some instances and overwhelming their attentional capacity in others.” Last week brought fresh evidence of this dynamic. The Associated Press reported, for example, that Trump spoke to reporters more often in his first hundred days back in office than any of his six predecessors—but HuffPost noted that the White House has not put transcripts of most of these and other interactions online, making it harder, for example, to quickly find out what Trump has said on a given topic, even if his remarks exist online in video form. (Asked for comment, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, told HuffPost, “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”) And the AP also reported over the weekend that the administration does not appear to be consistently preserving official records for posterity—and in some cases is doing the opposite—leading historians and archivists to fear that this presidency “will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any before it and that what is authorized for public release will be sanitized and edited to reinforce a carefully sculpted image the president wants projected, even if the facts don’t back that up.”

If, as I’ve argued before, access to a president does not on its own equate to transparency, transparency alone is no guarantee of virtue: in recent weeks, we’ve been treated to the bizarre, yet enormously telling, spectacle of senior congressional Republicans insisting that they have no ethical qualms with the Trump family’s business dealings, or Trump’s receipt of a lavish plane gifted by Qatar, because—unlike Trump’s predecessor—they’re doing it all out in the open. (House Speaker Mike Johnson: “The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains.”) This, apparently, does not equate to being allowed to talk about it openly; also last week, the administration seemed to suggest that it might investigate Axel Springer, the German media company that owns Politico and Business Insider in the US, for “illegal foreign political meddling” after the latter outlet published a story comparing Donald Trump Jr.’s business dealings to those of Biden’s son Hunter. This might not go anywhere, or it could turn into a fresh tug-of-war between the administration and the press, or, well, pick your metaphor. Whatever happens, there will, for sure, be more jostling. And Sovereignty will soon return to the track.

Other notable stories:

• Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said that it is considering a pitch submitted by a producer for a reality game show that would feature immigrants competing for US citizenship via a series of challenges; a spokesperson said that the department is happy to review “out of the box” ideas and that the pitch appears to be “a celebration of being an American,” though no decision has yet been made. The producer, Rob Worsoff, who is Canadian American, said that the show, which he has pitched before, was inspired by his own naturalization process. “Once you get past the shocking headline of like, ‘Oh it’s the Hunger Games for immigration,’ it’s not that at all,” he said, adding that the point is to “celebrate and humanize” immigrants. Critics, however, have dismissed the idea as unethical and likely unlawful. 

• The Post’s Robin Givhan profiled Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and chief content officer at Condé Nast, through the lens of efforts to further diversity, equity, and inclusion at the company at a time when the new Trump administration has gone to war against such initiatives. Wintour faced a reckoning over such questions in the summer of 2020, amid the protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd; since then, Condé’s “diversity statistics have ticked up and down,” Givhan writes, but “anecdotally, there has been evidence of a shift.” Now the company—unlike, say, Meta and Google—is continuing “to make a public effort” around DEI commitments, Givhan reports. “Wintour presses on. And in 2025, that alone is something of a win.”

• After Amazon announced a partnership with a Saudi AI initiative backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Jon Passantino, of Status, slammed Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who also owns the Post, over the deal, calling it a betrayal of the memory of Jamal Khashoggi, the Post columnist MBS is alleged to have ordered murdered by Saudi state assassins in 2018. In other global press-freedom news, Reporters Without Borders and a Ukrainian group published a report accusing Russia of repeatedly targeting hotels housing reporters in Ukraine. And the UK charged three alleged Iranian spies with targeting dissident journalists on British soil.

• Recently, I wrote in this newsletter about Gary Lineker, a star soccer anchor at the BBC who’d just given a newsy interview in which he criticized the broadcaster for caving to critics of its news coverage, including around Gaza. Lineker was in the process of stepping down from a leading soccer-highlights show, but was set to stay at the BBC in a reduced capacity. Then, last week, Lineker shared a pro-Palestinian video that featured a depiction of a rat, an anti-Semitic trope. He apologized and said he hadn’t done so knowingly, but will now leave the BBC altogether this summer.   

• And The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas assessed the recent media storm surrounding the football coach Bill Belichick and his relationship with Jordon Hudson, a woman nearly fifty years his junior who appears to have assumed a significant say over his affairs. “Belichick and Hudson are consenting adults; love is love; etc. What’s really shocking is that Bill Belichick has ceded this much control to anyone,” Thomas writes. “It is even more surprising that he has become the center of a media frenzy,” given his past distance from the press and hatred of self-inflicted distractions.

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