Media Intimidation

Journalists Targeted, Who is Next?

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Article in The Contrarian by Liam Scott, 4/18/25

Headline:  “Trump Officials Trolling Journalists is Just the Tip of the Iceberg”

Subhead:  “Behind the harassment of individual reporters is a full-scale assault on media freedom”

“When The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed last month that he had inadvertently been invited into a Signal group chat of senior U.S. national security officials, the news dominated headlines, cable broadcasts and social media for several days.

“While Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation into the incident, Trump officials set their sights elsewhere: on Goldberg himself. . . The harassment Goldberg faced was an unusually intense pile-on, but it underscores the increasingly common trend of targeting individual journalists by administration officials and even President Donald Trump.

“ ‘It’s clearly an effort to intimidate and silence journalists,’ Kathy Kiely, chair in free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, told me. . .”

For years, Trump has accused the mainstream media of bias and has even referred to it as “the enemy of the people,” in an increasingly contentious relationship that has also long featured journalist harassment. . .”

“And now, it’s not just Trump. Others, including Vance, Hegseth, Leavitt, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, Special Envoy Richard Grenell and DOGE’s Elon Musk, have all targeted journalists online — with varied frequency and intensity — since Inauguration Day three months ago. . .”

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/trump-officials-trolling-journalists

Protestors and the Media

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Lauren Watson, 4/17/25

Headline:  “Student Journalists Wrestle with Censoring Their Own Work”

Subhead:  “Navigating a surge in requests to take down previously published material.”

“In early March, Dylan Hembrough, the editor in chief of The Alestle, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, published a story about protests on campus over federal funding cuts and censorship in science. The following day, the paper received a message from one of the protesters, who had been featured prominently in photographs and an interview, asking to have their name and image removed. At the time, Hembrough said, the paper didn’t have any policy allowing for such a post-publication takedown. ‘So, in that case, we ended up denying it’ . . .”

“In the past few weeks, eight students at SIUE have had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, Hembrough said—part of a group of more than thirteen hundred students nationwide who have been detained or lost their visas, sometimes for infractions as minor as participating in a protest.. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/student-journalists-censorship-protests-takedown-requests.php

 

Broadcasters Can’t Use Facts Now?

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Article in AlterNet by Adam Lynch, 4/17/25

Headline:  ” ‘Misleading the American public’: Trump’s FCC chair tweets veiled threat at media giant”

“Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who don’t toe the current administration’s line on the wrongful deportation of a legal U.S. resident.

“ ‘Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that [Maryland father Kilmar] Abrego Garcia was merely a law-abiding U.S. citizen, just a regular “Maryland man.”  When the truth comes out, they ignore it,’ Carr posted on X Wednesday. ‘Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it.’ . . .”

https://www.alternet.org/brendan-carr-fcc/

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Article in The Hill by Sarah Fortinsky, 4/14/25

Headline:  “Trump says CBS should lose license after ’60 Minutes’ segments on Ukraine, Greenland”

“President Trump railed against CBS on Sunday night, saying the network should lose its broadcast license after “60 Minutes” aired segments on Ukraine and Greenland that the president said cast him in a negative light. . . .”

“CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, has said the president’s lawsuit is an “affront to the First Amendment and is without basis in law or fact,” claiming Trump is trying to “punish a news organization for constitutionally protected editorial judgments they do not like.” . . .”

https://thehill.com/media/5247488-trump-says-cbs-should-lose-license-after-60-minutes-segments-on-ukraine-greenland/

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Article in The Hill by Dominick Mastrangelo, 4/14/25

Headline:  “5 things to know about the Trump, CBS feud “

“President Trump’s feud with CBS is reaching a fever pitch as his administration turns up the heat on the national broadcast network stemming from a ‘60 Minutes’ interview it aired with former Vice President Kamala Harris before the presidential election last fall.

“Here are five things to know about the Trump and CBS fight. . . .”

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5248507-five-things-to-know-about-the-trump-cbs-feud/

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Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 4/14/25

Headline:  “Skydancing With Trump”

Subhead: “Donald Trump escalated his attacks on CBS News in a Sunday night tirade. But it’s what prospective new owner David Ellison was doing 24 hours beforehand that’s also left the newsroom on edge.”

“On Sunday night, Donald Trump launched into an unhinged tirade, this time targeting CBS News and its parent company, Paramount Global. The president, apparently incensed by the latest episode of ’60 Minutes,’ unleashed a barrage of false claims and conspiratorial rhetoric, accusing the network of having ‘illegally’ worked to elect Kamala Harris.  . .”

https://www.status.news/p/david-ellison-donald-trump-skydance-paramount

Only Tovarisch-Media Allowed!

