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During his first term in the White House, Trump regularly butted heads with the press, attacking the press as “the enemy of the people” and banning reporters from official briefings.
In recent months on the campaign trail, Trump has used dark and violent rhetoric to attack the media — telling a crowd this week that he wouldn’t mind journalists being shot — and sparking fears that he will try to weaponize the government against a free press.
Experts on authoritarian leadership in Europe say that Trump in his second term, with more loyalists and fewer protective fences around him, could cause great damage to press freedom in the US.
A look at some countries in Europe, where democracy is “regressing” hints at how this can happen.
Sharon Moshavi, president of the International Center for Journalists, said that in countries that have seen the dismantling of a free press, “it’s not just one thing – it’s not ‘we’re going to lock up journalists’.”
Governments around the world controlled by authoritarians and strongmen, including Russia, Hungary, India and, until recently, Poland, have moved to stifle the free press and crush dissent, she said.
Trump praised the leaders of many of those nations, particularly Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s attacks from multiple angles,” she said.
These angles include attacking journalists, discrediting their reporting, pressuring media owners to encourage self-censorship, launching legal challenges and leveraging wealthy allies to buy media outlets to 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 big corporate owners who have other interests, start to put pressure on their own staff, either directly or indirectly, and they don’t go that far [in their coverage]Moshavi said.
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Northwestern University professor Olga Kamenchuk said recent decisions by billionaire owners The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to stop the planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to be an example of indirect pressure and self-censorship. Both owners denied that their business interests were behind their decisions.
“‘Democracy dies in darkness’ — and some of the media that refused to support Harris, I think contributed to that, helped dim that light, unfortunately,” Kamenchuk said, referring to The Washington Postslogan.
“The owners are thinking about how they will live the next four years, whether they will have access to management.”
Anne Applebaum, staff writer for the Atlantic and historian who has extensively followed 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 money and influence,” Applebaum said.
A billionaire close to Orbán would buy the newspaper and change the way it reports the news, for example, Applebaum said.
“Or in Poland, the government could scare off advertisers, fearing they could lose their contract if they appear to support independent newspapers.”
Applebaum said that governments like Orbán’s took advantage of the precarious financial position of many media companies “to just finish them off.”
Anna Wójcik, an assistant professor at Kozminski University in Poland, said that Orbán had not only transformed government-funded public broadcasters “into platforms for party propaganda”, but also that his close allies had bought private television and radio stations to turn them into pro-government ones. houses, a process known as media recording.
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These newspapers were then centralized into a powerful media conglomerate, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA). That center now controls roughly 500 newspapers, Wójcik said, “consolidating most of the pro-government media into one entity.”
The few remaining independent media that continue to operate in the country “face challenges, including legal obstacles and the denial of broadcast licenses,” Wójcik said.
These expensive legal challenges can drain the resources of media organizations and their journalists. Often the lawsuits or investigations have nothing to do with journalism itself, but rather focus on alleged violations such as tax violations, but with the intended effect of undermining the financial viability of the media.
“Journalists, especially investigative journalists, face harassment, intimidation and costly lawsuits, including defamation cases and other legal actions that are often based on technicalities like data protection,” Wójcik said.
Trump has already filed lawsuits against the media. He sued CBS last month, seeking $US10 billion ($15.14 billion) in damages from the network 60 minutes interview with Haris. Even if the suit is ultimately dismissed, the network must devote resources, time and money to fighting the claim in court.
Mikhail Zygar, a Der Spiegel columnist and former Russian journalist, wrote recently 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 any draconian laws, close any newsrooms, throw journalists in jail, or have anyone killed. Media laws remain as liberal as ever, and censorship is still prohibited by the constitution,” he said.
“Putin simply got a little help from his oligarch friends.”
These threats are not just theoretical snippets from around the world. The New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger and a newspaper team recently studied how US lawmakers might rely on this very playbook to stifle the press.
Potential powers around the world “have realized that repression of the press is most effective when it is the least dramatic—not like thrillers, but like a movie so laborious and complicated that no one wants to watch it,” Sulzberger wrote in ua The Washington Post op-ed.
Still, most experts say they still believe American institutions will hold up under pressure. Applebaum noted that the American media market, with its enormous size and editorial diversity, differs from countries like Poland and Hungary.
“The main difference between them and us is that they’re very small. So you can do more damage faster. But it’s also the case that the media business model doesn’t work for everyone anymore and you can put a lot of pressure on that,” Applebaum said.
Kamenchuk also expressed optimism that the “levers and limits” on executive power contained in US law will work to protect a 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 that have recently had right-wing leaders,” she 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 disregard and hatred for independent journalism in many circles, a lack of trust, a lack of faith and a willingness to attack journalists,” she said. – That damage is permanent.
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