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Eight days ago, David Bauder, a media reporter at the Associated Press, published a story listing the by now familiar ways in which Trump and his administration have put journalists “on their heels” after only two months back in power, checking off a barrage of lawsuits and rhetorical attacks, the “newly aggressive” posture of the Federal Communications Commission, the gutting of the US-funded overseas broadcaster Voice of America, and the White House banning Bauder’s own shop, the AP, from events after it refused to start referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in the stenographic way Trump would like. Bauder also noted the (equally familiar) right-wing charges that the mainstream press is no longer widely trusted or even that widely consumed, among other sharp challenges. As last week unfolded, we were assigned more bleak reading (and listening). On an episode of the New York Times’ influential podcast The Daily, Jim Rutenberg outlined how Trump is not only undermining the press, but circumventing it, as alternative right-wing outlets and podcast bros furnish him with unprecedented levels of “media cheerleading and support.” (The episode’s title: “Nixon Dreamed of Breaking the Media. Trump Is Doing It.”) In Vanity Fair, Joel Simon situated Trump’s efforts to bend the media to his will in the wider context of growing authoritarianism in the US, and argued that “anticipatory obedience is rife” on the part of outlets from the Washington Post to ABC News.
As the week went on, we also saw some real-time tests of Trump’s power over the press and the press’s power to fight back. Several of them were teed up in advance: a congressional hearing designed to rake NPR and PBS over the coals; multiple lawsuits brought by journalists at VOA and its sister broadcasters, aimed at stopping the gutting; a long-awaited hearing in a case brought by the AP challenging its Gulf-related ban, which the agency says amounts to unconstitutional discrimination based on a question of speech. Others were unscheduled, if unsurprising: a top Trump campaign aide suing the Daily Beast for defamation; the FCC (newly aggressive indeed) announcing that it is investigating Disney and ABC (which Disney owns) over their promotion of supposedly insidious diversity policies; plainclothes immigration outlets snatching a foreign student at Tufts University off the street, quite possibly because of an op-ed that she coauthored in the student paper.
These stories certainly all attested to a media facing attacks on multiple fronts—and, in many ways, vulnerable in the face of them. But this vulnerability wasn’t in evidence to the same extent across the board; indeed, in some ways, at least a few of these stories showed the limits of the administration’s power over the press and how the press might assert its own power in response. The biggest political story of the moment has been a testament to media power, too, despite some very Trump-era caveats. Ultimately, the past week has shown how reports of our impotence might be exaggerated, or at least premature.
The utterly horrifying treatment of the Tufts student aside, the least hopeful of the stories mentioned above might have been the hearing involving the AP; the outcome isn’t yet known since the judge in the case has yet to rule, though he reportedly seems skeptical that the ban is infringing the agency’s exercise of its speech rights under the First Amendment. The AP has modeled persistence since the ban was announced, refusing to cave on the Gulf naming issue, continuing to show up at events despite repeatedly being turned away (an exercise that one reporter dubbed “Schrödinger’s Pool Duty”), and managing to cover certain press availabilities involving Trump and other world leaders by flying in correspondents from their home countries. Still, the agency insists that the ban is preventing it from reporting on Trump with nuance and immediacy, and is costing it a competitive advantage; Evan Vucci, an AP photographer, told the court last week that “being in the room is vitally important”—and that being shut out of it “kills us.” Zeke Miller, the AP’s chief White House correspondent, told the court that he’d observed a wider chilling effect from the ban, which he said has led to a softening of questions at White House events and a reluctance among TV anchors to say “Gulf of Mexico.” Miller allowed that this was a “subjective impression,” though at least on the Gulf front, the media reporter Oliver Darcy has documented something similar.