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Article in Democracy Now by Staff, 4/16/25

Headline:  “Russian Journalists Sentenced to 5+ Years in Prison for “Extremism”

“A Russian court in Moscow has sentenced four journalists to five-and-a-half years in prison each, after convicting them of “extremism.” Two of the four worked for Sota Vision, which documents Russian protests and court proceedings; the others contributed to international news outlets including Reuters and the Associated Press. Prosecutors alleged the journalists were involved with a banned anti-corruption organization founded by Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who died in a Russian penal colony last year following repeated assassination attempts.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/16/headlines/russian_journalists_sentenced_to_5_years_in_prison_for_extremism

Not All Reporters Are in Pool

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Update:

Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 4/16/25

Headline:  “The Deep End of the Pool”

Subhead:  “Donald Trump is replacing reporters with MAGA mouthpieces—will the rest of the press corps do anything about it?”

“On Wednesday morning, The Associated Press returned to court—again—in its ongoing fight to rejoin the White House press pool, the group of reporters granted access to cover smaller events on behalf of the broader press corps. . .”

“Instead, the administration took a new tack: On Tuesday, it announced that it had eliminated the wire service seat in the pool altogether. The move was a not-so-subtle trick designed to sidestep the court order by barring all wire services—not just the AP—thus claiming neutrality while continuing to shut out the Julie Pace-led newsroom. . .”

https://www.status.news/p/trump-ap-white-house-pool-wire-services

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Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 4/9/25

Headline:  “The Pool Filter”

Subhead:  “Some White House pool reports are no longer making it to the official distribution list, Status has learned—an unsettling development in the Trump administration’s escalating war on the press.”

“At approximately six-thirty on Tuesday evening, Joseph Morton, the Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News and the White House pooler on duty, tapped out a short email about the press being on the move and hit send. The crux of the email was fairly innocuous. It said that the White House pool, a small group of reporters designated to cover an event on behalf of the larger press corps, had been “loaded into the press vans” and was following Donald Trump “to the NRCC dinner at the National Building Museum.” But it also noted something else: ‘A reporter and photographer with The Associated Press were turned away from joining the pool.’. . .”

https://www.status.news/p/white-house-censors-pool-reports

 

Widening Gyre Public Media

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Article in Free Press by Staff, 4/14/25

Headline:  “Trump’s Plan to Defund Public Broadcasting To Face Opposition from Americans Who Overwhelmingly Support NPR and PBS“

Subhead:  “White House source tells press of plan to cut more than a billion dollars from the budget, effectively zeroing out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”

“According to Politico and New York Times reports Monday, the White House will send Congress a request to claw back nearly $1.1 billion in already-approved federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the entity that provides federal support for NPR and PBS affiliates across the country. . .”

https://www.freepress.net/news/trumps-plan-defund-public-broadcasting-face-opposition-americans-who-overwhelmingly-support

Investigation the Media “Investigator”

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Article in The Verge by Emma Roth, 4/1/25

Headline:  “House Democrats launch investigation into ‘bogus’ FCC probes”.

“In a letter to the FCC, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee call out Chairman Carr’s ‘actions to target and intidimate’ media companies in violation of the First Amendment:

” ‘You have launched sham investigations into entities disfavored by President Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party to censor journalists and news coverage. In the absence of actual agency authority and any real evidence of wrongdoing, your pursuit of these actions is clearly intended to punish and burden broadcasters and other media companies by inflicting incalculable reputational harm and excessive costs to defend themselves.’

“The Democrats are giving Carr until April 14th to respond to a series of questions about the FCC’s wave of investigations.”

https://www.theverge.com/news/641084/t

Media Roped?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 3/31/25

Headline:   “The Tug-of-War Between Trump and the Press”

Subhead:  “The media is vulnerable to Trump’s attacks. But that doesn’t mean it’s powerless.”

“Eight days ago, David Bauder, a media reporter at the Associated Press, published a story listing the by now familiar ways in which Trump and his administration have put journalists “on their heels” after only two months back in power, checking off a barrage of lawsuits and rhetorical attacks, the “newly aggressive” posture of the Federal Communications Commission, the gutting of the US-funded overseas broadcaster Voice of America, and the White House banning Bauder’s own shop, the AP, from events after it refused to start referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in the stenographic way Trump would like. . .”

