Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
On Wednesday night, President Biden delivered a farewell address from the Oval Office. After some hackneyed remarks invoking the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, he started, as expected, to defend his record in office, but he then moved on to issue a warning about “some things that give me great concern”—namely “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people” whom he went on to describe as a nascent American “oligarchy.” In particular, Biden decried the emergence of a “tech-industrial complex”—explicitly echoing President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, issued sixty-four years ago today. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden said. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
This turn in Biden’s rhetoric perhaps surprised observers who had expected a more traditionally reflective speech, and Biden’s invocation of a tech-industrial complex did, indeed, feel like a weighty and memorable intervention. But it’s been clear for a while that the present technological and communications landscape, and its smothering of the truth, is on Biden’s mind; since the election in November, he’s invoked such themes repeatedly. Before Christmas, he publicly bemoaned the declining reach of traditional news outlets, asking, “Where do you get your news, and how do you know what you’re getting is not just what you’re looking for as opposed to what’s happening?”; in an interview with the left-leaning digital outlet MeidasTouch, Biden echoed his complaint about the disappearance of “editors” and also appeared to criticize billionaire ownership of, and meddling with, well-known newspapers. This month, he has sounded similar notes in an interview with USA Today’s Susan Page—regretting the frictionless spread of misinformation online and invoking the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans as an example—and a sit-down with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that aired last night. After Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced recently that the company would effectively end its existing commitment to fact-checking on its platforms, Biden decried the move as “really shameful.”
These recent remarks invite an obvious question: What has Biden actually done about our warped information ecosystem as president? From its early days—a time, lest we forget, that was defined by the ongoing COVID pandemic, the rollout of vaccines against it, and conspiracy-fueled hesitancy to use them—his administration took a clear-eyed, and at times confrontational, posture against the spread of junk information online: in the summer of 2021, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, described it as “an urgent threat to public health” in his first formal advisory and indicted tech companies for not doing more to fight it; around the same time, Biden memorably remarked that Facebook was “killing people.” Biden would (sort of) walk this comment back, clarifying that he’d been talking about certain Facebook users, but Zuckerberg suggested to Joe Rogan recently that the initial statement had incensed him; during the same interview, Zuckerberg alleged that administration officials had screamed at Meta staff to remove certain COVID claims from their platforms. Whether this is true or not, officials did engage with social platforms on questions of content moderation, a fact that inspired years of controversy—some of it legitimate; some of it less so—and a court challenge that was ultimately thrown out. Biden’s administration has also pursued aggressive antitrust and other legal actions against firms including Meta and Google across a range of issues, from ad monopolies to data handling.
Not that any of this has necessarily had a decisive effect: writing after Biden’s farewell address, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked whether he can really say that he “took all the best steps to ensure that Big Tech helps the country more than it hurts,” noting that, “by virtually every measure, the ‘tech industrial complex’ is more powerful than it was when Biden took office.” As I see it, Biden’s legacy of tech regulation may take a while to come into focus—in no small part it will depend on the extent to which Trump picks up on it, an open question given the discrepancy between his past tech criticism and the company he is presently keeping—and closer tech-watchers than I to decipher. In the end, meaningfully reducing the grip that powerful tech companies have on every part of our lives, let alone cleaning up the information ecosystem we inhabit—and doing all this in four years—was always going to be tough, if not impossible. Biden has suggested in his recent interventions that he still doesn’t even know the best way of going about it.
But on the information front, one clear, if partial, solution would have been to lift up the news media as a source of good, verified information. Biden seemed to recognize this in his farewell address, in his remarks that the free press is “crumbling.” In this domain, however, his legacy already seems pretty clear—and it is, as I see it, ultimately one of failure. At best, it’s a story of missed opportunities; at worst, one of blatant hypocrisy. At the very least, it’s hard to conclude that stopping the crumbling was ever a top Biden priority.
After he took office, in 2021, Biden and his aides received some quick praise for restoring a basic normalcy in their press operations after the chaos, neglect, and disdain of the Trump years: regular briefings, not only in the White House but across government; (mostly) respectful interactions with reporters; no constant bashing of the “fake news.” (“There was a human, and that person said words, and the words made sense,” CNN’s Van Jones marveled after Jen Psaki, Biden’s first press secretary, held her debut briefing.) In a report for the Committee to Protect Journalists a year into Biden’s presidency, Leonard Downie Jr., a former editor of the Washington Post, found a “night and day” difference in its press relations compared with those of the Trump era. Beyond the rhetorical changes, observers highlighted concrete steps like Biden’s efforts to restore the credibility of Voice of America, a US-backed international broadcaster whose independence had been compromised under Trump.