Meanwhile, observers (including Paul Farhi in CJR) have suggested that members of the White House press corps haven’t stood up strongly enough to the new administration, at least in public. Officials have certainly asserted power over the White House Correspondents’ Association, not least by robbing it of its traditional right to pick which outlets serve in the press pool. Now, according to Mike Allen of Axios, officials are planning to impose their own seating assignments in the briefing room. One WHCA member reportedly suggested that the serving White House press secretary become the association’s permanent president in a bid for deescalation—though this idea seems sure to be rejected. (Over the weekend, the WHCA faced further charges of folding to Trump when it canceled the comedian Amber Ruffin’s scheduled appearance at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner shortly after a Trump spokesperson attacked her online—though the WHCA said that the decision was already in the works as part of a “re-envisioning” of the dinner.)
There was more hopeful news, however, about VOA and the other international broadcasters that Trump moved to gut two weeks ago; in response, various staffers and outside allies sued—arguing that since Congress appropriates funds for the broadcasters, the administration can’t just take them away—and last week, they enjoyed some initial success. The US Agency for Global Media—which oversees the broadcasters and has recently come under the influence of Kari Lake, a news anchor turned Trump ally—had already agreed to disburse some funds to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty by the time a judge temporarily blocked the agency from withholding money; on Thursday, USAGM restored funding not only for RFE/RL but for the Open Technology Fund, an organization under the agency’s banner that promotes internet access in closed societies, while also reinstating staffers at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, allowing programming there to resume, per the Times. Then, on Friday, a judge temporarily froze USAGM’s efforts to dismantle VOA and the other broadcasters, citing their congressionally approved funding. These may be but short-term reprieves; also on Friday, USAGM staffers received a classically Muskian “Fork in the Road” email inviting them to resign. But Patsy Widakuswara, a VOA journalist turned plaintiff in one of the cases against USAGM, told Politico that the timing of the email could be an encouraging sign that the administration is “getting the message that they have to do things legally”—even if, she noted, the journalists under USAGM’s aegis are by no means out of the woods yet.
While these cases played out, a congressional subcommittee—led by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and named for Musk’s “DOGE” initiative—hauled in the heads of the public broadcasters NPR and PBS for a reds-under-the-bed style dressing-down. (Liam Scott—who had covered press freedom for VOA until he was fired amid the recent cuts—attended the hearing and covered it for CJR.) The hearing may have been grotesque political theater, but it ended with very real threats: Greene called for the federal government to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees NPR and PBS (“You all can hate on us on your own dime,” she said) and followed that up with a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson making the same case; she also cosponsored a bill to that effect introduced by Ronny Jackson, the White House physician turned Trump-allied congressman. Even before the hearing, NPR and PBS were facing pressure from the FCC and defunding calls from Trump himself; the broadcasters get a relatively small percentage of their funds from the government, certainly compared with public media in other democracies, but smaller public media stations, especially in rural areas, can be more dependent on that money, and its absence would be sharply felt across the ecosystem, as the NPR and PBS leaders suggested to the committee.
And yet public media is hardly defenseless. Trump has suggested defunding it before and didn’t get very far. That’s no guarantee that it won’t happen now—an early theme of the second Trump presidency has been blitzing through whatever inhibitions and guardrails just about survived his first. But, as CNN’s Brian Stelter noted ahead of the hearing, a spending bill that Trump himself recently signed not only contained money for the CPB, but funds it through 2027 due to the way public media spending works. Greene called in her letter for this funding to be rescinded; again, this could conceivably happen, constitutionally or otherwise. But even Trump’s Republican Party is not entirely insulated from the winds of public opinion, and defunding NPR and PBS would seem to be unpopular. A Pew poll last week found that less than a quarter of the electorate—and fewer than half of Republican and Republican-leaning voters—currently supports such a move, numbers that are “even lower than I would have guessed,” Stelter observed on X. “Decades of right-wing attacks have not been all that effective.”