” On an episode of the New York Times’ influential podcast The Daily, Jim Rutenberg outlined how Trump is not only undermining the press, but circumventing it, as alternative right-wing outlets and podcast bros furnish him with unprecedented levels of “media cheerleading and support.” (The episode’s title: “Nixon Dreamed of Breaking the Media. Trump Is Doing It.”) In Vanity Fair, Joel Simon situated Trump’s efforts to bend the media to his will in the wider context of growing authoritarianism in the US, and argued that “anticipatory obedience is rife” on the part of outlets from the Washington Post to ABC News. . . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_media_threats_power_ap_voa_npr.php

Media Swirling Around The Anger

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Article in The Guardian by Adam Gabbatt, 3/30/25

Headline:  “Revenge is his number one motivation’: how Trump is waging war on the media”

Subhead:  “The president – who believes he has been treated unfairly by the press – is squeezing the media in different ways than his first term”

“On Tuesday 4 March, Donald Trump stood in the House of Representatives to issue a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first of his second term.

“Near the beginning of what was to be a marathon address, the president declared: ‘I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.’

What Trump did not mention was that less than three weeks earlier he had barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, because the news agency refused to use his preferred nomenclature for the Gulf of Mexico. He did not mention that he was waging lawsuits against ABC and CBS, nor that the man he appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission had ordered a flurry of investigations into NBC News, NPR and PBS.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/30/trump-media-attacks

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Article in Poynter by Anela Fu, 3/31/25

Headline: “As Trump attacks the press, many Americans aren’t hearing about it”

Subhead:  “Just 36% of Americans say they’ve heard ‘a lot’ about the Trump administration’s relationship with the media, down from 72% in 2017”

“From suing outlets to banning The Associated Press, President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought an unprecedented flurry of attacks on the media. But news about these events doesn’t appear to be reaching many Americans, according to a Pew Research Center study released Monday.

“The study, based on a survey of 5,123 adults between Feb. 24 and March 2, found that just 36% of Americans reported hearing “a lot” about the Trump administration’s relationship with the news media. Nearly a fifth said they’ve heard “nothing at all,” and 44% said they’ve heard “a little” about it.

Though national news consumption has generally been on the decline, those changes are slight and wouldn’t explain the dramatic decrease that Pew found, Shearer said.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans described the relationship between the Trump administration and the press as “very” or “somewhat bad.” Just 11% described it as “very” or “somewhat good,” and 22% said it is “neutral.”

https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/president-donald-trump-relationship-attacks-journalists/

PBS Indoctrinating Our Kids?

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Article in New York Times by Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, 3/26/25

Headline:  “Elmo and Elon Musk Are Cited as G.O.P. Lawmakers Grill PBS and NPR“

Subhead:  “Dark pronouncements by Republicans about a ‘communist agenda’ espoused by public media were intercut with lighter references to “Sesame Street” and ‘Curious George.’ “

“Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.

“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called ‘Anti-American Airwaves’ — opened her remarks by deriding PBS and NPR as ‘radical left-wing echo chambers’ that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.

“The leaders of both PBS and NPR testified that those claims were untrue, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans, even as the NPR chief executive acknowledged regrets for posting critical remarks about President Trump before she joined the broadcaster. . .”

“Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that Republican lawmakers would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/business/media/pbs-npr-congress-hearing-republicans.html

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Liam Scott, 3/26/25

Headline:  “NPR and PBS Leaders Face Grilling Before House DOGE Subcommittee”

Subhead:  “We are essential, especially in remote and rural places,” the head of Alaska Public Media testified.”

“It was standing room only at Wednesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the public broadcasters NPR and PBS.

“Titled ‘Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,’ the hearing, held by the DOGE subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, comes as various Republican lawmakers have spent the past few weeks making a rallying cry out of their calls to pull federal funding from the broadcasters over perceived liberal bias. . .”

“Press freedom groups, meanwhile, say the hearing is taking place in the context of a broader campaign against the media in the United States in the form of lawsuits, government investigations, and hostile rhetoric from officials.

“This fits into the broader pattern that we’ve been observing since Trump became president of using the government as a tool to harm the media in any way,” said Clayton Weimers, the head of the US office of Reporters Without Borders.

“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and the subcommittee’s chair, began the hearing by recounting how she—and her three children—grew up watching PBS. Her tone quickly shifted.

“ ‘NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,’ Greene said in her opening statement, claiming that the broadcasters are ‘brainwashing and trans-ing’ children. . .”

“Maher (NPR CEO) and Kerger (PBS CEO) defended the broadcasters. ‘I do not believe we are politically biased,’ Maher said at one point. ‘We are a nonpartisan organization.’

“Kerger highlighted PBS’s educational programming for kids, which she said especially benefits children whose families cannot afford pre-kindergarten. ‘I strongly believe that the programming we offer to prepare children for the future is the most essential work that we do today,’ she said.

“Public media has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. A 2017 national survey from Rasmussen Reports found that just 21 percent of Americans—including less than a third of Republicans—supported cutting federal support of public broadcasting”.

https://www.cjr.org/news/npr-and-pbs-leaders-face-grilling-before-house-doge-subcommittee.php