The MAGA Assault on the Media Is Picking Up Steam

The news that Paramount, the media leviathan that encompasses both Viacom and CBS News, was negotiating a settlement of Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the newsmagazine show 60 Minutes, was sadly no news at all. Since Trump’s re-election, ABC News—a profit-challenged division of the Disney Corporation—settled a similarly ginned-up Trump claim against the network for George Stephanopoulos’s on-air comment that the former president had been held “liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil suit against him. (In reality, Stephanopoulos was summarizing the finding of the presiding judge in the Carroll trial—a far cry from the traditional benchmarks of willful disregard of the truth and actual malice that have long guided judgments favoring plaintiffs in defamation cases.) 

The complaint at the heart of Trump’s Paramount suit is leagues more frivolous than the ABC charge. Trump and his legal team allege that 60 Minutes manipulated interview footage with Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris in order to create the impression that she had greater command of Middle East diplomacy than she actually displayed in the exchange. (Never mind that the Biden White House’s policy agenda in this sphere defies any sane rehabilitation effort, no matter how putatively cunning it might be.) The chief evidence for this whitewashing effort, the Trump team alleges, was a promotional clip of the interview aired on Meet the Press that included compromising Harris replies that didn’t turn up in the final aired segment. 

Lay aside the plaintiffs’ apparent unfamiliarity with what’s known as B-roll footage—spare video recordings plastered across the broadcast day to stave off the mostly correct impression that TV news generates vanishingly little new or original content. Just consider how epically incompetent the pro-Harris cabal supposedly at the helm of CBS News would have to be in order to beam the very footage they were ostensibly keen to censor into the homes of millions of viewers. If this is high-media political sabotage, it seems like the Trump campaign should have been lobbying for more of it, rather than trying to throttle it with adverse lawsuits and settlements from the vertebrae-challenged corporate paymasters operating major media properties.

But marginal political advantage isn’t what’s driving Trump’s litigation roadshow against the press. Rather, it’s a raw show of oligarchic strength, calculated to intimidate other media organizations—particularly ones with shallower pockets than the backers of ABC and CBS —from programming principled and independent investigations of the many power grabs, crimes, and constitutional trespasses of the second Trump White House. There’s no other way to suss out an intelligible throughline from the other marquee Trump media suits—consumer fraud complaints against the Pulitzer Prize board for recognizing the reporting of the New York Times and the Washington Post on allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and against the Des Moines Register and its lead pollster Ann Selzer for a misleading voter survey showing Harris pulling ahead of Trump in Iowa during the election’s homestretch. (Trump wound up winning Iowa by 15 points, again raising the question of whether ostensible media plotting against his campaign actually benefitted it.) GEspecially given Trump’s own penchant for lying extravagantly about his own Russian entanglements and election results, it’s grimly amusing to see him pretend to police the alleged bad-faith reportage of the press. It’s also striking, though notably absent from coverage of the Paramount suit, that there was indeed a major interview conducted with a presidential candidate during the campaign’s homestretch that a network scrubbed of its many damning falsehoods and non sequiturs—the Fox News footage of Trump’s interview at a Bronx barbershop. 

All this is why Trump’s harassment-by-lawsuit initiative is one of the few sectors of MAGA agitprop that doesn’t directly stem from the maximum leader’s own playbook, despite Trump’s own storied, self-advertised standing as a vexatious litigant from way back. Trump’s courts-based intimidation campaign against the press descends from handiwork of one of his most prominent Silicon Valley backers, venture capitalist and neo-reactionary ghoul Peter Thiel. In 2016, Thiel famously bankrolled the lawsuit that pro wrestling has-been Hulk Hogan mounted against Gawker Media for its flagship site’s decision to post a Hogan sex tape. That action did more than intimidate Gawker—it drove the company into bankruptcy, subsequently relegating most of its satellite properties to slow death by private-equity negligence. Thiel’s silent-partner backing of the Hogan suit stemmed from his longstanding resentment of a 2007 post on the site outing Thiel as gay. The Gawker suit dramatically altered the media landscape, both online and off, by making it clear that broadcasting material that provoked the ire of billionaires could be a swift death sentence. It was less an exercise in chilling free speech than a controlled demolition. 

It’s this, by and large, that is the logic behind the present Trump litigation binge. Reports on the Paramount negotiations indicate that the company’s CEO, Shari Redstone, is promoting the journalistically disastrous settlement agreement in order to ensure that the new Trump administration won’t block the company’s pending multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance, the entertainment concern backed by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. This isn’t the live-or-die proposition that Gawker faced in a Florida court, but the deal stands to net Redstone several billion dollars, and that figure is enough to dispel any nostalgic reveries of John Peter Zenger, Nat Hentoff, or CBS’s own free-press avatar Edward R. Murrow. So like the corporate satraps at ABC, Redstone’s team has reckoned that a principled stand in defense of press freedom and independence just isn’t worth the blow to the parent company’s potential revenue stream as an implacably hostile administration takes office. 

Meanwhile, the second Trump administration is using its expansive score-settling powers to execute its own controlled demolition agenda on press independence. In a separate action, Trump’s new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has requested that CBS furnish his agency with the full transcript and tapes of the 60 Minutes interview with Harris—and the spineless suits at the company have complied. Anna M. Gomez, one of the Democratic appointees on the agency properly called out the FCC’s unprecedented demand as a blatant assault on First Amendment freedoms: a “retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable…designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.” In another arena, newly installed Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has adopted the same playbook of executive overreach. The former Fox News dayside host notified the Pentagon Press Association that traditional news organizations are to be “rotated out” of the building in favor of MAGA outlets for whom knee bending is a conditioned reflex. Gone are the New York Times, NBC, NPR, and Politico; the New York Post, One America News Network, and Breitbart will be taking their place—together with Huffington Post, a meaningless gesture of phony viewpoint balance, since the liberal-cum-lifestyle site doesn’t even employ a Pentagon correspondent.

The dean of modern press critics, AJ Liebling, wrote long ago that the press is the weak slat beneath the bed of American democracy. But that was an era in which the government itself wasn’t engaged in prying loose the core foundations of democratic civic life (at least not overtly, anyway). Now the press is poised to become a de facto collaborator in Trump’s multifront authoritarian putsch, by downplaying its true nature, euphemizing his lies and bigotry, and appeasing his worst power plays. It’s no accident that the dystopian contours of the new Trump age are taking shape with a cheering section of media moguls egging the whole project on—from Washington Post overlord Jeff Bezos to LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong to X impresario Elon Musk to recent MAGA convert Mark Zuckerberg. These are no doubt the role models that Shari Redstone looks up to as she plans to parlay her own quisling instincts into yet more billions.