‘60 Minutes,’ the Associated Press, an Iowa newspaper: Trump’s attacks on the media reach new heights
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President Trump has long needled news outlets that got under his skin.
He branded CNN and others “fake news.” He repeatedly railed against journalists as the “enemy of the people” during his first term — rhetoric that news groups tried to shrug off or wore as a badge of honor.
But six weeks into Trump’s second administration, the attacks have carried a greater sting. In a recent rant on social media about MSNBC, Trump accused the liberal news network of being “an illegal arm of the Democratic Party.” He took direct aim at the network’s parent, Comcast, and its chairman, Brian Roberts, calling him a “lowlife.”
“They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country,” Trump wrote.
Presidents frequently skirmish with the press. Richard Nixon famously waged a pitched battle, placing several journalists on his notorious “enemies list.” But Trump’s broadsides have reached new heights and media companies have scrambled to respond.
Some have raced to reset relations. To settle a lawsuit Trump brought early last year against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, Walt Disney Co. agreed to contribute $15 million to a Trump presidential library, plus $1 million for Trump’s legal fees.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta contributed $25 million to end a beef that began after Trump was booted from Facebook following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Trump sued Facebook in 2021, alleging free speech violations.
President Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, the leader of the world’s largest social network, have butted heads in the past. Now Zuckerberg is reshaping Meta for the Trump era.
CBS owner Paramount Global has been racked for weeks over whether to settle Trump’s $20-billion lawsuit over edits to a “60 Minutes” interview, a suit that 1st Amendment experts say is frivolous.
The Associated Press went to federal court to reverse a ban of its journalists after the White House booted the news service for declining to adopt Trump’s name for the Gulf of Mexico — the Gulf of America.
“The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit.
“Asking the President of the United States questions in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One is a privilege granted to journalists, not a legal right,” the White House responded in a statement.
Hollywood’s backing away from political battles began even before Trump beat Harris. It all speaks to a moment when the media and entertainment industry is destabilized.
The news media, which prides itself on being America’s watchdog, risks being neutered by a confluence of social, political and economic forces. An emboldened president and his allies have launched a vigorous campaign to use levers of government to intimidate an increasingly fragmented and polarized media, media experts say.
“Media organizations, especially starting with the first Trump term, defined themselves as the resistance to Trump,” UCLA 1st Amendment law professor Eugene Volokh said. “It’s unsurprising that Trump is returning that hostility. I don’t think he ever particularly liked them, but now it seems that he dislikes them even more.”
The White House declined to comment for this story. However, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a White House briefing last month, “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.”
The administration made other moves against organizations the president views as unfriendly. Trump officials ditched a decades-long policy of having the White House Correspondents’ Assn. select reporters in the press pool that covers the president in smaller spaces, including the Oval Office. Now, Trump and his team will hand-pick the reporters.
The U.S. State Department also ordered employees to cancel subscriptions to several prominent news organizations, including the New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg and the AP.
Threats to revoke broadcast licenses
Trump long stewed over his treatment by major news organizations, Democrats in Congress and the Department of Justice, which launched probes into his conduct and the Jan. 6 riot.
While campaigning, Trump frequently said the government should revoke broadcast licenses of certain news outlets.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission, got to work even before he was elevated to chairman. In December, Carr sent a letter to Disney’s Chief Executive Bob Iger, accusing ABC of contributing to an “erosion in public trust.”
Within hours of being sworn in, Carr dismantled the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Two days later, he reinstated news bias complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS — cases that his Democratic predecessor had dismissed.
Carr later launched a review of Comcast’s internal initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
The action by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr shines a spotlight on fears that President Trump will use his power to threaten media outlets that don’t support him.
The flurry of moves reverberated throughout the industry and deepened a rift on the commission, which currently has two Republicans and two Democrats. (A fifth commissioner, a Trump-appointed Republican, is expected to take office soon.)
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, a Democrat on the panel, said in an interview that Carr was setting a “dangerous” precedent.
“What you are seeing is our licensing authority being weaponized,” Gomez said. “The biggest threats to free speech are not coming from Big Tech or from the media. They’re actually coming from the government itself.”
Carr’s office did not respond to a request for comment but last week at a Semafor media conference, he said it was his job to make sure that broadcasters operate in the public interest.
“If you are a broadcaster and you don’t want to serve the public interest, you are free to turn your license in,” Carr said.
Waning trust in media
Long before becoming a politician, Trump was a New York tabloid sensation never far from a camera or microphone. In 2004, he transformed into a TV star with NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
There Trump honed his knack for reality TV — and making hay from opponents’ vulnerabilities.
His attacks on the press have capitalized on diminishing public confidence in the media.
A half-century ago, Americans overwhelmingly supported the press during its coverage of the Watergate scandal, which prompted Nixon’s 1974 resignation. Nearly 70% of U.S. adults surveyed by Gallup said they trusted the media then.
But by last October, just 31% of U.S. adults polled by Gallup said they trusted the media to “fully, accurately and fairly” report the news. That’s a dramatic decline from 45% in 2018, early in Trump’s first term.
