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In early 2017, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, an adviser to our organization, Protect Democracy, who’d spent roughly a decade living in Hungary during the rise of Viktor Orbán, offered us a warning: beware that the newly elected American president might copy Orbán’s autocratic technique of using the regulatory state to punish media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
Prime Minister Orbán did this to great effect. The barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment he directed at his media critics, coupled with orders that his government agencies direct public advertising dollars only to media sufficiently loyal to him, drove independent media from the field. Orbán didn’t neutralize the media overnight. It happened gradually and in plain sight.
We have examined Trump’s public statements, and put them together with the actions of the government and of media outlets over the past eight years, and we fear that, despite the conventional wisdom that American media independence survived the tests of Trump’s first term unscathed, developments in the years since he left office tell a different story. That story is that, like Orbán’s, Trump’s campaign against the media has taken time to have its intended effect, but have an effect it has, and the trajectory discernible now, in hindsight, doesn’t bode well for the media should Trump return to power.
Scheppele had ample reason to warn us as she did. During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump talked openly about using the Orbán playbook. As a candidate, Trump often denigrated media he disliked; he took particular aim at CNN (“fake news,” “garbage”) and the Washington Post (“a disgrace to journalism”).
As CNN and the Post continued to report on Trump in ways he did not like, he openly threatened that, if elected, he would seek revenge against them. At a rally in early 2016, he called out Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post, and said: “If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”
Trump told campaign crowds that as president he would block a proposed merger between Time Warner, CNN’s parent company, and AT&T. At a rally in Pennsylvania on October 22, 2016, he said CNN was part of the media “power structure” trying to suppress his votes. “AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN,” Trump said, “a deal we will not approve in my administration.”
In November 2017, the Department of Justice sued to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger. The then-head of the Antitrust Division denied that Trump had directed the DOJ to intervene. (A judge ruled against the DOJ, and the deal closed in June 2018.) As far as Bezos and the Post, in the spring of 2018, President Trump pushed the US postmaster general to raise Postal Service charges on Amazon. At the same time, the president tweeted false statements about Amazon and his threats to raise its postal shipping rates. Amazon’s market value briefly plunged $60 billion.
Having been prepared by Professor Scheppele’s warnings, on October 16, 2018, Protect Democracy filed suit on behalf of PEN American Center, a nonprofit organization representing writers, journalists, and free speech, against President Donald Trump. The basis of our argument was that Trump “threatened to engage, and has engaged, in conduct intended to retaliate against specific news organizations and journalists whose content and viewpoints displease him. Through his actions, Defendant Trump has intentionally conveyed to all writers and journalists that if he objects to their coverage, they may be subject to retaliation by the federal government. That conduct violates the Constitution.”
We asserted that Trump’s actions, like Orbán’s, were intended to chill a free press in violation of the First Amendment. The court dismissed some of our claims—including the ones related to CNN and the Post—and sustained others, and eventually the suit was settled when the Biden administration took office.
Some observers wondered if our alarm about Trump’s actions had been overblown. After all, numerous outlets had published award-winning investigative pieces on the Trump administration’s abuses of power. The New York Times and Washington Post won Pulitzers for this work. In the first draft of history, at least, the Fourth Estate had held its ground.
In November 2022, the New York Times published a meticulously reported feature on the AT&T–Time Warner deal. James Stewart spoke with more than two dozen sources, including on-the-record interviews with executives from both AT&T and Time Warner. Jeff Bewkes, then Time Warner’s chief executive, told Stewart, referring to AT&T executives: “Of course they weren’t so stupid as to say, ‘Trump wants this, and if you do it he’ll do what we want,’” Bewkes recalled. What AT&T wanted at the time was for the administration to approve the merger. “But [AT&T chief executive] Randall [Stephenson] was always probing me. ‘What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
In February 2022, as Trump seemed to rise from the political dead to become a viable potential candidate for returning to the White House, CNN dismissed Zucker and replaced him with Chris Licht. There were other reasons that contributed to Zucker’s dismissal, but nevertheless, the man Trump wanted out was out, and a broader change was underway. According to David Zaslav, CNN’s executive boss, Licht was to make the network’s coverage “more neutral.” Licht fired several CNN reporters whose coverage was critical of Trump, and Licht staged a CNN town hall that seemed like a rally to launch Trump’s reelection campaign. If anything, CNN’s shift to be more accommodating to Trump was too aggressive: Licht was let go after his mismanagement of such a rapid U-turn led to a staff revolt.
What’s changed since Licht? Only last month, when Oliver Darcy asked former CNN anchor Don Lemon for his “thoughts on how this election is being covered” and if he thought journalists were “being blunt enough in calling out Donald Trump’s appalling behavior,” Lemon responded: “‘The system,’ in many ways, doesn’t allow them to. The corporation doesn’t allow them to.”
Along with the changes at CNN, over at the Post another change at the top was in the works. In early November 2023, Bezos announced that he was installing a new publisher: Will Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch executive who has spent most of his career in right-wing media. Lewis’s ascent to the top of the Post masthead, as with most of his career, has been dogged by scandal and allegations of unethical conduct. But it’s one allegation (denied by Lewis) that is perhaps most relevant here: that as an informal adviser to the UK’s Trumpian alter ego, Boris Johnson, Lewis advised Johnson and his staff to destroy evidence in order to protect Johnson from the burgeoning “partygate” scandal.
Mainstream American media is a small dataset. A few examples do not demonstrate correlation, let alone causation. But history—be it decades old or as fresh as yesterday’s news—instructs us to pay very close attention to the fact that, of all major media outlets, the two that Trump targeted with the most force during his first term have been the two that changed their leadership.
This, it seems to us, is what Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, calls “anticipatory obedience.” In his book On Tyranny, Snyder, who is also an adviser to our organization, writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Trump seems to have learned the lesson that his approach is working and has expanded his targets from old media to new. Attuned to both the key role that social media platforms would play as loci of information during the election and the fact that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices in 2020 to help make up for governmental shortfalls necessary to administer an election successfully during a pandemic, on July 9 of this year, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with prison if he did any such thing again. Receiving the message loud and clear, three days later Meta announced it was removing a set of restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts that had been placed there after Trump previously violated the company’s terms of service. Zuckerberg then praised Trump as a “badass” and announced that his philanthropic arm would not be repeating any of its past support for nonpartisan election administration.
In March of 2017, only two months after Trump’s inauguration and eight months before Trump’s DOJ would attempt to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, David Frum predicted that very DOJ move and much of what else was to come, adopting the perspective of an observer from the near future—2021—and an America on the cusp of a second Trump term. It’s staggering how much Frum got exactly correct, or pretty darn close.
As Frum wrote:
“The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warner’s CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trump’s definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of the Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage. Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true.…
“Trump-critical media do continue to find elite audiences. Their investigations still win Pulitzer Prizes; their reporters accept invitations to anxious conferences about corruption, digital-journalism standards, the end of NATO, and the rise of populist authoritarianism. Yet somehow all of this earnest effort feels less and less relevant to American politics. President Trump communicates with the people directly via his Twitter account, ushering his supporters toward favorable information at Fox News or Breitbart.”
More than seven years later, in hindsight, perhaps Frum’s otherwise prescient predictions weren’t pessimistic enough.
Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter are contributors to CJR from the nonprofit United to Protect Democracy. Ian Bassin is the executive director of United to Protect Democracy and a former associate White House counsel. Maximilian Potter is a writer-editor with United to Protect Democracy, a 2023 finalist for a National Magazine Award, and the 2023 winner of the Military Reporters and Editors James Crawley Award.