Every dictator wants to undermine confidence in a free press because an informed public can act as a check on government corruption. Dictators can do this in several ways. They have often done this in the past by arresting or assassinating journalists. But that approach is more difficult to implement in a society where everyone has a smartphone to record what is happening and everyone has access to the internet. The opposite approach is to discredit truthful stories and flood the internet with so many false reports and lies that the public is no longer able to tell what is true and what is false--or as Steve Bannon put it, to "flood the zone with shit." Those who are interested in taking a closer look at how the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy actually works and why it is so effective should read the Rand Corporation's report on The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model.
I wrote a fairly lengthy article in October 2020 on Trump's efforts to discredit and demonize the free press during his first term. I hope you will read it because I am not going to repeat everything I wrote here. However, I will note that Donald Trump FREQUENTLY calls any story that he doesn't like "Fake News". This is very similar to the term "Lügenpresse" (lying press) that the Nazis used to demonize the press in the 1930s and 1940s. And Trump has called multiple mainstream news organizations "the enemy of the people." This phrase was used by the Nazis to demonize Jews and by Lenin and Stalin to attack those who did not agree with their ideology. Those who were attacked as enemies of the people often found themselves imprisoned or shipped out to labor camps.
Trump discredited and demonized the media during his first term in office, but he has discovered a new trick to ramp up the pressure in his second term. It involves a two-pronged attack involving a lawsuit or a threat of a lawsuit followed by penalties or threats of penalties by the Federal Communications Commission. Trump's lawsuit against CBS over a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes is a perfect example of this. CBS aired two versions of Harris's response to a question about Israel--one version was included in a 60 Minutes segment and the other version in a promo for that segment. Her response that was aired on 60 Minutes was vacuous, but her response in the promo segment was vacuous with an extra dose of word salad. Both answers were bad, but the one used for the promo was worse. You can see these two segments by watching 13:00 - 17:37 of the Jon Oliver video at the end of this article.
Trump seized on this and filed a complaint against CBS and its parent company Paramount, at the end of October 2024 claiming that CBS's use of the less ditzy excerpt for the 60 Minutes interview was a partisan and unlawful act intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in favor of Harris. First Amendment lawyers called out Trump's lawsuit as bogus. CNN reports:
“This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media. The Supreme Court has made it crystal clear: the First Amendment leaves it to journalists – and not the courts, the government or candidates for office – to decide how to report the news,” said First Amendment attorney Charles Tobin of the law firm Ballard Spahr. Tobin is representing CNN in several ongoing matters.
Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer of Pentagon Papers fame, agreed, telling CNN: “The First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation. Mr. Trump may disagree with this or that coverage of him, but the First Amendment permits the press to decide how to cover elections, not the candidates seeking public office.”
Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, put it more simply: “It’s ridiculous junk and should be mocked.”
If Trump had lost the election, this lawsuit would have gone nowhere fast. But Trump won, and he empowered the FCC to go after the media that was critical of him. NPR notes
Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating all the major broadcast outlets — except for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News Channel....
The FCC is questioning how CBS edited an interview of Trump's 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, and whether NPR and PBS are complying with regulations on corporate underwriting spots. The FCC can revoke local broadcast licenses, which could damage the networks financially.
This was bad news for Paramount because Paramount had been working towards an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, and that merger could not go through without FCC approval. So rather than fight the Trump regime, Paramount decided to cave on July 2 when they agreed to give Trump $16 million and pledged to provide $20 million worth of free pro-Trump advertising and programming. Skydance also promised to promote viewpoint diversity and install an ombudsman "to receive and evaluate any complaints in overseeing CBS's news programming." Exactly what would this have meant had such an agreement been in effect in late December 2020 or January 2021? Would 60 Minutes have yielded to increased pressure to report that Biden had stolen the election from Trump? Would it have been pressured to call the January 6ers who beat up cops and spread feces on the walls of the Capitol heroes? I don't know. What I do know is that the Trump Administration only wants to install ombudsmen in media outlets that criticize him but is fine with letting Fox News and Newsmax air their biased "news" supporting him go unchecked.
