Control the Media, Control the World
The First Amendment implications of right-wing media dominance are staggering. It's up to us to ensure that the First Amendment remains intact.
Even Donald Trump’s most vocal critics acknowledge his uncanny ability to manipulate the media. It’s hard to deny that particular skill. But it’s alarming when you evaluate his success not just at staying in front of the cameras to bolster his fragile ego but also his willingness to use the levers of power to bend the entire media landscape to his will. But that skill has already proven to be a serious threat to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
One of the most obvious recent breaches of the First Amendment is the arrest and malicious prosecution of Georgia Fort and Don Lemon, independent journalists who documented a protest in Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The protest was newsworthy mostly because of the recent murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis but also because the pastor of said church works as an ICE agent.
Trump has now had sufficient political visibility for ten years to flex his media manipulation muscles, and he shows no hesitation to use the levers of government to impose his will on the media, either by taking outrageous actions that change what the media are looking at or by squelching or silencing the ability to report in an unbiased way. The arrests of Fort and Lemon are merely the latest hamfisted attempt at changing the narrative.
The net result of Trump’s media manipulation is that fewer and fewer Americans are getting unbiased information from their news sources.
By the time Trump entered the White House in 2017, the media landscape was already vastly different than it was even a decade before. Since he’s been in office, Trump and the right wing have exerted their influence in ways previously unimaginable. Here’s a brief rundown of how Trump has flexed his power over our media in the last several years:
Television
Fox News has gone from a right wing network to what has essentially been a propaganda arm of Donald Trump. Messaging from Fox News has aligned simultaneously with messaging from the White House and from Trump-worshiping Republicans. Profits at Fox News consequently have soared.
ABC News capitulated and paid Trump $15 million in a specious defamation suit that Trump filed against the news organization, rather than fighting the lawsuit in court.
Following suit, CBS News agreed to shell out $16 million to Trump because he didn’t like the way a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. It has been speculated that CBS chose not to defend itself because they didn’t want pending litigation to impede the imminent merger of ViacomCBS (CBS News’ parent company at the time) with Paramount-Skydance. Shortly thereafter, the Trump-supporting head of Paramount-Skydance, Chairman and CEO David Ellison, installed Bari Weiss as the new head of CBS News, ending decades of stellar broadcast journalism and turning the network news into another right-wing propaganda machine.
Trump has even attempted to silence the BBC, with a $20 billion lawsuit claiming that their editing of his Jan. 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” speech was somehow defamatory.
Trump and the Republicans have successfully defunded and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and are in a continuing fight to do the same with PBS.
Fox News imitators have sprung up like weeds — Newsmax, OAN, RSBN — and they’re all purveyors of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories. Additionally, Sinclair Broadcasting continues its efforts to infiltrate local television news, requiring their stations to air right-wing features during their local broadcasts. (Sinclair has accumulated 185 local TV stations in 85 different markets.)
Comcast spun off MSNBC and unhitched it from NBC News, forming the new MS NOW network, one of the few remaining left-leaning outlets on anyone’s dial.
Newspapers
The first and favorite media target of Trump’s ire has been the New York Times. Trump continues to file a never-ending string of frivolous lawsuits against the Times whenever he believes they’re not deferential enough to his narrative.
Shortly after the start of his second term, Trump banned Associated Press reporters from the White House press pool. The AP was founded in 1846 and has provided respected syndicated content to newspapers all over the country and the world for 180 years. Apparently that longevity doesn’t provide sufficient journalistic credibility for this administration, especially when their reporters ask questions that make anyone in the administration uncomfortable.
Multi-billionaire and Trump minion Jeff Bezos (of Amazon fame) purchased the Washington Post and almost immediately started imposing his and Trump’s political views on the paper. A number of staffers resigned in protest of Bezos’ encroaching on the independence of the Post’s opinion writers, triggered by his refusal to allow an endorsement of Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign. Subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in droves. The once venerable news outlet is now facing layoffs of some 300 staffers, around 30% of their reporting staff. In Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles’ character casually writes to his trustee, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” In Bezos’ case, he would have written “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper into the ground.”
Unlike many of Trump’s efforts, when Trump tried to extort and muzzle The Guardian, his effort was swiftly shut down in a Florida circuit court.
Social Media
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he claimed it would be a bastion of free speech. Instead, in very short order, both by mismanagement and through intentional “enshittification,” it has become a cesspool of the worst kind of right-wing trolls who propagate misinformation and hate speech at an alarming pace.
