Trump Sharpens Attacks on a Favorite Foe: The News Media
It was a familiar move that might have been lifted straight from his playbook in the 2016 presidential campaign.
But this is a very different moment. If Trump's complaints about the media feel like a throwback to his first term, his actions toward the industry have gone much further than that.
Over the past six months, Trump has undertaken a muscular and precise attack on the media's pressure points. He has sought to dismantle Voice of America, the federally funded news agency that provides coverage to countries with limited press freedom, and persuaded his allies in Congress to cut funding for public broadcasting after decades of similar efforts sputtered out.
The tactics go well beyond cutting government funding, with the administration seeking to find — and use — every lever it has, just as it has in its attacks on certain universities. It has flexed its power over seemingly parochial matters — like when some reporters at legacy media organizations including The New York Times lost their desks at the Pentagon to friendly right-wing media outlets, or by removing The Journal from the press pool on a coming trip to Scotland — and over bigger ones, too.
When Trump took office, his handpicked chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, quickly revived complaints about 2024 election coverage by ABC, CBS and NBC that had been dismissed by the outgoing chair, and he said the outcome of a 'news distortion' complaint about CBS could affect his agency's review of a merger proposed between Paramount, CBS's parent company, and Skydance. Those moves, my colleague Jim Rutenberg observed early this year, recall Richard Nixon's crackdown on the press after he won re-election — and they may succeed where Nixon failed, just as Trump failed in his first term.
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