Again, taken together, these and stories like them point to very real vulnerabilities on the part of the media that should not be downplayed. But they also show how, when those targeted choose to fight back, they appear more powerful than the tribunes of media impotence would suggest, at least some of the time. Some of these fights—those involving USAGM, in particular—are inseparable from the broader tug-of-war between Trump, Congress, and the courts that is playing out at the moment across a whole range of government functions. But the news media has some more specific cards it can play as well—not least the First Amendment. (One imagines that law firms, for example, might like to have similarly explicit constitutional protections right about now.) Even this is not a guaranteed trump card, as the uncertain case of the AP shows. But another, perhaps lesser-noticed legal decision last week brought some positive news on this front: the Supreme Court declining to take up a defamation case brought by Steve Wynn, the casino mogul and GOP donor, that could have allowed the court to reconsider the robust libel protections for the press that current precedent considers to be protected by the First Amendment; again, these might not last forever, but it’s good news that they’re intact for now. On a more abstract level, it’s easy to interpret the barrage of attacks on the press as evidence of our weakness—that we’re an easy and popular target. And yet, taken on their own terms, these attacks are at least implicitly premised on the recognition that the media has power (to propagate the woke mind virus, if nothing else). If the administration is willing to cede such power to the press, at least rhetorically, it seems counterproductive for us to rhetorically cede it right back by insisting that we’re powerless.
It seems to me that commonly cited examples of media caving—Jeff Bezos tampering with the Post’s opinion section; ABC caving to an obviously meritless Trump lawsuit; CBS considering doing likewise, but on steroids—don’t so much reflect journalistic powerlessness as C-suite spinelessness. Or cravenness; or greed; pick your poison. Zeke Miller and others have observed a softening of certain types of Trump coverage in the face of his attacks, and there is likely some of that going on; there’s also the potential for self-censorship, which is definitionally hard to measure since it revolves around stories we don’t know about. But I’d argue that it’s far too early to conclude that journalists are caving en masse. Cowardly coverage of Beltway politics is hardly a new phenomenon; from the outside, it can be hard to tell which soft-pedaling is due to fear and which to access or similar, decades-old incentives. And a great deal of excellent, hard-hitting journalism is still being produced every day; as the AP’s Bauder noted recently, for instance, 60 Minutes, the CBS show at the heart of Trump’s bogus suit against the network, has chronicled the new administration unbowed. (Last night, it covered the attempted demolition of VOA; Widakuswara thanked the show for “telling VOA’s story while we are unable to do our work of telling America’s story.”) Last summer, I noted in this newsletter that reporters still have the power to go where others can’t (or won’t) and to set the agenda, at least among political elites. As evidence, I pointed to the historic photo of Trump in the aftermath of an assassination attempt that Vucci, the AP photographer, risked his life to take. The photo came up in court last week: the AP’s lawyer held aloft a coffee-table type book, produced by Trump, to show that he’d used Vucci’s photo for the cover.
All these nuanced power dynamics came to a head last week not in a courtroom showdown, but in the week’s biggest story—the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s explosive report that Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally added him to a group chat on a commercial messaging app in which very senior officials proceeded to share highly sensitive details of a bombing raid in Yemen—even if the timeline here was, as they say, very dumb. In some ways, the episode demonstrated the media’s vulnerability: rather than take full responsibility, the implicated officials attacked Goldberg in vicious terms and served up distinctly post-truthy deflections; no one was fired, as they surely would have been under administrations past, not least Trump’s first. (“I don’t fire people because of fake news,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker yesterday.) Even this latter point, however, isn’t clear-cut: per reports in the aftermath of Goldberg’s story, Trump was deeply frustrated by the embarrassing headlines that it triggered; it has since been reported that top advisers suggested that Trump fire Waltz, that this could still happen, and that the key reason it hasn’t yet is that Trump doesn’t want to give the mainstream media a scalp. (If the story had appeared in a right-wing outlet like Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal reported, Waltz would already be gone.) Again, this fact could be read as evidence of a lack of power on the media’s part, but I think it’s much better read as an acknowledgment thereof, from a defensive crouch; at least on this story, Trump is the one on his heels. It certainly cut through with the public—and even sparked some criticism from usually Trump-friendly precincts of new and alternative media. (Even Dave Portnoy had a complaint.) Trump, perhaps, hasn’t circumvented “the media” quite yet.
