Mother Jones illustration; Alex Brandon/AP; Wikimedia
“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has made clear what he thinks of journalists and what should happen to us: Thrown in jail and raped, “sued like never before,” investigated for treason, “taken off the air.” Once he reassuringly noted that “I would never kill them, but I do hate them,” but since then he’s clarified that he “wouldn’t mind so much” if someone shot the “fake news.”
Ten years ago, some were inclined to shrug this off as hyperbole. Now it is crystal clear that Trump intends to do everything he can to stop journalists from reporting things he doesn’t like, which is most things that are true. If there was any doubt, he said it again shortly after his inauguration, in a speech at (tellingly) the Justice Department: “But these networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative and it has to stop. It has to be illegal.”
Trump has banned reporters from press briefings (while inviting sycophants and propagandists). He has taken government data offline. He has fantasized about journalists being raped in prison. He has threatened to pull licenses of television stations, signed an executive order to kill funding for public radio and television, had news organizations investigated (and claimed that they are paid agents of the government) and threatened journalists simply for asking him questions.
For these and other reasons, the United States is slipping on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index; this year we sit in 57th place among 180 countries, right behind Sierra Leone. (The five countries directly ahead of us: Romania, Liberia, Ghana, Mauritius, and Mauritania.)
But the president doesn’t have to do all the dirty work of suppressing inconvenient truths himself. He can also outsource the job to corporate media owners. In the past six months we’ve seen that when faced with a choice between standing up for journalism and protecting their profits, leaders of our most powerful media corporations will often look out for the bottom line first. They may even convince themselves that accommodation is the moral choice—because it’s a way to “heal partisan divides,” “combat wokeness,” or simply “be objective.” But in the end, it’s just about the money.
These settlements established the going rate for media companies to pay off Trump.
Consider, most recently, Paramount, which owns CBS. Last year, CBS’s 60 Minutes had a sit-down interview with Kamala Harris, as it has with each major party candidate for decades. (Trump bailed on his 60 Minutes interview at the last minute; his spokesman said it was because the show insisted on fact-checking.)
Harris gave a long answer to a question about the Middle East, and CBS aired shortened versions of that answer on 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. The edits didn’t change the meaning of what Harris said—you can check for yourself in the transcripts. But Trump went ballistic, calling the interview a “Giant Fake News Scam” and promising to “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” On Halloween, his lawyers filed suit in the Northern District of Texas—the district where cases automatically get assigned to a Trump-appointed, ultraconservative judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk.
The complaint is quite something. It alleges (with evidence such as numerous Breitbart citations) that CBS’s editing violated Texas consumer protection laws by making Harris’ answer appear more concise than it was, an “unconscionable” action “because it amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.”
CBS, and virtually every First Amendment expert, called the case “baseless.” But Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone (the daughter of company founder Sumner Redstone) desperately wants to sell the company to Skydance Media (which, because we live in a nepo-baby world, happens to be owned by the son of Oracle founder and Trump pal Larry Ellison).
That sale needs approval from the federal government, and two days after Trump’s inauguration, the Federal Communications Commission opened its own investigation of the Kamala interview…and explicitly linked it to its review of the Paramount merger. Just in case anyone missed the point, shortly afterward, Trump doubled the size of his claim against CBS, demanding $20 billion (yes, with a “b”). Nice merger you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
The media newsletter Puck News reported that Redstone asked CBS leaders to delay negative stories about Trump until after the Skydance deal was closed. In May, Bill Owens, the legendary executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned, saying he had “lost independence from corporate.” His boss, CBS vice president for news Wendy McMahon, quickly followed. And on July 2, Paramount did settle the “baseless” lawsuit with a payment of $16 million. (That amount was reportedly chosen because it was similar to what ABC had paid: Had Paramount shelled out a lot more, it might have opened itself up to shareholder lawsuits for bribery. In other words, these settlements established the going rate for media companies to pay off Trump.)
In just the past year, Trump has pursued litigation against ABC, CBS, the Des Moines Register, a pollster, Simon & Schuster, and CNN. He’s also threatened to sue the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize board, and people who write books about him. Elon Musk, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth have also threatened to sue Rachel Maddow, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and others.
Until Trump’s reelection, some of his most prominent targets fought back. ABC pushed back hard against the case he filed complaining that host George Stephanopoulos defamed Trump by saying the president had been “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. (The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault—but the judge pointed out that under any definition except the very strict one of the New York penal code, Trump “raped her.”)
Weeks after the election, the network turned tail and paid $15 million to make the lawsuit go away. A few months later, ABC dismissed its veteran correspondent and anchor Terry Moran after he called Stephen Miller a “world-class hater.”