Theoretically, this ombudsman won't necessarily lead to CBS censoring itself. The ombudsman will report to the president of the new Paramount Corporation and will only evaluate bias complaints filed against CBS. But Anthony Fisher, Senior Editor, MSNBC Daily explains why we should be concerned.
This move is an affront to the First Amendment and sets the precedent that partisans on the FCC can compel media outlets to accept the authority of a “government-sanctioned ‘truth arbiter’” — as FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, put it...
Gomez, in an interview with PBS, warned that President Donald Trump’s “administration is weaponizing the FCC as a licensing authority,” and she said that any time the commission has to approve a license request, merger or sale, “I am concerned that you are going to see similar demands for concessions that will lead to censorship.” Gomez added that she’s “concerned that this will breed more corporate capitulation, because the bottom dollar is what these corporations want. They are not protecting their journalists.” …
Gomez told me in an email that she’s concerned the CBS News bias monitor’s job will be “to ensure that journalists do not criticize this administration or express views that conflict with its agenda,” calling it a “never-before-seen form of government intrusion into the newsroom” that she says is “in clear violation of the First Amendment and the law.” She added, “To this administration, ‘media bias’ appears to mean anything or anyone it disagrees with.”
We should be concerned, but no doubt the executives at Paramount and Skydance are happy since the FCC approved their merger on July 24, just over three weeks after Paramount paid tribute to Trump.
Incidentally, if the type of editing that was done for the 60 Minutes interview with Harris is illegal, then surely Fox News's editing of their interview with Trump in June 2024 must be extra illegal. Fox originally aired a segment of Rachel Campos-Duffy's interview with Trump that was edited to make it look like Trump was willing to release the Epstein files. The edited clip made Trump look so good that the Trump War Room used it for his campaign.
President Trump says he will DECLASSIFY the 9/11 Files, JFK Files, and Epstein Files pic.twitter.com/JalLWFkRDZ
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 3, 2024
Soon after--perhaps later that day or within a few days--Fox's Will Cain showed Trump's unedited response to Campos-Duffy's question that gave a very different impression. The Lincoln project placed the two versions next to each other in one post so that you can see how Fox's editing drastically changed the meaning of Trump's answer.
If you can't put the pieces together by now, we can't help you. pic.twitter.com/sLsOJcSWdZ
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 14, 2025
Those who watched the abbreviated clip but did not see the full version shown on Will Cain's show were misled about Trump's intention to release the Epstein files. Maybe it was not Fox's intention to mislead, but the Trump campaign took full advantage of the opportunity they presented. See these articles on Alternet, Yahoo!News, and MSNBC for more information about Fox's editing.
Paramount's settlement provided a good reason to fear for the future of a free press. NPR reports:
Trump's lawsuit that CBS and Paramount settled....by nearly all accounts from outside legal experts — incredibly flimsy.
Trump's critics say that was never the point.
"It's primarily about exerting dominance and creating a chilling effect for other actors," says Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar. "It's less that he gets the money, but that the defendants have to fork it over."
Media organizations, he says, will "think twice about putting on news that is adverse to the president's perceived self-interest."
These concerns turned out to be prescient. Donald Trump's FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, made a mafia-like threat against ABC, its parent company, Disney, and ABC's affiliates if they didn't pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air because he didn't like a clip that Kimmel made about MAGA during his monologue. Carr's threat against ABC was a direct assault on the First Amendment--and the American people rose up in protest against Carr's assault and successfully pressured ABC to put Kimmel back on the air. I have written about the FCC's "Fuck-the-Constitution" moment in much greater detail here.
Trump wants to censor so much more than just Jimmy Kimmel. He made it clear that he wants to censor ANY TV network that was too mean to him.
I encourage you to watch this video by Jon Oliver for an even more comprehensive overview of Trump's war against the press. He may be a comedian, but his analysis is excellent,
