The Trump Administration Is Casually Torching the First Amendment

“It would be difficult to describe the United States as having a free press,” Jim Naureckas, longtime editor of the media criticism organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told me earlier this week. “The administration is openly calling for sanctions against media outlets based on the content of their coverage. Even worse than the threats, he argued, was “the manipulation of regulations to concentrate media ownership in the hands of the president’s friends. Seeing an openly authoritarian president choosing which billionaires will have a stranglehold on information is a new level of censorship.”

Naureckas’ comments came after “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth demanded that the media produce more “patriotic” stories about the war in Iran and rejoiced over the likelihood that CNN would soon be bought by the Trump-backed Ellison family, which has built a vast MAGA-affiliated media empire with surprising speed in the last year. He also spoke to me after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters they could lose their licenses for unflattering reporting on the Middle East shit show. Following Carr’s statement, Trump accused media companies of “treason” for their coverage of the war, the opening act of which included the U.S. bombing of an elementary school, killing more than 175 children and teachers, and the torpedoing of a military ship, 2,000 miles from the conflict zone, that was returning from an international goodwill festival.

Trump’s war – from which virtually all US allies except Israel have distanced themselves – has drawn much of the Middle East into conflict. If this lasts much longer, the situation could get even worse, both militarily and economically. This week, Israel and Iran launched direct attacks on energy infrastructure, setting natural gas deposits on fire and leading to huge increases in energy prices around the world. The war could easily trigger a global recession and, with fuel prices soaring, it looks increasingly likely to fuel a new wave of inflation just years after the Covid-triggered inflation that has caused so much economic and political carnage since 2020.

As media outlets across the political spectrum have pointed out, this appears to be a war fought on the fly. Military strategy appears to emerge through late-night posts on social media, not through consultations with regional specialists. You don’t have to believe me about this; Listen to Joe Kent, who resigned as counterterrorism chief and said the war was launched without “any imminent threat” from Iran.

In a conflict in which the Iranians cannot hope to match the hard power of the United States and Israel, no one should have been surprised that they would close the Strait of Hormuz in an attempt to trigger an international energy crisis. Except, one way or another, did surprise the US administration – which, it turns out, tapped DOGE for its energy experts in the Middle East before the war, leaving grand strategy in the hands of bomb-bombing ignoramuses and braggarts such as Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Trump and Hegseth. With clowns in charge, the result was a circus.

To be clear, blaming the media for the lack of any coherent strategy for prosecuting the war and planning for its consequences is tantamount to shooting the messenger. It is also authoritarian behavior par excellence. If you can’t stop bad news, you can at least try to stop it from spreading. And if you can’t stop bad news from spreading, well, you can always accuse the messengers of treason.

“Under the First Amendment, the press decides how it wants to report on the war. The government cannot control what the press says,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. And yet, that is precisely what Trump supporters are trying to do.

Chemerinsky told me that there are many Supreme Court precedents, based on a 1963 anti-censorship case, Bantam Books v. Sullivanand the most recent NRA v. Vullo ruling, that threatening consequences by a government official or agency against an institution that is exercising its First Amendment free speech rights is unconstitutional. Carr must know that. Although neither Neanderthal Hegseth nor a fading Trump have a particularly strong grasp of constitutional law, their legal advisors are surely familiar with these landmark cases. Yet intimidation tactics against the media continue. “It’s an attempt to intimidate the press, as Carr’s statement, ‘We can do it the easy way or the hard way’ against Jimmy Kimmel was,” as were the administration’s demands that television networks remove late-night hosts who made statements critical of Charlie Kirk after his assassination, the law school dean said.

Chemerinsky’s fear, he continues, is that the worse the war goes, “the more it [the administration] could increase pressure on the media.

Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, agrees: “I think it’s pretty common; even in democratic governments, there’s a tendency to use wartime as a power grab, to suppress dissent and criticism of war. With authoritarians, it’s especially important. For Brendan Carr, it’s part of a larger pattern. That’s exactly what the First Amendment was supposed to do prevent.”

Cobb said Trump 2.0 played fast and loose with constitutional niceties: “This administration has taken an a la carte approach to the Constitution from the start. » The administration, he said, relied on media owners, law firms and others to hide and cover rather than stand firm in the face of a vengeful government.

If the administration succeeds in intimidating major media outlets into changing their coverage of the Iran war, Cobb said he fears they will take that as license to demand changes in how broadcasters and newspapers cover the midterm elections; and, to curry favor, major publishers and owners might well comply. “I’m very worried about this,” Cobb told me. “History shows that we should not be shocked if this happens.”

The highly respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Index (from the eponymous institute headquartered at the University of Gothenburg) agrees. This week, the publication downgraded the political status of the United States, saying it can no longer be called a liberal democracy and that, fueled by the assault on the media, free speech is at its lowest level in the country since the end of World War II. Free speech rights, the authors note, are often “the first ‘domino’ to fall when countries autocratize.”