{"id":6316,"date":"2025-02-04T18:27:02","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T18:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/?p=6316"},"modified":"2026-01-06T12:45:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T12:45:10","slug":"perspectives-on-trump-media-pressure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/2025\/02\/04\/perspectives-on-trump-media-pressure\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspectives on Trump media pressure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Put Colbert to sleep<\/a><\/strong> — Dec 24 — In a social media post, Donald Trump said that comedian Stephen Colbert is a “pathetic train wreck” and that CBS should “put him to sleep”\u00a0 He also said: \u201cIf Network NEWSCASTS, and their Late Night Shows, are almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party, shouldn\u2019t their very valuable Broadcast Licenses be terminated? I say, YES!\u201d<\/p>\n

Another comedian bothers Trump<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0 — Nov 17 —\u00a0 Trump and FCC chair Carr called for comedian Seth Meyers to be fired by the National Broadcasting Company. “NBC’s Seth Meyers is suffering from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS),” Trump posted<\/a>\u00a0on Truth Social on Nov. 15.<\/p>\n

Demeaning reporters<\/strong> <\/a>— Nov 14 — Asked about the ongoing Epstein scandal, Trump turned on a female reporter and responded “Quiet, Piggy.”<\/p>\n

Suing BBC<\/strong> <\/a>— Nov 14 – President Trump said he was considering a libel suit against the British Broadcasting Corp. for up to $5 billion after it spliced together separate excerpts of a speech on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol. Trump claimed the edit created the impression he had called for violence. BBC apologized<\/a> but said it would fight any legal action.<\/p>\n

Not taking the Pentagon press pledge<\/a><\/strong> — Oct 14 — News organizations have refused the Trump administration’s offer to allow them continued credentials at the Pentagon in exchange for a written pledge to only report “authorized” official information approved by the Pentagon press office.\u00a0 Organizations refusing this unprecedented new policy include the Associated Press, New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Fox and Newsmax.\u00a0 In addition to refusing the policy,\u00a0 NPR defense reporter Tom Bowman is turning in his press credentials<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0OneAmerica News is the only outlet that has agreed to the new Pentagon rules. The Poynter Institute provides a breakdown<\/a> on the policy and its critics. Update from the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press:\u00a0 The New York Times filed a\u00a0lawsuit<\/a> \u00a0in the first week of December 2025 claiming that the new Pentagon policy violates the First Amendment. The RCFP has a short summary and explainer<\/a> of the legal theories advanced by the Gray Lady.<\/p>\n

Kimmel show cancelled<\/a><\/strong> — Sept. 17 — Pressure from the Federal Communications Commission led ABC to cancel the Jimmy Kimmel show.\u00a0 Kimmel faced criticism over remarks about the politics of the man who is accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk.\u00a0 ABC \/ Disney relented after fans objected, and Kimmel returned Sept. 23 with a moving\u00a0 defense of free speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump calls for FCC to <\/strong>revoke broadcast network licenses<\/strong><\/a> — Aug 25, 2025 – President Donald Trump reiterated a long-running push for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke station licenses of two major U.S. broadcasters and charge them for using the public airwaves, as he criticized their news programming.\u00a0 Trump suggested late on Sunday on social media that Disney-owned ABC\u00a0 and Comcast-owned\u00a0 NBC are biased and mostly air “bad stories” about him, and as a result, should, “according to many, have their licenses revoked by the FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful.”<\/p>\n

Colbert show cancelled<\/a> <\/strong>— July 17 — CBS decided to cancel Late Night with Stephen Colbert a few days after Colbert criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who claimed the network interfered in the 2024 election by editing a 60 Minutes<\/em> interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris. (PBS)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is not new. Trump has been at war with the media for decades, but is now using all the presidential power he can muster to attack it.<\/p>\n

Several important responses<\/strong> have come up recently in reaction to the Trump administration’s pressure on the media.<\/p>\n

Jameel Jaffer,\u00a0 <\/span>director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, expressed concern in a New York Times op-ed<\/a> over noted US Judge Learned Hand’s “Spirit of Liberty” speech while considering the acquiescent media’s responses to Trump’s laughable libel suits.\u00a0 Hand said:<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>, said Kevin Baron and Price Floyd of the Washington Post.<\/p>\n

Also responding to new developments, former Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan,\u00a0 noted the lack of competition<\/a> between the big tech \/ media industries that put Trump into power.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another episode of pressure on the media involves\u00a0 Executive Order 14172<\/a>\u00a0 of Jan. 20, 2025, directing federal agencies<\/a> to adopt the name \u201cGulf of America\u201d for the body of water that had been called the “Gulf of Mexico” for at least 300 years. \u00a0Google Maps<\/a>,\u00a0Apple Maps<\/a>,\u00a0Bing Maps<\/a>, and several U.S.-based media outlets such as\u00a0USA Today<\/a><\/i>,\u00a0Axios<\/a><\/i>, and\u00a0Fox News<\/a> adopted the change.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In order to coerce the Associated Press to use the \u201cGulf of America\u201d name, the\u00a0Trump administration ordered that AP reporters and photographers be banned<\/a> from all government news conferences and events.\u00a0 The AP sued in federal court but was unable to secure an immediate injunction against the discriminatory and coercive policy.\u00a0 The problem is that this is an ancient form of viewpoint discrimination called compelled speech. (For more on the topic see “Compelled Speech<\/a>” on this site).<\/p>\n

The AP issue involved more than simply having reporters access White House events, according to Julie Pace, AP executive editor<\/a>. “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.\u201d<\/p>\n

On April 8, a federal court ordered the White House to remove restrictions on the AP<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Put Colbert to sleep — Dec 24 — In a social media post, Donald Trump said that comedian Stephen Colbert is a “pathetic train wreck” and that CBS should “put him to sleep”\u00a0 He also said: \u201cIf Network NEWSCASTS, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,25,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-constitutional-law","category-politics-media-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7077,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316\/revisions\/7077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}