Virtually all of the heads of social media companies have bent the knee to Donald Trump, in the form of huge campaign contributions, gifts, fake trophies, and all manner of sycophantic adulation. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Twitter), Tim Cook (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Sundar Pichai (Google), and even Arvind Krishna (IBM) have all sucked up to the Trump administration in one form or another, giving themselves cover by claiming it’s their responsibility as CEOs of their respective companies. They’ve sacrificed any moral or ethical concerns they may have had in the interest of winning or maintaining contracts with the federal government.
Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) even went so far as to name Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump advisor, as its President and Vice Chairperson. While that was happening, they’ve been in the process of laying off thousands of employees.
Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, serves two purposes: It provides what has become the primary method of communication between the President and the American people, and it provides a steady stream of income for Trump himself. The added benefit to Trump is that he can post whatever lies, racist memes, and hate speech he chooses, and the rest of the nation’s (and the world’s) media republish is ravings on other platforms.
Overshadowed by all of this and almost forgotten less than a year after it was struck down by Trump’s FCC is the widely accepted concept of net neutrality — the concept that internet service providers (ISPs) shouldn’t favor one content creator over another. Aside from the implications of the decision itself, some of those same ISPs have been large donors to Trump’s election campaigns — just another in a long list of conflicts of interest.
Radio
During his first term, Trump signaled to the world exactly how extreme he was when he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Honor — an honor previously given to humanitarians, musicians, a cardiologist, poets, astronauts — to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing hate radio blatherer. That further elevated Limbaugh and his brand of radio so that, in large swaths of the country, right-wing AM radio has achieved dominance and AM stations have become localized de facto propaganda arms of the Trump administration.
Having convinced the Republicans in Congress to defund the CPB, Trump and the GOP are still working to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Any journalism that operates independent of Trump’s messaging desires is a tremendous threat to his administration, because they have been willing to speak the truth. So far, NPR has managed to survive, but its long term viability is still at severe risk.
Speaking of journalists willing to speak the truth, Trump banned April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks from the White House briefing room, because she asked uncomfortable questions. We can’t overlook the fact that there’s a racist overtone to this exclusion, particularly because Black women are especially triggering to Trump.
SiriusXM, the subscription satellite radio service, is pretty much the only place to find progressive views on the radio, with a small handful of terrestrial radio stations being the exception. But even SiriusXM also features several right-wing stations.
Movie Studios
Prior to Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post, Amazon bought MGM, the historic movie studio. That purchase proved fruitful for Bezos because it has not only made him a lot of money, it recently became handy as a tool to suck up to Trump, with the producing of the “Melania” propaganda film. The movie has received universally dreadful reviews, but no matter. It helped Bezos cozy up to the administration, and it only cost Bezos around $75 million.
Campaign financier Larry Ellison (of Oracle) purchased the Paramount conglomerate that includes Paramount Studios, CBS Television, and multiple cable television outlets. As mentioned earlier, Ellison appointed his son, David, as the head of the renamed Paramount-Skydance empire. But that wasn’t big enough. They’ve been in a battle with Netflix for the rights to purchase Warner Brothers Discovery (another media conglomerate). The First Amendment implications would be terrifying should they succeed.
Another frightening facet to Paramount/Warner/Netflix battle is the fact that the Trump-zealot Heritage Foundation seems to think it has enough pull with the administration and with the corporate world that it should weigh in on the deal. Apparently, they’re not satisfied with all the damage that Project 2025 has already done; they want to make sure no other voices are heard. Not only is this administration in favor of monopolies, they’re very specific as to which monopolies should be allowed to exist.
In any administration, any one or two of these shifts in the media landscape would be a red flag. In their totality, they’re a serious threat to the freedom of the press that is guaranteed in the First Amendment.
The term “fake news” started as pushback against objectively untrue reporting by Fox News and other early adopters of right wing media tactics. But Donald Trump appropriated that phrase and turned it into criticism of any legitimate journalism that reported any story that he didn’t approve of. He particularly applied the term to any criticism of his policies and especially reporting of his many failures.
Trump’s tactic was nothing new. The Germans had a name for it: Lügenpresse. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
So here we are, approaching the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the nation — a nation whose founders made certain that freedom of the press was among the freedoms included in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
But gone are the days when media and tech companies at least presented the illusion of independence and freedom. Journalists previously held on to their First Amendment right as if it were a lifeline, because it is. The tech revolution only a couple of decades ago brought to prominence groups of scrappy innovators who were the outsiders of society who cherished their freedom to innovate. Now, both the old school and new school have succumbed to the pressures from right-wing forces and have essentially given away both their innovation and their power.
There’s a quote that is attributed (or misattributed) to Mark Twain that kind of sums up the world we’ll be living in:
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”
The midterm elections in the fall might be a way to restore First Amendment rights and perhaps even prove that quote to be incorrect. But that will only occur if Democrats prevail in the election and, as important, if we keep pressure on elected Democrats once they’re in office.