on media


News is the casualty in Trump’s war on media


Lawsuits and and axed funding are among the extreme, overt attacks, says Raymond Snoddy


Trump has now taken to suggesting A


mid the mayhem caused by President Donald Trump’s stream of orders, tariffs and threats to Canada,


Panama and Greenland, it would be easy to overlook the threat he poses to the media in the US. Some actions are simply spiteful, such as excluding AP from White House briefings because the news agency has refused to turn the Gulf of Mexico into Trump’s Gulf of America. More generally, the White House has


taken control of access to presidential press conferences and Air Force One and excluded not just AP but also Reuters and the HuffPost. Other moves are much more fundamental, such as ending America’s international broadcasting operations after more than 80 years. Matters are made worse by


billionaire media owners, most notably Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, apparently currying favour with Trump by emasculating one of America’s most iconic newspapers. As he gets into his stride, Trump’s


threats against the media are getting more overt and extreme. The US president has launched a


$2 billion lawsuit against CBS because its 60 Minutes programme has broadcast items critical of his actions in almost every weekly edition since his inauguration. There are fears that CBS owners Paramount might buckle and settle because they are in talks over a merger with Skydance Media and that would require approval by the Trump administration.


that programmes by news channels such as CNN and MSNBC must be illegal because, as he sees it, 98 per cent of what they broadcast is critical of him. Broadcasters have much to fear because of the power a Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission could wield over their licences. The direction of travel is clear and


the attacks on freedom of expression in the US could intensify as Trump’s popularity continues to wane. The journalists on the New York Times and the Washington Post are still reporting the news despite the threats but, for the Post, free comment is a different matter entirely. Not content with blocking Post


editorial writers from backing Kamala Harris, to his shame, Bezos has ruled that the Washington Post of Watergate fame is no longer going to have a broad-based opinion section. Instead, it will focus solely on support


for ‘personal liberties and free markets’. The Washington Post opinions editor David Shipley resigned as did Ruth Marcus, who had worked on the section for 40 years, after Bezos killed a piece she wrote opposing the policy change. The most outrageous attack on the US media is the ‘pause’ – in effect the closure – of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcast news to countries where freedom of expression is suppressed. Funding has been halted and hundreds of staff placed on ‘administrative leave’. Trump is also threatening to pull federal funding for PBS television and National Public Radio. What happens next in Trump versus the American media? The likeliest will be a blizzard of legal


cases citing the first amendment to the US Constitution, which states that


Congress ‘shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’. How does any of this affect the UK? The main impact so far has been on


right-wing commentators, who seemed willing, until recently, to treat Trump as a normal president despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Harry Cole, political editor of The Sun,


hedged his bets in January by predicting that while the second Trump presidency may well be a disaster, there was just as much chance that it would not be. “And whisper it quietly – he might actually do a good job,” Cole suggested. In the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson


clung to a belief in Trump by insisting he has a viable plan to end the Ukraine war. Trump, Johnson argues, will achieve ‘a reasonable peace’ by taking such tough action against Putin that he will have to agree. Unfortunately, Putin does not seem to read the Daily Mail. More remarkably, Andrew Neil no


“ ”


The direction of travel is clear and attacks on freedom of expression could intensify as Trump’s popularity wanes


less, wrote in his Mail column in March, one of the most abject mea culpas in the history of modern journalism, apologising for giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Trump’s behaviour had convinced Neil, some would say very belatedly, of something he had feared in his heart of hearts – that the president was ‘an unprincipled, narcissistic charlatan’. Now Neil, who had seen ‘the vacuous


Kamala Harris’ as the greater threat, admitted he had been wrong all along. “What fools we were not to take him


[Trump] at his own estimation, but to think he could amount to something better. We have no right to be surprised that the man who tried to overturn democracy in his own country doesn’t give a damn if it’s now snuffed out in Ukraine,” Neil concluded. Indeed. Quite. But I suppose better the sinner that repenteth…


theJournalist |09


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