Destroying the First Amendment - Without Breaking any Laws
If you’d like to skip to the end, the method is money.
Journalism and media are in a perilous state - one we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. Major media outlets, including those which were legendary in exposing political corruption, are now mostly controlled by the Trump-supporting billionaire class. The result is killing stories, running disfavorable stories buried in back sections (or nested under subcategories on websites), and in several cases, direct payments to the president. In some cases, there have been outright bribes.
Donald Trump, despite the reality created image so many bought into, is quite terrible at business. He has a decades long history of screwing over contractors, burying them under litigation he knew he could afford and they could not. He eventually realized this same lawfare tactic could be used against the media he desperately seeks the approval of. Several of the cases you’re going to read about were thrown out or decided for the media outlets.
Winning isn’t the point though.
Harassment and intimidation are.
The Wall Street Journal broke a new Jeffrey Epstein story this week. I didn’t find this particularly damaging given we already knew about their relationship, already knew that Donald Trump is a rapist, already knew he said what he had most in common with his daughter was “sex,” already knew he was fine with people calling that same daughter “a piece of ass,” already knew he bragged about walking in on minor girls who were changing, and already knew he once twice talked about how he hoped to be dating an underage girl in a few years. So to me the revelation that Donald Trump sent Epstein a lewd image which alluded to a shared secret is not earth-shattering news, but I’m still trying to make sense of the Epstein story.
It’s his reaction though I want to focus on. In his usual rageposting manner, the president has sent out a series of posts about the WSJ story. He is of course threatening to sue The Wall Street Journal, their publisher, and Rupert Murdoch personally. The president’s standard response to negative news stories is to threaten and/or file lawsuits. We have not seen anything like that in American history. While the highest ranking official in the country suing a paper does not DIRECTLY undo the first amendment, it definitely degrades it.
But we have another problem with this WSJ story. Donald Trump personally called the owner of the paper, Rupert Murdoch, and asked him to kill the story. Trump claims Murdoch agreed, which I doubt. This is not normal behavior, but it IS normal behavior to Donald Trump. Trump had an arrangement for quite some time with The National Enquirer. Quite simply the Inquirer would buy stories damaging to Trump and then never publish them. David Pecker, the publisher, testified that these stories would have made his paper substantial amounts of money but they didn’t run them out of service to Donald Trump. (Pecker drew the line at Stormy Daniels because of her career which led to Michael Cohen paying her directly which led to Trump’s felony convictions.)
When he hasn’t been able to buy off stories before they’re printed, Trump has retaliated against media outlets publishing them, both in a personal and governmental capacity.
Amazon sued over losing a large government contract due to Trump disapproving of Washington Post stories about his numerous scandals. Both Amazon and The Washington Post are owned/run by Jeff Bezos. While this lawsuit was mooted by cancelling the program, Bezos understood the message perfectly and began intervening in the Post’s coverage of Donald Trump. The Post declined to endorse anyone in the 2024 election for the first time in decades despite one of the candidates being a convicted felon rapist. Opinion editor David Shipley resigned over changes Bezos made to Trump coverage. Ruth Marcus resigned when a story critical of Trump was spiked. Cartoonist Ann Telnaes ended her relationship with the paper after it refused to run a cartoon about Bezos’s relationship with Trump.
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration and provided another $1 million in in-kind streaming service. The message here is clear - don’t run contact that makes Trump look bad so that the owner of the paper may curry favor with the president. Does this mean the paper never publishes ANY negative stories? No, of course not. (They just revealed a prisoner exchange involving hundreds of men sent to CECOT in El Salvador.) But these actions are limited, especially in the opinion page.
In March of last year, George Stephanopoulos mentioned Trump’s rape of E. Jean Carroll. Despite the finding of a previous court that yes, it’s accurate to say Trump raped her, Trump sued ABC for defamation. ABC settled the case with a donation of $15 million to Trump’s museum.
60 Minutes ran an interview with Kamala Harris which had some routine editing for clarity. This is absolutely a standard practice and the content of what she said was not changed at all. Trump sued for 20 BILLION dollars. This was another slam dunk first amendment case. But CBS’s parent company, Paramount, needs government approval for a planned merger. Instead of fighting the case, they settled with a donation to Trump’s library just as ABC did. (The head of 60 Minutes resigned saying the organization had been compromised by Donald Trump.)
Steven Colbert criticized that settlement this week. He flat out called the settlement a bribe, which it is. In response, CBS announced the cancellation of Colbert’s show. They called this a financial decision but Colbert is, by far, the top rated show in his timeslot. They are lying. They are firing Colbert because he criticized the payment to Trump and Paramount does not want to cross the president.
He is currently suing Ann Selzer, a pollster, and the paper who published her Iowa polling. The president of The United States is filing lawsuits against people who publish POLLS he doesn’t like.
He has sued the New York Times multiple times for running op-eds critical of him or for accurate news coverage, including suing his own niece for revealing his shady financial dealings. He has sued The Washington Post multiple times for the same reasons. He even sued the Pulitzer Prize board for giving out awards to papers exposing his connections to Russia. He has sued Bob Woodward and Michael Wolfe, as well as their publishers for writing books critical of him. He sued CNN over an opinion piece about his numerous lies about the 2020 election.
It isn’t merely unusual for the sitting president to file all of these legal actions against the press. It doesn’t happen. Or rather it did not until Donald Trump was elected.
Many of these lawsuits end up getting dismissed as they are WILDLY without merit. But the goal here isn’t to win the cases. The goal is to harass and intimidate the media into covering him favorably.
And while we do still get stories about his wrongdoing and op-eds about why having the country run by a fascist rapist is possibly a bad thing, the people who break those stories and write those op-eds are being driven out of the media institutions that employ them at an alarming rate.
Steven Colbert isn’t even a journalist. He is a COMEDIAN. But his humor criticizes Donald Trump and points to the surrender of his employer to Trump’s threats. Therefore he had to go. They are directly following the playbook of every modern dictatorship which has destroyed freedom of the press.
The freedom of the press is not being taken away from us.
It is being willfully ceded to a tyrant.
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