As Political scientist Lawrence Britt wrote in Free Inquiry Magazine, “under some [fascist] regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line.”
The kind of media control that Britt describes here seems more forceful than what we see in contemporary news outlets. According to mediabiasfactcheck.com, even more overtly right-leaning outlets such as Fox News have relatively high press freedom.
Though conservative ownership of media platforms is not new, the Trump Administration’s escalating hostility towards reliable news outlets have alarming implications for press freedoms in America.
Recently, the Trump administration has seized control of White House press coverage. The impingement started when Trump banned independent global news outlet the Associated Press (AP) from the White House, citing their continued use of “Gulf of Mexico” instead of its new title “Gulf of America”. The AP has since reported that Trump has continued to restrict their press coverage until they “agree that it’s the Gulf of America.”
Many conservatives would argue that the ban is trivial since the AP is not barred from general press coverage. However, this mindset distracts from the Trump Administration’s infringement of first amendment rights. The AP is well within its rights to call it “Gulf of Mexico,” and the White House has no grounds to punish the AP for not using the language that Trump prefers.
According to Reuters, the White House has also taken full control over managing the press pool covering Trump. Though Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt says the five major cable and broadcast television networks would continue their coverage, the White House would rotate print and radio reporters.
This means that the Trump Administration has more direct control over what news outlets are covering events at the White House. Reuters reports that Trump has already exercised that control by barring certain news outlets from covering an executive cabinet meeting, including Reuters and the AP.
According to Newsmax, several prominent news outlets lost Pentagon offices as part of the “rotation” program. The four outlets in question – NBC, The New York Times, Politico and National Public Radio – were informed that they would be leaving their workspaces in the Pentagon on Feb 14.
Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot said in the memo that the move was made to “broaden access to the limited space of the Correspondents’ Corridor to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalist value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon.”
However, the White House’s replacements for these news outlets reveals their true motives. Newsmax reports that two of the “less traditional, smaller organizations” filling those spots include Breitbart and One America News Network. Both organizations have a mixed-to-low factual reporting and a far right-wing bias, according to mediabiasfactcheck.com.
Replacing trustworthy reporters is not a move to grant new opportunities to smaller news outlets. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to control what media outlets cover news at the White House. Trump will use these untrustworthy organizations to spread more misinformation, furthering his political agenda in the process.
