Leonard Downie Jr., a professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, is a former executive editor of The Post and author of Committee to Protect Journalists special reports on the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations and the press.
“I say up front, openly and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News. “The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country.”
What could Trump do to the news media and their ability to inform the American people? Judging by what he did in his first term, plenty.
As president, he habitually attacked the news media and individual journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” undermining public trust in the fact-finding press.
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He called for boycotts of news organizations and changes to libel laws to restrict critical reporting on public figures, including himself. His political campaign filed libel suits, ultimately unsuccessful, against The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN over opinion columns critical of him.
He tried to deny White House press credentials for reporters and news media whose stories he disliked. He closed White House visitor logs to the press and the public. For months at a time, the White House and State Department refused to hold daily on-the-record press briefings. Federal departments scrubbed from their websites information and resources about climate change, the Affordable Care Act and women’s health, among other subjects.
Trump’s Justice Department increased leak investigations and prosecutions of journalists’ sources of classified information, including secret seizures of phone records of reporters at The Post, the Times and CNN. “We only learned how invasive these probes were many months into the Biden presidency,” said Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection aggressively screened and questioned reporters at some border crossings and recorded their movements in a secret database. Trump threatened to have the Federal Communications Commission investigate NBC, even though the FCC licenses only individual stations, not networks.
News media fact-checkers documented tens of thousands of false and misleading public statements and claims that Trump made in office. “No other president has said as many false things as Trump,” creating “a readiness of people to disbelieve factual reporting,” Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s founding editor in chief, said in 2020.
The Biden administration’s treatment of the media has been an almost complete reversal of this hostility. There have been no verbal or legal attacks on journalists. Regular news briefings have resumed, and media access to government agencies and information, including the White House visitor logs, has increased. The news media’s primary complaint has been that President Biden holds too few news conferences and sit-down interviews.
Biden also restored the editorial independence of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, home of Voice of America, after Trump tried to turn it into a propaganda agency. The Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term, is critical of Biden’s restoration of USAGM’s editorial independence.
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Press freedom groups have begun planning for attacks and restrictions on the media in a second Trump administration.
“Trump will do everything he can” to restrict press access to the White House and the executive branch, Brown told me. He is also concerned about more Trump-inspired libel suits against the news media, IRS reviews of the tax-exempt status of nonprofit news organizations, a return of Justice Department investigations of reporters and news sources, and federal regulatory pressure whenever there is a major change in media ownership.
In a second Trump presidency, the Justice Department could also punish reporters for refusing to name confidential sources or prosecute them under the Espionage Act for reporting about classified information.
The IRS could audit journalists’ taxes and remove the tax-exempt status of the growing number of nonprofit national, regional and local news organizations. The Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FCC could investigate news media owners.
Trump and his political allies could harass reporters and news organizations with expensive nuisance libel suits. Justice Department guidelines for police treatment of reporters covering demonstrations could be rescinded.
“His first term would prove to be a warm-up act,” said Frank Sesno, a George Washington University professor and press expert who covered the White House for many years. “A second term would be a wild ride. I’m expecting a no-holds-barred approach. They could shut down the White House press office and throw the reporters out. There could be retribution if you do a tough story about the president.”
“Trump and his people,” Sesno added, “don’t accept that a fundamental function of the press is accountability. They don’t want to be held accountable.”
“At its most extreme, it’s very troubling,” University of Utah media law professor RonNell Andersen Jones told me, referring to Trump’s “using government power to shut down any of the press that’s critical of him.”
Gabe Rottman, director of RCFP’s Technology and Press Freedom Project, said the Department of Homeland Security could again step up its screening of reporters at border points, questioning them about their activities, news sources and notes. Adam A. Marshall, an RCFP government transparency lawyer, said he worries that it could become even more difficult to obtain federal government information under the Freedom of Information Act.
As for Trump’s “insulting, professionally demeaning” rhetoric about the news media, Brown said, “it is very important to not let him get inside our heads. The media will need to focus on what really crosses the lines.”
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Joel Simon, director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at City University of New York, said he is focused on potential threats to journalists’ safety. Portraying the media “as almost traitorous,” Trump has the ability “to mobilize his followers online to attack journalists and the press,” Simon said. “It’s really vicious vitriol.”
Sesno said another Trump term as president would enable him “to finish the job” on the news media. “There is ample evidence of Trump using the legal system as a means of harassment and retribution.” Retribution is what Trump has been emphasizing in his campaign rhetoric as a priority upon returning to the White House.
Biden and other Democrats are trying to make the future of American democracy an issue in the campaign. Importantly, the future of our democracy’s free press is also very much at stake.
