U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for a state visit to Britain, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 16, 2025.
New York Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and “Regime Change co-author Maggie Haberman say President Donald Trump is wielding incredible power to stifle free speech and the U.S. media, and he and his administration make no bones about it.
“Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is ‘reshaping the media landscape,’” reports the Times. “Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that ‘for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.’ Mr. Trump, he added, has ‘fundamentally changed the game.’”
But critics say that change has everything to do with curtailing the media’s freedom to report news.
“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”
Trump uses federal oversight entities and his own staff to rebuke and remove and punish news outlets that cross him. Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the wire service refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. The A.P. also refused to give Trump the rights to its photo of a bloodied Trump with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024.
“At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event,” wrote the Times.
Trump has targeted comedians he doesn’t like by pressuring their employers. In April, after Trump and the first lady demanded ded ABC fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke, the F.C.C. started an early review of the federal licenses that ABC stations need to operate, years before they are set to expire.
And in addition to pulling the levers of government, Trump also uses his own team of lawyers to pound organizations in court, whether or not he wins. When challenged in court, the Times reports the president and his administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights, but winning isn’t the prime motive, they say. It’s about inflicting pain.
“Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.”
Trump has been candid about his aim to cause pain, no matter how fleeting, writes the Times.
“After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, whose book TrumpNation estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.
And Trump’s willingness to use the levers of government to extract bankruptcy-level court costs from the embattled media is making a difference, said the Times.
“Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden,” reports the Times.
“Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. [Steven] Cheung, the [White House] communications director, has dubbed in a social media post, “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
And there is no guarantee that another American president will take a lesson from Trump’s example.
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