President Donald Trump has long attacked reporters who criticize him — suing them, icing them out of White House access, even threatening to lock them up. And it has led to fears from observers that freedom of the press could be in mortal danger in the United States.
Press freedom is indeed in danger, RonNell Andersen Jones of the University of Utah argued in a new podcast with Slate's Dahlia Lithwick — but not in the way many may think. Trump isn't shutting down media outlets that criticize him. He doesn't have to. He's doing something more insidious.
Lithwick noted a key example of what he was talking about, in CBS News' recent legal pressure against late-night comedian Stephen Colbert not to air the interview he did with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, citing the Trump Federal Communications Commission's threats to take a much harder line on enforcing the "Equal Time Rule" in a way that cracks down on interviews with Democrats.
CBS was not directly told by the FCC that it couldn't air the interview. But the administration had just approved a merger that put the network in the hands of owners and editors much more favorable to Trump. And that's the crux of the matter, Jones said.
"We have this system where a lot of those regulatory pressures are bound up in the way that the media is built," Jones said. "Pressures that you might not even think of as being press freedom issues: Law fare avenues turn out to be mergers and acquisitions, immigration law, broadcast licensing rules, tax law ... a whole slew of corporate pressures. We’ve seen settlements in cases that have been brought by the president against news outlets, or individual journalists on defamation claims, or on claims that are essentially defamation claims, but are dressed up as other kinds of claims like consumer fraud claims or election interference claims, but at their root are really focused on the president’s concerns about content that was unfavorable to him."
This sort of thing, he argued, isn't so much the abolition of the free press, but the "capture" of it.
"The law is on the press’s side, but executive leverage and corporate structure — the sorts of things that have haunted press freedom and media studies scholars for a generation — the lack of public interest protection and hyper-commercialization, weak and vulnerable public media, and this reliance on market forces to deliver good investigative journalism in the public interest?" said Jones. "All of that combines in a way that leaves a million touch points of vulnerability, and it feels at this moment like all of them are being targeted."