Nor has he broken it, as The Atlantic proved not only by running its initial story but by then calling the administration’s bluff and publishing the full chat, after officials insisted, ludicrously, that they hadn’t discussed anything very sensitive; in so doing, as Politico noted, it showed how to resist the playbook that Trump has used “to bring some of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions to heel,” and backed him into a corner instead. The revenge tour could yet come for Goldberg, but in recent media appearances, he’s brushed off the prospect with an admirable equanimity. On Meet the Press yesterday, he noted to Welker that he hadn’t really done anything besides getting added to a chat, and that the administration’s hostile response hasn’t worked on him. “Sometimes people get intimidated,” he said, but “we at The Atlantic are not intimidated by this nonsense. We’re going to keep reporting the truth as we see it. And I just think it’s a kind of silly deflection.”
Other notable stories:
- On Friday, Trump commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson, the founder and CEO of the media company Ozy, just as he was set to report to prison after being convicted of fraud and other charges for his role in misleading investors and inflating the company’s value. Last year, Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim covered Watson’s trial—and what it said about the digital-media environment of the 2010s—in a three-part podcast series for CJR. Hersh reported on Watson’s commutation on Friday, while Banikarim told Semafor that she’s both “amazed” and not all that surprised that Watson managed to pull it off. His cause didn’t seem an obvious one for Trump to take up, but “in many ways Carlos is a Trumpian figure,” she said, “someone who seems to always find a way to make the system work in his favor.”
- Politico’s Adam Wren reports that people in the orbit of former president Joe Biden are bracing for the imminent release of at least four books—authored by journalists from NBC, CNN, Axios, and elsewhere—that “promise to excavate and relitigate not only the historic 2024 presidential campaign but the former president’s own physical and mental condition before dropping out”; per Wren, Biden’s aides did not make him available to any of the authors but are “prebutting” some of the books, “challenging their framing and questioning their fact-checking approach in an attempt to protect the former president’s image.” Meanwhile, Michael LaRosa, a former Biden staffer, told a podcast that Biden’s administration “bullied” reporters while it was in office.
- The AP’s Michael Casey has the story of Carlo DeMaria, the mayor of the Boston suburb of Everett who won a libel case against a local newspaper that turned out to have printed fake stories about him—as a result of which the paper shut down—only to now face corruption claims that have led to a no-confidence vote from the City Council. Per court records, a reporter for the paper invented a City Hall insider who fictitiously accused “Kickback Carlo” of everything from extortion to sexual assault, but he now stands more broadly accused of “padding his salary with bonus payments,” Casey writes. (DeMaria has denied any wrongdoing.)
- Last year, the parents of Oleksandra Kuvshynova, a contractor for Fox News who was killed while reporting in Ukraine in 2022, sued the network, alleging that it behaved negligently and later tried to cover up the fact. Now the widow of Pierre Zakrzewski, a Fox video journalist who was killed in the same attack, is suing the network as well, claiming that it failed to take proper measures to protect her husband and also that its insurance was inadequate to compensate his family. Fox has pushed back on both suits, and plans to fully respond to the latter in May.
- And the Post’s Kyle Swenson spoke with Jason Chernesky, who worked as a historian at the Food and Drug Administration before DOGE cut his job, about an oral history project that he has since set up to capture and preserve the stories of members of the federal workforce at this tumultuous time. (The project is open to those affected by the cuts, but also those executing them; Chernesky says he would “gladly interview” Musk.) Chernesky described the effort as being in the tradition of past initiatives like the Federal Writers’ Project, which I profiled for CJR back in 2020.
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