How to Kill a Free Press Without Killing a Free Press
Hard censorship threatens. Soft censorship purchases. War is accelerating both.
Two truths:
Only cowards fear a free press.
There is no such thing any more as “the media.”
Let’s look at the second truth.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, you might have been able to make the argument that a few corporations dominated what news the American public got, and what news the public did not get. That is simply not true any more.
The explosion of the internet and social media means that every possible viewpoint, and an enormous variety of reporting, data and analysis, are available to every citizen with a phone and a modicum of curiosity. It’s true that most people don’t take up the opportunities this ocean of information and opinion present each one of us—but that’s a different problem.
I worked at ABC News from September 1997 until June 2025. I lived the decline—gradual, then steep, then fatal—of the power, profit, and influence of network news. I loved working ABC, and I retain my admiration for the work of my former colleagues. But it is simply to acknowledge the obvious to say that network news is a dying business.
So why are President Donald Trump—and his cartoonish FCC henchman Brendan Carr—so determined to take control of it?
One reason is that Trump is a fragile, petulant, thin-skinned man who cannot endure any criticism from any quarter. He is a coward. We know that.
The other reason we also know, or should. Seizing control of the corporate media is one part of a bigger project. And Trump’s war is accelerating it.
CENSORSHIP HARD AND SOFT IN TRUMP’S WAR
There are two ways a government silences the press.
The first is direct: a threat, a license revocation, a prosecution.
The second is subtler, and in the long run more effective—the slow transfer of media assets to people who understand what the powerful want to hear, and the pervasive climate of fear that whispers to every editor and reporter: be careful.
Both are on display this week.
The Hard Hand
On Saturday, while reportedly attending a Mar-a-Lago event, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr posted a warning on X that should alarm every American who values a free press. Amplifying one of Trump’s social-media screeds attacking The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and what Trump called “other lowlife papers and media,” Carr wrote that broadcasters airing “fake news” must “correct course before their license renewals come up.”
The law was clear, he declared: broadcasters that fail to serve the “public interest” will lose their licenses.
The immediate trigger was Trump’s fury over reporting in The Wall Street Journal—based on what U.S. officials were saying—that Iranian missiles had struck five Air Force refueling planes at a base in Saudi Arabia. Trump disputed the extent of the damage.
As law professor Stuart Benjamin wrote Sunday at The Volokh Conspiracy, the factual differences between the Journal’s reporting and the administration’s claims were fairly small; more to the point, uncertainty is the condition of all war reporting.
Journalism in any breaking news story—especially a war—is iterative. You talk to sources, check them with other sources and with what you are seeing on the ground, and report the story, sharing with readers/viewers as much as you can about how you know what you are telling them. And you keep reporting.
It’s not perfect. It never has been. And our laws and traditions in this country have always recognized this fluid and essential process. “Journalism is the first rough draft of history,” as Philip Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, put it decades ago. It’s not the final word.
So Brendan Carr is not trying to improve journalism. He is gagging it. That is what he is threatening.
Legally, experts say, his threats are largely hollow. Any government action would trigger years of First Amendment litigation. Even Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin—who loathes the old “mainstream media”—went on Fox News Sunday to say he opposes heavy-handed government “no matter who is wielding it.”
But legal hollowness is not political toothlessness.
Carr doubled down in a CBS News interview, declaring that broadcast licenses are not a “property right.” He has already opened investigations into NBC affiliates over immigration coverage, threatened action over a 60 Minutes interview, and suggested that even late-night comedy might violate the public interest standard.
The pattern is not random. It is systematic pressure designed to produce a result that a formal proceeding never needs to reach.
And here is the critical legal distinction Carr exploits: the First Amendment fully protects newspapers and digital outlets. Trump can fume at the Times and the Journal and all of us on Substack all he wants—he cannot touch them legally.
But the TV networks, governed by an old and outdated law, are ripe fruit for the censor’s picking.
The Soft Hand
Hard censorship is visible and thus galvanizing. Soft censorship is more insidious because it speaks in the ordinary language of business.
On Friday—the day before Carr’s threat—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon podium, and in a long, ranting whine trashed CNN’s reporting that the administration had failed to fully account for the consequences of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz (as Trump frantically demands Europe, China, SOMEONE come and help open the Strait), and then Hegseth said something remarkable:
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison’s Paramount Skydance has a deal in place to acquire CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a transaction valued at over $110 billion. Ellison is a friend of Trump’s. He has already taken over CBS, where he placed Bari Weiss of The Free Press in effective charge of CBS News editorial operations, producing significant turmoil within the organization.
A departing CBS Evening News producer described a newsroom in which stories were now being weighed not only on journalistic merit but on whether they conformed to ideological expectations—a dynamic that pressured reporters and producers to self-censor and avoid narratives that might invite backlash.
Ellison has pledged, repeatedly, that editorial independence at CNN “will absolutely be maintained.” He made the same pledge about CBS News.
Hegseth did not misspeak. He said exactly what the administration thinks: change the ownership, change the coverage. The president himself has said he expects the Ellisons’ CBS coverage to be “fairer,” and that David Ellison would “do the right thing.”
This is the soft hand of censorship: not force but corporate takeover.
Soft censorship at its deepest level is not even about ownership. It is about the climate of fear—the mere possibility of government disfavor. Think Viktor Orban, not Big Brother.
Wartime Makes It Worse
Two things make this moment especially dangerous.
The first: Trump launched this war without consulting Congress, without warning the American people, without apparently thinking through what Iran might do in response. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows daily—the administration was caught flat-footed, and reporters said so. That is precisely the function of a free press in a democracy: to tell citizens what their government has done in their name, and whether it is working.
Trump’s response is to attack the messengers and demand praise. The reporters who point out the obvious infuriate him because the obvious reflects badly on him, and because his war—launched without public consent, now threatening an oil shock—is not going as promised.
The second: “War is the health of the state,” as the great anti-war essayist Randolph Bourne wrote during the First World War.
Wars create emergencies, and emergencies create executive power.
The Stakes
Free journalism in wartime is not a luxury. It is the mechanism by which a self-governing people learns whether a war is going well or badly, whether their leaders are honest or not, whether the costs paid in blood and treasure are what they were told they would be. The Founders understood this. Autocrats always understand it too, which is why they move so quickly against the press when they have the chance.
The hard hand and the soft hand are working in tandem right now.
—Terry
It's certainly true that an attack on the free press (and free speech) is and has been underway since the start of the Trump regime. They are now fighting a losing battle because a) the regime is so incompetent and unpopular and b) there are so many quality independent journalists now, like Terry.
In this regard, I worry less about the Trump regime and more about the corporate takeovers of the media from the standpoint of who will have the resources and manpower to do the independent investigation of our government (and others). I've never been in the journalism world, but it seems to me that a lot of independent journalism is based on analyzing and spreading the news based on the considerable leg work and resources of organizations like the NYT, the WSJ and previously the WP. As mainstream media gets consolidated, is our threat greater (in the long term) from the oligarchs who control the media (Ellison, Bezos, Murdoch, etc.) than from the Trump regime?
aka: State media. This is how it begins.