On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that essentially reaffirmed free speech, which is already enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
The order alleged that the previous administration of President Joe Biden “trampled on free speech” by censoring “Americans’ speech on online platforms”, and forced social media companies to comply under the guise of combatting “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “malinformation”.
What the order overlooked was that members of both parties routinely asked social media companies – including X (formerly Twitter), now owned by Trump ally Elon Musk – to remove unfavourable content.
At the same time, Trump regularly targets platforms and people critical of him, his allies and his agenda. His attacks on more traditional institutions of the press – like TV/radio news networks and newspapers – have escalated since winning the election.
“We are seeing a multipronged attack on free speech, but not just any free speech. I think, in particular, we’re seeing a multipronged attack on the ability of journalists as well as individuals to call into question anything that Donald Trump or that the Trump administration does,” Heidi Kitrosser, a constitutional law professor who focuses on freedom of speech issues at Northwestern University, told Al Jazeera.
“We’re seeing an effort to cow journalists into submission, not only to avoid criticism of Donald Trump and the people who work under him, but to avoid reporting the news in any way that he dislikes.”
Election spin
After Trump won the presidency, he went after several media outlets. He filed two cases against The Des Moines Register and its pollster, J Ann Selzer, after it ran a poll suggesting Trump was trailing Vice President Harris.
Pollsters predicted a tight race from the get-go, and the paper was no exception. They were right. Trump won but not by the landslide he and his allies have claimed. The race was actually one of the tightest in American electoral history and the smallest since 1968. Trump ultimately finished with less than half of the popular vote.
Trump sued ABC News in March 2024 after its longtime anchor George Stephanopoulos made comments on air that Trump had been “found liable for raping” writer E Jean Carroll. In 2023, a court found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, but that is a different transgression from rape under New York law. ABC agreed to pay $15m towards Trump’s presidential foundation to settle the lawsuit.
Trump is also going after CBS’s news magazine programme 60 Minutes. The president suggested that the programme deceptively edited an interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to make the former vice president look good and had cut out parts that did not in an effort to sway the will of voters in her favour. CBS has denied the allegations.
Trump also called for the broadcaster to lose its licence. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gives local TV and radio broadcasters eight-year licences to use public airwaves. There are limited times when the FCC can revoke licences, like if a station stops broadcasting altogether. The next set of TV stations up for licensing renewals isn’t until the fall of 2028.
Ahead of the elections, Trump also threatened to investigate MSNBC and NBC for the networks’ coverage of him. Trump allies claimed that NBC and Comcast committed election interference by allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live for 90 seconds, even though Trump was granted the same amount of time on the same network less than 24 hours later during a NASCAR race.
Trump long threatened to change libel laws to make it easier to sue media organisations, but since libel laws are under the purview of the states and are not federal, he actually can’t change them.
“I think what he meant was that he wants to make it easier to go after a journalist using whatever tools, assuming he had some idea of what he was talking about,” said Kitrosser.
Post-inauguration escalation
While on the campaign trail, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a blueprint for overhauling the federal government produced by The Heritage Foundation. But since winning the election, he has appointed several authors from the document to lead different government departments, including appointing Brendan Carr to lead the FCC.
The FCC has since opened investigations into public broadcasters NPR and PBS for allegations that the public broadcasters ran commercials, which both have denied. Federal funding is contingent on stations not running commercials or other promotions for for-profit entities.
Republicans targeting the public media is nothing new. In 2012, Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, said he intended to pull funding for public broadcasting. In 2007, then-President George W Bush proposed a 25 percent cut to public broadcasting. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon explored eliminating public television.
On Trump’s first day in office, he appointed Carr to lead the FCC by an executive order. Two days later, the FCC reinstated complaints against the three major networks in the United States – NBC, CBS, and ABC.
For instance, in September, Trump had urged the FCC to cancel licences for ABC after the network moderated the presidential debate. The agency recently reinstated that complaint, even though it has no authority to revoke any of these licences.
Then, in a conspiracy-laden rant on Truth Social, Trump suggested that the US government illegally paid news outlets including Politico for coverage. In reality, however, the federal government paid for subscriptions to news publications, which is not out of the ordinary.
Under Carr’s direction, the FCC also pushed CBS to hand over transcripts and raw video of the Harris interview that the Trump campaign alleged was doctored. CBS complied with the agency’s request. The FCC published the transcript and full video of the interview, which CBS also did on its website.
“This is a head-scratcher to me, for CBS to claim that it is legally compelled to turn over these documents as if it has no choice. Of course, it has a choice. There is a legal system where you can resist unconstitutional demands from the government, and they’re free to assert their rights as plenty of news outlets do,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Al Jazeera.
CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, is reportedly preparing to settle a lawsuit over the interview, prompting an internal backlash, according to the newsletter Puck, including from some of the most senior correspondents at CBS. Journalists at the network have threatened to resign or speak out publicly. Anderson Cooper, who, in addition to his role as an anchor at CNN, is a correspondent for 60 Minutes, reportedly urged staffers not to resign in protest.
Cooper did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
“When you’ve got a political stunt like this for an interview that was only edited for length, it would be so easy to just make the whole thing public and moot the issue. The reason 60 Minutes doesn’t air interviews in their entirety is that the show is 60 minutes long. The internet exists now. There is infinite, practically infinite space to post interviews in full. Why even wait for a legal dispute,” Stern added.
One of the FCC’s five commissioners, Anna Gomez, a President Biden appointee, slammed Carr’s move, saying the move to go after CBS is an attempt to intimidate the press.
“It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions. The Communications Act clearly prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcasters and the First Amendment protects journalistic decisions against government intimidation,” Gomez said in a public statement (PDF).
Carr did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Stern believes that ABC parent Disney and Paramount’s move to settle is because of business interests outside of their news operations. For instance, a merger between Paramount and Skydance is currently pending.
CBS did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
“I think it speaks to a broader climate of fear and speaks to what the future could hold, whether or not it’s better to settle versus, you know, letting things play out in court,” Katherine Jacobsen, programme coordinator for Canada, the US and the Caribbean at the Committee To Protect Journalists, told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has also reshuffled the workspace for the press at the Pentagon. The agency, now led by a former Fox News host, swapped its previous spots for the mainstream press and replaced them with far-right publishers, with the exception of HuffPost. In place of NBC News, it brought in One America News Network– an extremely far-right network that now has a show hosted by Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who, according to a House Ethics Committee investigation, paid several women for sex, including a minor, and was briefly Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
The Defense Department did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Renowned journalist Katie Couric wrote on X that the move would hinder journalists who cover the Pentagon from doing their work.
Representatives for Couric did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for an interview.
“It’s unfortunate but predictable that Trump is going to engage in that kind of favouritism. But it’s also an opportunity to reevaluate approaches and possibly do some better journalism,” Stern added.
“My hope is that any outlets that are excluded and do not get the access that they are accustomed to, use the opportunity to pivot away from access journalism and double down on investigative reporting that does not require them to be in the briefing room when government officials give their spin,” he said.
On top of this, Trump’s nominee for FBI director Kash Patel has threatened on far right-wing podcasts to go after journalists.
In the White House briefing room, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a new media chair for podcasters and content creators. The White House said that more than 7,000 applied, but it didn’t say on what criteria would the administration select the chair.
The White House did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for an interview.
Creators are a blossoming category of media but do not have the same editorial standards required by traditional news organisations. According to a report from UNESCO, 62 percent of news and commentary creators say they do not verify information before sharing it.
In addition to attacks on press freedoms, Trump’s team and his allies at the federal, state and local levels have over the past few years pushed a number of measures that hinder free expression.
These measures include book bans teaching certain topics like critical race theory, limiting access to research resources, threatening to deport non-citizen protesters, forcing certain religious belief systems in government settings over others, and pushing to outlaw access to sexual material.
History repeats Itself
Trump’s isn’t the first administration to have a hostile relationship with the press. There were serious concerns on that front even during the administration of President Barack Obama.
Even as Obama would go into the ‘lion’s den’ – notably doing interviews with Fox News Sunday and even with former primetime opinion host, Bill O’Reilly (who was forced to resign in 2017 amidst sexual misconduct allegations), he also came down hard on news leaks and prosecuted eight leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act. The Department of Justice under Obama also subpoenaed journalists at The Associated Press and Fox News.
“The Obama administration’s use of the Espionage Act was extremely troubling. The administration was far too trigger-happy about going after people who serve as media sources,” Kitrosser, the constitutional law professor, said.
Trump has escalated animosity towards the press and has called journalists the “enemy of the people”. He regularly threatens news organisations and has aggressively gone after whistleblowers.
The first Trump administration had the Justice Department investigate eight journalists as part of probes into 334 leaks during his time in office. The Justice Department also seized phone records for reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN.
“The Obama administration kind of ginned up this very troubling weapon and used it in some troubling ways. But in the Trump administration, it’s basically in the hands of a very vindictive, lawless president who has made clear his desire to go after anyone he perceives as a personal enemy,” Kitrosser added.
