Donald Trump deploys new tactics to manage the media
“Why don’t you wear a suit?…Do you own a suit?” The first question from the White House press pool to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, during his visit to the Oval Office on February 28th, came from an outlet unfamiliar to many viewers. News outfits such as Reuters and the Associated Press (AP) had not made it into the meeting. Instead the challenge came from a reporter for Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming site.
Two days earlier the White House had announced that the travelling pool of reporters around the president would no longer be selected by the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had organised the rota for a century, but picked by the government. The shuffle in personnel—and the resulting change in tone of questioning—is the most visible move so far in Donald Trump’s approach to managing the news. More changes are likely.
The president is backing up his criticism of media outlets with a barrage of lawsuits. He recently extracted $15m and an apology from ABC News (for saying he was found liable for rape, rather than sexual abuse) and is fighting consumer-fraud cases against CBS News (over edits to a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, his opponent last year) and the Des Moines Register (for publishing a poll showing him trailing in Iowa, a state he later won).
Such cases seem designed mainly to suck up defendants’ time. But news organisations must take them more seriously than in the past. One reason is a more hostile public. At the start of Mr Trump’s first term, in 2016, 76% of adults said they had some trust in national news outlets. By last year the figure was 59%, and 40% among Republicans, according to the Pew Research Centre. Libel trials in America are heard by juries. If a plaintiff picks the right county they can expect a sympathetic audience—and judge.
Defendants must also weigh the possibility of retribution from government agencies. Meta, which paid $25m in January to settle a complaint by Mr Trump for being suspended from Facebook, faces an antitrust hearing soon at which far more is at stake. Paramount, CBS’s owner, needs permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a proposed merger with Skydance Media; some at the company fear problems if it fights the “60 Minutes” case. The FCC, a dowdy bureaucracy that manages broadcast licences, has become an unlikely attack-dog under Mr Trump, probing everything from media firms’ diversity policies to a California radio bulletin that may have revealed details of an undercover immigration operation.
Covering the White House, meanwhile, is becoming more difficult. The recent purge of the press pool is not the first time Mr Trump has sought to bar journalists: during his first term the White House withdrew the press pass of Jim Acosta, a CNN reporter (and a “rude, terrible person”), after a row during a press conference. The White House backed down after a judge intervened, but this time it is claiming that attending smaller gatherings in the Oval Office or onboard Air Force One is “a privilege....not a legal right”.
The AP, which has been banned from press events for using the name “Gulf of Mexico” alongside the president’s preferred “Gulf of America”, failed to persuade a judge immediately to restore its access; another hearing is due on March 20th. The next battleground over transparency may be in immigration courts, which do not have the same presumption of access as other federal courts, says Bruce Brown of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a free-speech lobby.
Where is the next front? Reporters worry that it will become harder to speak to confidential sources. Joe Biden’s government reined in the use of subpoenas against journalists, which Barack Obama had used aggressively to pursue leakers. In 2022 the Department of Justice banned the use of subpoenas to seize reporters’ notes or demand their testimony. But there is nothing to stop Mr Trump undoing this. Case law offers little comfort: in 2014 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by James Risen, a New York Times reporter who was compelled to testify in a case against an alleged CIA leaker.
The Supreme Court has never had to determine whether journalists could themselves be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Last year Julian Assange pleaded guilty to breaking it by publishing secrets on WikiLeaks, but the government considered Mr Assange a hacker, not a journalist. Clayton Weimers of Reporters Without Borders, a journalists’ organisation, argues that the episode nonetheless opened the door to prosecutions. “They’ve set a precedent here that these acts, which are exactly what journalists do all the time, are punishable under the Espionage Act.”
Even for those who do not see the Assange case as definitive, prosecuting a journalist would be a big step; news outlets would throw everything they have against such a case, says Mr Brown. “It would be existential. But a lot of existential things are happening in the US right now.”■
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