But it doesn’t take a lawsuit to make a media tycoon come to heel. Sometimes they do it all on their own—witness how last fall the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post pulled their papers’ already written endorsements of Harris. Jeff Bezos has also decreed that the Post’s opinion section will henceforth endorse “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish articles opposing those ideas, while Patrick Soon-Shiong went on Tucker Carlson’s show to criticize his own paper. The LA Times owner was rewarded with a spot on Trump’s Middle East trip, where he posted videos of himself chatting with Trump and Saudi crown prince (and journalist killer) Mohammed bin Salman. And don’t sleep on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been going out of his way to butter up Trump, including by killing Facebook’s fact-checking program because it had become “too politically biased.” Surely nothing to do with a Justice Department lawsuit against Meta that Zuckerberg really, really wants to go away.
It’s depressing to see media owners roll over like that, but it probably shouldn’t be surprising. Billionaires like innovation and disruption when they’re on their way up. But once they’re on top, they love the status quo, and they support the politicians who will protect it.
A recent book by New York Times reporter David Enrich investigates the way in which litigation has been used to silence the press—including the lawsuit by a dark-money billionaire, Frank VanderSloot, against Mother Jones. Enrich interviewed me and summarized the dilemma we were in when we were battling that lawsuit. The case was filed with a monetary demand of just under $75,000 (the limit beyond which it would have gone from Idaho state court to federal court). We could have paid to make the case go away—but we would have had to essentially plead guilty, putting an asterisk on our reporting forever after.
Their strategy was to put us in a position where the safest thing for us to do was disavow our reporting,” she explained. But caving to billionaires wasn’t in her DNA, any more than it had been in the New York Times’ genes when a different bully, L. B. Sullivan, had sued over the Martin Luther King ad. Mother Jones would fight.
Finally, after more than two years of legal maneuvering, a state judge threw out the lawsuit: VanderSloot was a public figure, and there was no evidence that the magazine had deliberately or recklessly manipulated the facts. Regardless, the damage was done. Mother Jones had to shell out more than $600,000 to cover its legal bills, which it paid for out of a fund earmarked for new journalism projects. When it came time for Mother Jones to renew its libel insurance, the magazine’s broker approached forty-two different insurers. Forty refused to even offer a quote. Ultimately, the magazine found an insurer, but its annual premiums more than doubled to $75,000, even as the amount of coverage dropped by a third. Its deductible soared to $150,000.
Enrich’s book is truly worth a read. It chronicles how a combination of aggressive plaintiffs and a clique of lawyers driven by ideology and profits have made the cost of publishing controversial stories terrifyingly high. “Dozens of lawyers, many with decades of experience, told me that the popularity of these menacing legal tactics has recently surged to unprecedented heights,” he writes. “In such an environment, the safest course often seemed to be to avoid writing about anyone or anything that smacked of controversy—or at least anyone with the inclination and wherewithal to retain aggressive counsel. It was a form of quiet censorship all but inaudible to the American public.”
Trump and his allies have seen this kind of quiet self-censorship—and they love it. Who needs state censorship, when you can simply make publishers fret about the consequences of their reporting? In addition to lawsuits (from Trump or his minions), these consequences can include being hauled in front of a congressional committee, like NPR CEO Katherine Maher was, or being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission (also happening to NPR, as well as ABC, CBS, and NBC). Or the government could secretly dig through reporters’ phone and email records: Attorney General Pam Bondi recently revoked rules that kept the Justice Department from spying on journalists it suspects of working with whistleblowers.
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy,” authoritarianism scholar Stephen Levitsky wrote recently. “The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.”
What makes this especially dangerous is that we won’t know the quiet censorship is happening—because it’s quiet. How will we know which opinion columns Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post (now “unapologetically patriotic”) is not commissioning or publishing? Who’s to say which stories ABC or CBS will consider worth paying the next $16 million settlement for?
But let’s not end on that grim note—because the truth is, independence has always had a cost. Our newsroom is living proof of that: In the 1980s, the Reagan IRS came after us. We fought and won. In the 1990s, we were sued by a Republican consultant. We fought and won. Ten years ago, in that lawsuit by dark-money megadonor VanderSloot, we fought and won. Six years ago, our sister radio show, Reveal, was sued by a taxpayer-funded charity connected to an alleged cult. They fought and won.
Yes, all these cases involved bullies who were strong, rich, and confident. Yes, there was a cost to standing up to them, and that cost is higher today than it was 10 or 30 years ago. Yes, it’s depressing that the billionaires who could afford to pay that price…won’t.
But that just means that this is one of those times when people and institutions, including news organizations, show you who they really are. And once they do, you have a choice. If they accommodate, normalize, soft-pedal, or cozy up, do they deserve your attention and your money?
Here’s what’s comforting for us, in this organization that has just about one-tenth of 1 percent of Paramount’s annual revenue: We get to wake up every morning knowing that we’re not accountable to any bully or billionaire. We answer only to you, our audience—and that means fighting back and standing up is in our DNA. Because it is in yours.