Even in these early days, though, there were tensions between the administration and reporters, not least around access to Biden himself; Psaki and other officials stressed that he was regularly making himself available to reporters in informal settings (in between trips, say), but, compared with his recent predecessors, he rarely sat for formal interviews with major outlets or did press conferences. This trend continued—and last summer, the criticism of it came to a head after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump led to a sudden, angry reckoning over his physical and mental health, culminating eventually in his withdrawal from the presidential race. Biden has done some interviews since then (including, recently, with Page and O’Donnell) but at times on his way out the door he has remained distant from reporters, despite the freedom of the press seeming to be on his mind of late. Per one count in the New York Times last month, he shouted a cumulative fifteen words to traveling reporters during late trips to Africa and South America.
Throughout Biden’s term, I’ve argued that access to the president is important and that Biden has offered up far too little of it, but also that reporters should see such access as a starting point, not the be-all and end-all; among other things, it matters how they use it, and when Biden has done press conferences, the questions have not always been particularly useful. Tensions with major outlets, meanwhile, are regrettable but hardly surprising. As I see it, Biden’s biggest failings on press freedom concern matters that have often garnered less attention than the access question but have more concrete consequences.
Several of these have come overseas. There have been some wins in this area: Biden did, in the end, secure the release in a prisoner swap of Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, two American journalists jailed in Russia. Even this, though, was a complicated victory, one that arguably legitimized the growing practice of hostage-taking on the part of authoritarian regimes and left other journalists for US-backed outlets in jail in the region. And on the whole—from Mexico to Guatemala to Angola—Biden hardly centered press freedom as a foreign policy priority, despite his lofty rhetoric about the fight for global democracy. The tone was set when, in 2021, his administration refused to personally sanction Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for ordering the murder of the Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, despite publishing a report claiming that he did so. (Historically, “there have not been sanctions put in place for the leaders of foreign governments where we have diplomatic relations,” Psaki said at the time.) Nor did the administration take strong action after an Israeli soldier shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera journalist and US citizen, in 2022. Similar can be said of the subsequent war in Gaza, and its devastating toll on journalists. Yesterday, two attendees at a State Department briefing on Gaza were kicked out—one forcibly—after vocally challenging Antony Blinken, the secretary of state.
At home, there were some wins for press freedom, too: after the Biden administration initially seemed to defend Trump-era subpoenas of several journalists’ communications records issued in the course of leak investigations (and, apparently, issued a subpoena to confirm one journalist’s phone number itself), Merrick Garland, the attorney general, issued a new policy largely protecting members of the press against similar intrusions. But overall, the administration has hardly broken radically with its predecessors when it comes to handling leaks: it inherited and saw through the prosecution of Daniel Hale, who handed documents about US drone warfare to The Intercept, and also Trump’s bid to extradite Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, from the UK on Espionage Act charges that many experts said would theoretically criminalize standard reporting practices; in the end, Assange took a plea deal and was freed, but concerns about the precedent that the case set have endured, and two members of Congress and various press freedom groups are still calling on Biden to pardon Assange before he leaves office on Monday. Writing in The Dissenter, a publication about whistleblowing and government secrecy, in recent weeks, Kevin Gosztola has noted that Biden has mostly offered continuity in these and related areas—including responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests, which, per Gosztola, Biden is leaving “in shambles.” And, if Garland’s new policy was welcome, incoming Trump staffers can easily overturn it.
This is because the Biden administration ultimately did not enshrine these and similar protections into law. Since Trump won reelection, ushering in fresh fears about a coming onslaught on the press, media advocates have urged the quick passage of the PRESS Act, a bill that already passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support and would protect journalists against having to give up their sources, but the calls haven’t gone anywhere. Prominent Republicans stood in the bill’s way: Trump called vocally for it to be rejected, while Tom Cotton mounted a crusade against it in the Senate. But press-watchers have nonetheless pinned the failure on the Senate’s Democratic leadership, arguing that they failed to prioritize the bill. Nor was the PRESS Act a rushed end-of-mandate thing—Senator Ron Wyden first introduced it back in 2021, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, albeit barely. The basic concept is even older.
