Voters had delivered the president to the White House for a second term and accused news about the arrests and charges of former assistants of violating the law to keep him in power. Now the newly encouraged president and his senior officials had a message for the reporters who treated it all so aggressively: it was payback time.
While senior officials Journalists such as 'arrogant elitists' were out of contact, the administration threatened the licenses of local TV stations that transport the news broadcasts of the large networks and moved to the financing for the 'liberal' PBS.
The president was not Donald J. Trump. He was Richard M. Nixon. The scandal he thought he, Watergate, had arisen, would eventually force his resignation. And his brutal anti-press movements, which initially seemed to cow journalists, would hold on to an attack of revelations about his role in hiding with misconduct in his West wing.
That dark chapter in media history is suddenly relevant again, because President Trump's second administration resorts to a harsh approach to traditional journalists who has all the characteristics of his predecessor of the attempted press about 50 years ago.
Mr. Trump and his assistants have called reporters for large news boundaries liars; Was wrongly accused of accepting government benefits for a favorable treatment of Democrats (a wrong representation of the expenditure of agencies in news subscriptions); And made a show to reduce their fame in the White House and Pentagon briefing Rooms, while giving more room to friendly competitions of newer, right -wing alternatives.
Mr. Trump has those who are largely symbolically linked and now known movements with an attempt to use the government's levers against traditional journalists who go much further than his attacks in the first term.
He and people close to him threatened to use the Federal Communications Commission to punish the broadcast news networks, defend PBS and even prosecute journalists for their coverage of the investigations and criminal cases against Mr Trump and his supporters.
“We have not experienced this kind of rough, flagrant use of government power for ideological purposes since Nixon,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a long -term lawyer in the public interest specializing in media regulations.
“In many ways,” he said, “the threat is bigger,” comes with a harder lead against a weaker press corps.
Mr. Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has told reporters that “The White House strongly believes in the first amendment.” But in her very first briefing, she had warned: 'We know for sure that there have been lies who have been pushed about this president about his family by many legacy media in this country, and we will not accept that. “
Much of the early action originated from the FCC, an independent agency with a dual administration whose chairman has been selected by the president. Mr. Trump named an old Republican Commissioner, Brendan Carr, after the position in November and called him a 'warrior for freedom of expression'.
Already increasing the threats in Nixon-style to link television stationary licensees to government provisions on content-that has some leeway to do some leeway that still requires licensed broadcasters to serve the “public interest”. Complaints revived. Against the three traditional broadcast networks and opened an investigation into PBS and NPR.
An investigation into CBS played in public in recent days when the network worked together with the request from the FCC for information regarding the adaptation of an interview with “60 minutes” last fall with vice -president Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump had accused the network, in his own lawsuit of millions of dollars, of cheating the interview to encourage Mrs Harris's presidential campaign, which denies CBS.
Mr. Carr said that the outcome of the investigation can take into account the assessment of his agency of a hanging merger between the parent company of CBS, Paramount, and Skydance, creating a distribution between him and Democrats on the committee.
“This is a retaliation movement by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is considered unfavorable,” said Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, an appointed Biden, in a statement. “It is designed to generate fear in broadcasting stations and to influence the editorial decisions of a network.”
Representatives from Mr. Carr did not respond to messages in which comments were requested.
The CBS agreement on Wednesday to provide the FCC with raw transcriptions and video from the Harris interview, also brought concern to lawyers of the first amendment and media times that the investigation was already working as Mrs. Gomez warned it would do.
Al Sikes, a Republican chairman of the FCC during the board of President George HW Bush, wrote in the Talbot Spy, a local news site in Maryland: “CBS should have taken legal steps to block the actions of the committee; It is not. “
CBS said that it acted in accordance with the law and that the transcripts showed that the interview had been handled correctly. But the compliance contributed to the fears of the public that the network and her parent company participated in a trend of apparent plea by media companies that are suddenly confronted with a presidential administration that show no embarrassment about retribution against observed enemies.
Paramount is also considering concluding a deal with Mr Trump to end his CBS right case, that recent decisions by ABC News and Meta, the owner of Facebook, would follow to agree with Multimillion Dollar settlements.
“It is a bit discouraging and worrying to see the press respond to this president at this specific moment in this way,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendement Institute at Columbia University. The settlements, although not great in number, raise questions about whether the traditional press will have the means to “get up,” he said.
These questions also arose in the Nixon era and for a good reason.
After he had arrived from the White House, the founder of CBS, William S. Paley, agreed to put an end to the new practice of providing “immediate analysis” of presidential speeches – Basisunditry That Nixon often distracted – and a program canceled that is critical of the Vietnam War.
While Nixon allies challenged the licenses of television stations owned by the Washington Post, the publisher, Katharine Graham, called the Star Watergate correspondent Bob Woodward to her office, looking for reassuring the report he pursued with his co-writer , Carl Bernstein.
“The power of the administration – and anger – was on their greatest after the elections of the landslide, and we were on our weakest,” she remembered in her memoirs. “We were scared,” she added.
The post was often unparalleled in the Watergate report. Despite all the anger of the White House about reporting the scandal, many media initially treated it carefully. In the end, the Post, CBS and the rest of the media were of course justified when the scandal flourished and they distinguish it with distinction.
Yet the big newspapers and broadcasters were then the only competition in the city. And polls showed that Americans trusted them overwhelmingly.
Those figures plummeted over time, because the media made his share in missteps and its credibility came under the sustainable conservative attack.
Now Mr. Trump A whole cable network-fox News-Wiens Opinion programs are populated with open fans and an army of online Info war fighters whose promotion of his version of reality receives extra reinforcement on social media platforms, including Elon Musk's X and his own truth social.
Even while he exerts pressure on traditional journalists, Mr Trump promises to “stop all the censorship of the government.” But in that case he seems to have had the technical platforms, which, he complained, have kept in mind, with unfair pressure from the Biden administration to the content of the 2020 elections and information about public health during the Covid -Pandemie to moderate.
That conflicting approach to old and new media is clearly visible in two hearings that are held by Trump -federalmen on Capitol Hill. One, to record by representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, will explore “systematically biased content” on PBS and NPR. The other, planned by the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman Jim Jordan is Jordan van Ohio, will investigate the “censorship campaign” of the Biden administration against the platforms and “upcoming threats for free expression”.
