Several important responses have come up recently in reaction to the Trump administration’s new wave of pressure on the media in the winter of 2025.
director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, expressed concern in a New York Times op-ed over noted US Judge Learned Hand’s “Spirit of Liberty” speech while considering the acquiescent media’s responses to Trump’s laughable libel suits. Hand said:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is sending NBC News and the New York Times out from standard Pentagon offices and replacing them with partisan media outlets Brietbart and the NY Post. This will seriously undermine the public’s right to know, said Kevin Baron and Price Floyd of the Washington Post.
Also responding to new developments, former Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, noted the lack of competition between the big tech / media industries that put Trump into power.
It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.
