()– President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on much of the media in his second term, threatening to jail journalists, revoke broadcast licenses and launch a series of lawsuits against them. It’s an approach he’s threatened to use before.
During his first term in the White House, Trump regularly clashed with journalists, calling the press the “enemy of the people” and banning reporters from attending official conferences. In recent months during the campaign, Trump used dark and violent rhetoric to attack the media, telling a crowd this week that he wouldn’t care if journalists were shot, which has raised fears that he will try to use the government against the free press.
Experts on authoritarian leadership in Europe warn that in a second term, with more loyalists and fewer restrictions around him, Trump could seriously damage press freedom in the United States. A look at some countries in Europe, where democracy is “regressing”, suggests how this could happen.
Sharon Moshavi, president of the International Center for Journalists, said that in countries where the free press has been dismantled, “it is not one thing; It is not ‘we are going to imprison journalists.’”
Governments around the world controlled by authoritarians and strongmen, including Russia, Hungary, India and, until recently, Poland, have attempted to silence the free press and stifle dissent, he said. Trump has praised the leaders of many of these countries, especially Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“It is death by a thousand cuts. “They are attacks from multiple angles,” he said.
These angles include attacking journalists, discrediting their reporting, putting pressure on media owners to induce self-censorship, launching legal challenges, and relying on wealthy allies to buy media outlets and turn them into government mouthpieces.
Much of that pressure is indirect, Moshavi said, as business owners try to protect their access and interests.
“You see a lot of owners, a lot of large corporate owners with other interests, starting to pressure their own staff, directly or indirectly, not to go as far (in their coverage),” Moshavi said.
Northwestern University professor Olga Kamenchuk noted that recent decisions by the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to halt planned endorsements for Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to be an example of indirect pressure and self-censorship. Both owners have denied that their business interests influenced their decisions.
“’Democracy dies in darkness,’ and some of the media that refused to support Harris I think contributed to that, helped extinguish that light, unfortunately,” he said.
Kamenchuk, referring to the slogan of The Washington Post. “The owners are thinking about how they will survive in the next four years, whether they will have access to the leaders.”
Anne Applebaum, a writer for The Atlantic and a historian who has extensively covered the rise of authoritarians in Europe, said that in Hungary and Poland, leaders who sought to undermine the free press did so “not through direct censorship or closure, but through of money and influence,” Applebaum explained.
“A billionaire close to Orbán would buy a newspaper and then change the way it covered the news, for example,” Applebaum said. “Or in Poland, advertisers might fear the government, thinking that if they supported an independent newspaper they might lose a contract.”
Applebaum said governments like Orbán’s took advantage of the precarious financial positions of many media companies to “wind them down.”
Anna Wójcik, an assistant professor at Kozminski University in Poland, explained that Orbán not only transformed government-funded public media “into partisan propaganda platforms,” but his close allies also acquired private television and radio stations to turn them into media outlets. pro-government, a process known as media capture.
Those outlets were centralized into a powerful conglomerate, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA), which now controls approximately 500 outlets, consolidating the majority of pro-government outlets under a single entity, Wójcik said. .
The few remaining independent media outlets in the country “face challenges, including legal obstacles and denial of broadcast licenses,” Wójcik said.
These costly legal challenges can drain resources from media organizations and their journalists. Often, the lawsuits or investigations have nothing to do with journalism itself, but instead focus on infractions such as tax violations, with the aim of weakening the financial sustainability of these media outlets.
“Journalists, especially researchers, face harassment, intimidation and costly lawsuits, such as defamation cases and other legal actions based on technicalities such as data protection,” Wójcik said.
Trump has already started suing the press. Last month he sued CBS, demanding $10 billion in damages for the “60 Minutes” interview with Harris. Even if the lawsuit is ultimately dismissed, the network must devote resources, time and money to fighting the allegations in court.
Mikhail Zygar, a Der Spiegel columnist and former Russian journalist, recently wrote in his newsletter The Last Pioneer that when Vladimir Putin dismantled the free press in Russia, “he didn’t even have to get his hands dirty.”
“Putin did not pass draconian laws, nor close newsrooms, nor imprison journalists, nor kill anyone. Media laws remained just as liberal and censorship remained prohibited by the constitution,” he said. “Putin just got a little help from his oligarch friends.”
These threats are not mere theoretical fragments from around the world. New York Times editor AG Sulzberger and a team at the newspaper recently studied how American lawmakers could exploit this same playbook to stifle the press.
Would-be authoritarians around the world “have discovered that repressions against the press are more effective when they are less dramatic—not the stuff of thrillers, but a movie so monotonous and complicated that no one wants to watch it,” Sulzberger wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
Still, most experts said they still believe American institutions will hold up under pressure. Applebaum noted that the media market in the United States, with its large size and editorial diversity, is different from that of countries such as Poland and Hungary.
“The main difference between them and us is that they are very small. So you can do more damage faster. But it’s also true that the media business model no longer works for everyone and you can put a lot of pressure on it,” Applebaum said.
Kamenchuk also expressed optimism that the “mechanisms and limits” on executive power enshrined in US law will protect the free press.
“I am moderately optimistic that democratic powers, including the power of the media, will not be as limited as we have seen in other countries with right-wing leaders lately,” he said. “But these probably won’t be the best of times.”
Still, Moshavi said Trump’s lasting damage to the media may be his rhetorical attacks on “fake news” that have fueled deep distrust among his supporters.
“It is an absolute disdain and hatred towards independent journalism in many circles, a lack of trust, a lack of belief and a willingness to attack journalists,” he said. “That damage is lasting.”
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