Donald Trump, who coined the term “fake news” to discredit the news media, is not letting up since he was re-elected U.S. president. He’s intensifying his campaign against journalism in many alarming ways.
Call it news intimidation.
Canadians should take notice because Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Conservatives, has more or less been following Trump’s playbook, threatening to defund the CBC and describing The Canadian Press, which supplies most of the country’s news to print and broadcast outlets, as “a tax-funded mouthpiece for the Prime Minister’s office.” Poilievre is odds-on favourite to lead his party to power in the next federal election. He often refuses to let journalists ask questions at his press conferences and prefers to talk policy on podcasts where he cannot be fact-checked.
This week, south of the border, Trump’s pick to be new chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, announced he is launching an investigation into NPR and PBS, two popular government-funded news and public affairs networks that serve millions of Americans, much like the services that CBC provides for Canadians. National Public Radio (NPR) feeds 20 local stations that reach eight million listeners in local communities. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is even bigger, delivering news to 65 million viewers.
In a letter addressed to the chief executives of the public broadcasters that was published by The New York Times, Carr wrote that Congress is “actively” looking into whether to stop requiring Americans to fund NPR and PBS programming, noting that he personally sees “no reason” this should continue. His investigation, he said, will look into whether NPR and PBS are broadcasting “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
What’s notable about Carr is that, besides being in charge of the agency that licenses all U.S. broadcasters, he wrote a large section of Project 2025, the contentious document that supporters of Trump wrote before the election and which Trump seems to be following to the letter in the weeks since his inauguration. Among other things, Carr advocated getting rid of outdated regulations and cited Trump henchman Elon Musk’s satellite internet product Starlink as a technology the FCC should promote.
“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr said.
Both CEOs have disputed Carr’s allegations. But on other fronts, the new Trump administration has peeled back the ability of traditional media to cover what’s going on. Example: The New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico will be evicted from their offices at the Pentagon next week and replaced by smaller right-wing sites including Breitbart News and One America News. A Pentagon spokesman called it a “new annual media rotation” but the Times and NBC News have had news bureaus at the Pentagon for decades and one of the replacements, HuffPost, does not even employ a Pentagon correspondent.
Seeing the writing on the wall, many billionaire media owners have paid Trump millions of dollars to settle winnable lawsuits he filed on questionable grounds even before the election. One critic called their actions “preemptive servitude.”
Example: Trump sued CBS for $10 billion, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the election campaign. Many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish a critical outlet.
Now that Trump is back in the White House, many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration will approve their planned multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance. Settlement discussions are now under way. Throwing in the towel would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.
During the “60 Minutes” interview at the center of the lawsuit, which aired in October, the CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris a question about the conflict in the Middle East. In a preview of the interview that aired on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Sunday morning show, Harris was shown giving a different answer than the one she gave in the version of the interview that was broadcast the next evening on “60 Minutes.”
Trump accused “60 Minutes” of selecting a more coherent quote from Harris for the prime-time telecast in order to boost her candidacy. CBS News said that Harris had given one lengthy answer to Whitaker’s question, and that the network followed standard journalistic practice by airing a different portion of her answer in prime-time because of time constraints.
Regardless of the lawsuit’s merit, Trump’s administration wields leverage. Because Paramount owns broadcasting licenses, it needs the blessing of the FCC to complete its planned merger with Skydance. Carr, Trump’s new FCC chief, says his commission would probably look into the “60 Minutes” interview as part of its review of the Paramount merger.
If Paramount settles with Trump, it would be the third major company in recent weeks to settle a lawsuit brought by the new president.
Last month, ABC News paid $15 million to resolve Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who had imprecisely said that the president was found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York. (In fact, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse.)
And Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, paid $25 million to resolve a lawsuit that Trump filed after the social networks suspended his accounts in 2021. Meta is headed by Mark Zuckerburg, a billionaire supporter of Trump.
The settlements have come even though it is notoriously difficult for public figures like Trump to win defamation lawsuits. Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent — which Trump and some of his allies want to see weakened or overturned — plaintiffs must prove that a publisher knew a defamatory statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its accuracy.
Trump’s aggressive lawsuits are the latest sign that his administration is prepared to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.
The strategy to punish factual reporting can pay other dividends as well. CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros., recently reassigned prominent Trump critic Jim Acosta to a midnight shift in what was widely seen as a move to mute critical coverage of the new administration. Warner has lucrative broadcasting interests that are subject to FCC licensing, including Discovery Network, the Food Channel and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Acosta quit in protest, saying “don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth, and to hope.”.
In Canada, Conservative leader Poilievre has also resorted to questionable attacks against the media, including the country’s most popular news network CTV News. After an editing error took one of his statements out of context, Poilievre ordered his MPs and senators to “refrain from engaging with CTV News, including participating in interviews, providing statements or offering any form of commentary,”
He has also questioned government subsidies to the news media which have kept many newspapers afloat while they shrink their coverage due to unprecedented loss of advertising revenue and subscribers. Last year Poilievre said subsidies paid to local newspapers by the Trudeau government have produced “regurgitated propaganda paid for by taxpayers.” Instead, he says Canadians enjoy an abundance of news available for free on the Internet. That, of course, is not true, since popular online sites like Facebook and Instagram refuse to carry news produced by professional media and Facebook has dropped its token fact-checking function.
Canadians would do well to watch what Trump is doing to cripple the news media south of the border. Poilievre shows every indication he may use those tactics here if his party wins election later this year.
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