To indict Biden for failing to pass the PRESS Act or something like it as a priority early in his term might nonetheless feel like hindsightism: at the time, the prospect of a returning Trump weaponizing the power of the state against reporters felt like a very distant one; Biden, meanwhile, was busy dealing with the pandemic and expending political capital on ambitious infrastructure and climate laws. Similar could perhaps be said of more positive steps to stop the crumbling of the news industry and its reliance on billionaires. Biden could, for example, have pushed for an aggressive program of federal subsidies to local news outlets, or pushed for some sort of commission to reimagine the shape of the broader media business, if other, apparently more urgent matters weren’t consuming his time and attention.
This, doubtless, would have been a heavy and controversial lift. But Biden’s unexpected success in forcing through radical industrial and pro-worker legislation despite Democrats’ slender congressional margins—and aggressive approach to tech monopolies—suggests that some pro-press measures could have been passed, or at least attempted. (Besides its contribution to democratic health, the media is, ultimately, an industry populated by workers, even if it isn’t always discussed in such terms.) In this area, as in others, Biden’s key failure can perhaps be boiled down to a complacency—an arrogance, even—about the perceived irrevocability of his victory not only over Trump, but the specter of American authoritarianism: the apparent belief that reasserting norms and normality would be enough to save a press that always needed much less abstract assistance than that.
Biden making the health of the press a greater priority—both at home and abroad—would have been good for journalism, and thus for democracy, even if it wouldn’t in isolation have corrected the informational ills Biden complained about in his farewell address. It’s not really the point here, but doing so might also have been good for Biden politically. In addition to concern for the health of democracy, he has, in his recent remarks, seemed to bemoan the fact that free-for-all discourse online drowned out the truth about the policies he did prioritize and his ability to take credit for them. If the media had had greater capacity to cover them he might not always have liked it, of course. But there might, at least, have been more editors.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, James C. Goodale, a former vice chairman and general counsel at the New York Times, asks how strongly the press is likely to fight back against the expected Trumpian onslaught. “The phrase ‘fighting like tigers’ comes from a speech that Judge Harold R. Medina of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit gave in 1975 at a meeting in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria that I organized,” Goodale writes. “That was some time ago, but history has a way of repeating itself. It was an easy sell to those lawyers then. In a short period of time, the New York Times had won landmark cases on libel and prior restraint and carved out a reporter’s privilege of sorts. Now Trump has indicated a desire to overturn some or all of these cases. Does the will to resist exist?”
- Yesterday, Jessica Rosenworcel, the outgoing chair of the Federal Communications Commission, rejected four pending attempts to challenge TV licenses—one brought by critics of Fox News’s 2020 election coverage against a Fox-owned station in Philadelphia, the others by a conservative group based on complaints about coverage of the 2024 election—characterizing them as efforts to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority for political purposes, and as violations of the First Amendment. The move comes as Brendan Carr—whose broad designs Kyle Paoletta recently wrote about for CJR—prepares to take over the FCC; in a statement, he suggested the dismissals could effectively be reversed. CNN’s Stelter has more details.
- Earlier this week, the crisis gripping the Washington Post—where Will Lewis, the CEO, has sparked discontent; top reporters are leaving; and there is concern about owner Jeff Bezos’s recent chumminess with Trump—escalated when more than four hundred staffers wrote to Bezos expressing “alarm” about “recent leadership decisions” and requesting a meeting. (NPR’s David Folkenflik has more.) Now Benjamin Mullin, of the Times, reports that executives at the Post have coined a new mission statement—“Riveting Storytelling for All of America”—as “an internal rallying point for employees” as the paper pursues ambitious new strategic goals.
- Recently, policymakers in the European Union have been in talks with tech companies urging them to commit to new standards aimed at fighting disinformation online, including a policy that would require Google to incorporate fact-checks into its products and its decisions to algorithmically rank or remove content. Google, however, told the EU that it didn’t plan to comply with that requirement, and reiterated the stance yesterday in a letter reported by Sara Fischer, of Axios. An executive said that the policy “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services.”
- And the AP’s David Bauder reports on a new documentary that raises questions about the authorship of the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo taken during the war in Vietnam; the image has always been credited to Nick Ut, an AP photographer, but the documentary suggests that it may actually have been taken by a local “stringer” who had been working as a driver for NBC. The AP probed the claim and said that it has no reason to doubt Ut’s authorship; meanwhile, Ut himself is threatening to sue.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
