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.
Another episode of pressure on the media involves Executive Order 14172 of Jan. 20, 2025, directing federal agencies to adopt the name “Gulf of America” for the body of water that had been called the “Gulf of Mexico” for at least 300 years. Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, and several U.S.-based media outlets such as USA Today, Axios, and Fox News adopted the change. One organization that did not adopt the change was the Associated Press, which said that since it serves and international audience, it would not be. appropriate to reflect a US-only name change. In order to coerce the Associated Press to use the “Gulf of America” name, the Trump administration ordered that AP reporters and photographers be banned from all government news conferences and events. The AP sued in federal court but was unable to secure an immediate injunction against the discriminatory and coercive policy. The problem is that this is an ancient form of viewpoint discrimination called compelled speech. (For more on the topic see “Compelled Speech” on this site).
The AP issue involved more than simply having reporters access White House events, according to Julie Pace, AP executive editor. “It was about whether the government can tell a news organization, or anyone, what language to use and if they don’t comply, retaliate against them.”
On April 8, a federal court ordered the White House to remove restrictions on the AP.
