Stop the Presses

08/04/2025

Another pressure point for authoritarians involves government regulation. Trump uses the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to harass journalists, just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán sics his Sovereignty Protection Office on them and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suspends media from government advertising if he doesn’t like what they report.

Dictators also use the courts. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” has criminally targeted journalists who reported on his ties to gang leaders. Trump has baselessly accused MSNBC of “illegal political activity,” but so far, he has preferred civil lawsuits to indictments. In effect, Trump is running an extortion scheme: He files frivolous lawsuits against news outlets and then uses the FCC regulatory hammer to force them to settle.

The control of media by oligarchs – and the dictators’ control of the oligarchs – has severely limited the availability of trustworthy news in countries like Hungary and Russia. And increasingly in the United States, as evidenced by the recent capitulation of CBS News.

The trend lines for American journalism are alarming. Truth-tellers get fired, while those who normalize the rise of fascism get ahead. Journalists who cover White House briefings have to compete with ringers in their midst – right-wing propagandists asking absurd questions. And official statistics that news outlets have long relied upon have been undermined by Trump’s dishonesty.

It’s reasonable to fear that real journalism will become impossible in the United States.