“When you look at those poll numbers coming down and trust in national media absolutely bottoming out, I think the industry should stop and reflect on what they’re doing,” said the FCC’s Carr.
The decline in confidence coincides with a collapse in news business economics over the last two decades.
Three-quarters of newspaper jobs have been lost, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ranks of journalists in state houses and city halls have been thinned. Once-mighty television networks have lost clout amid steep declines in advertising and pay-TV distribution fees.
Social media, increased political polarization and Trump’s stronger standing shifted the field.
That lack of trust has had a ripple effect. Media lawyers increasingly worry about defending libel cases before unsympathetic juries. Losing a lawsuit could devastate an already cash-strapped institution, they say.
“This is a massive shift from even 10 years ago,” University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones said. “The baseline argument about the importance of press freedom in a society has already been undercut.”
Courts have changed. During his first term, Trump appointed 226 federal judges, according to the Pew Research Center. Some are now deciding the biggest tests of press freedom, including the CBS and AP lawsuits.
“A lot of things are coming together right now,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School. “We have an administration that is being very aggressive toward the media, and a media that is afraid. … And that’s frightening.”
Trump’s time out of office may have worked to his advantage.
The president and his lieutenants “had a four-year breather to organize and get their ducks in a row,” said Daniel Suhr, president of the Chicago-based Center for American Rights, a conservative nonprofit that filed media bias complaints at the FCC against ABC, CBS and NBC.
“This team has both the experience and the time to plan well to use the levers of power to achieve their agenda,” Suhr said.
Andersen Jones put it another way, saying years of battering by Trump have taken a heavy toll.
“The question people are now asking is whether that vilification of the press, and an encouragement of harassment against members of the press, was a dangerous table-setting for more aggressive incursions on press freedom,” she said.
Trump clashes with ABC, CBS
Trump and his allies have pounced on media missteps.
A year ago, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News and Stephanopoulos, who incorrectly said on air that Trump had been found liable for rape of author E. Jean Carroll.
In fact, the civil court jury determined Trump was liable for sexual abuse.
Six months later, ABC hosted the sole debate between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Some conservatives cried foul after ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis pushed back on Trump’s false claims, including an assertion that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets.
Trump complained on “Fox & Friends,” saying the government “ought to take away [ABC’s] license.”
Disney agreed to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit involving Stephanoupolos in December.
Linsey Davis, the co-moderator of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, has quietly becoming a rising star at ABC News.
Tensions also have erupted at CBS.
In October, Trump declined an invitation to appear on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Network producers went forward with an interview of Harris, which turned into a tempest when CBS aired two different portions of a Harris answer to a question about the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
“Face the Nation” used a clip that showed Harris giving a convoluted response. When the Harris interview ran the following night on “60 Minutes,” her answer was stronger and more succinct.
Trump and others claimed the interview had been doctored.
CBS producers acknowledged editing the interview, which is common in the news business, but they denied the edits were deceptive.
Trump sued, demanding $10 billion (since increased to $20 billion). He filed the case in Amarillo, Texas, ensuring that it would be heard by a Trump-appointed judge. Last month, the president amended his suit, alleging the interview amounted to consumer fraud.
The FCC separately has been scrutinizing the matter.
The action by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr shines a spotlight on fears that President Trump will use his power to threaten media outlets that don’t support him.
Carr demanded CBS turn over raw transcripts and unedited footage as part of the agency’s investigation into the news bias complaint.
Video released by the FCC and CBS support the broadcaster’s account that Harris was quoted accurately. But leaders at the network’s parent, Paramount, signaled a willingness to settle. Both sides have agreed to have a mediator step in.
Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, and other executives have expressed interest in settling to expedite the company’s sale to David Ellison’s Skydance Media, according to insiders who are not authorized to comment publicly. The deal requires FCC approval because it involves the transfer of CBS station licenses.
“Media companies are now owned by people who want to curry favor with the administration to get other benefits” for other parts of their businesses, Chemerinsky said.
CBS journalists protested Paramount’s settlement talks, insisting they did nothing wrong. First Amendment experts agreed, arguing that paying a big settlement would only further embolden Trump.
“Any time a news organization settles a suit that was plainly winnable, that represents lost 1st Amendment ground,” Andersen Jones said.
Shortly after Disney settled the ABC-Stephanopoulos case, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer.
In his December complaint, Trump accused Iowa’s largest paper of election interference. He was irked by Selzer’s poll, published by the Register days before the election, that suggested Harris could pull off an upset in the state.
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Selzer’s poll showed Harris with a 3% point lead in Iowa. Trump won the state with 56% of the vote.
Trump’s suit argued the poll was concocted in collusion with Democrats in violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. The Register and Selzer denied the allegations and have asked for the case to be dismissed.
“No one in America, whether it’s a regular person or a newspaper, should be afraid to predict the outcome of an election,” Selzer’s attorney Conor Fitzpatrick, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in an interview. “These lawsuits are all designed to discourage people from speaking out. They’re designed to intimidate.”
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