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Democracy Needs a Fearless Press and Vice Versa—Trump Is Killing Both
Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy. But there are things we can do to fight back.
Sep 18, 2025
Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.
Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.
The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.
At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).
Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said that Trump was found liable for rape rather than "sexual abuse" in the civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The network settled for $16 million
Trump sued CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris on "60 Minutes" to make her sound more coherent. CBS also agreed to pay $16 million.
Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.
In the 1980s, Trump sued the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp for $500 million, for criticizing Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, a 150-story tower that Gapp called "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”
Trump charged that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" the project and subjected Trump to "public ridicule and contempt." A judge later dismissed the suit as involving protected opinion.
But such lawsuits are far worse when a president sues. He’s no longer just an individual whose reputation can be harmed. He’s the head of the government of the United States. One of the cardinal responsibilities of the media in our democracy is to report on a president — and often criticize him.
The legal standard for defamation of a public figure, established in a 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, requires that public officials who bring such suits prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.
That case arose from a libel suit filed by L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, against the New York Times for an advertisement in the paper that, despite being mostly true, contained factual errors concerning the mistreatment of civil rights demonstrators.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, finding that the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment and that the higher standard of proof was necessary to protect robust debate on public affairs.
Under this standard, there’s no chance Trump will prevail in his latest lawsuits against the Times or Wall Street Journal. Nor would he have won his lawsuits against ABC and CBS, had they gone to trial.
But Trump hasn’t filed these lawsuits to win in court. He has sought wins in the court of public opinion. These lawsuits are aspects of his performative presidency.
ABC’s and CBS’s settlements are viewed by Trump as vindications of his gripes with the networks.
He’s likewise using his lawsuit against the New York Times to advertise his long standing grievances with the paper.
His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is intended to send a message to the Journal’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, that Trump doesn’t want Murdoch to muck around in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
These lawsuits also put the media on notice that Trump could mess up their businesses.
Not only is it costly to defend against them — requiring attorney’s fees, inordinate time of senior executives, and efforts to defend the media’s brand and reputation.
When a lawsuit comes from the president of the United States who also has the power to damage a business by imposing regulations and prosecuting the corporation for any alleged wrongdoings, the potential costs can be huge.
Which presumably is why CBS caved rather than litigated. Its parent company, Paramount, wanted to be able to sell it for some $8 billion to Skydance, whose CEO is David Ellison (scion of the second-richest person in America, Oracle’s Larry Ellison). But Paramount first needed the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — which held up the sale until the defamation lawsuit was settled.
Here we come to the central danger of Trump’s wanton use of personal defamation law. The mere possibility of its use — coupled with Trump’s other powers of retribution — have a potential chilling effect on media criticism of Trump.
We don’t know how much criticism has been stifled to date, but it’s suggestive that a CBS News president and the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned over CBS’s handling of the lawsuit and settlement, presumably because they felt that management was limiting their ability to fairly and freely cover Trump.
It’s also indicative that CBS ended Stephen Colbert’s contract. Colbert’s show is the highest-rated late night comedy show on television. He’s also one of the most trenchant critics of Trump.
Among the capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration was to hire an “ombudsman” to police the network against so-called bias — and the person they hired was Kenneth R. Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute think tank.
Note also that on Wednesday ABC pulled off the air another popular late-night critic of Trump — Jimmy Kimmel — because Kimmel in a monologue earlier this week charged that Trump’s “MAGA gang” was trying “to score political points” from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
ABC announced the move after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, appeared to threaten ABC, and its parent company Disney, for airing Kimmel’s monologue —ominously threatening: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and related businesses, has muzzled the editorial page of the Washington Post — prohibiting it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and imposing a stringent set of criteria on all editorials and opinion columns, which has led to the resignations of its opinion page editor and a slew of its opinion writers.
Trump hasn’t sued the Washington Post for defamation, but Bezos presumably understands Trump’s potential for harming his range of businesses and wants to avoid Trump’s wrath.
Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy.
What can be done? Two important steps are warranted.
First, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be far stricter when a president of the United States seeks to use defamation law against a newspaper or media platform that criticizes him.
Instead of requiring that he prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, he should have to prove that the false statement materially impaired his ability to perform his official duties.
Better yet, a president should have no standing to bring defamation suits. He has no need to bring them. Through his office he already possesses sufficient — if not too much — power to suppress criticism.
Second, antitrust authorities should not allow large corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests to buy major newspapers or media platforms. They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their financial interests in their range of businesses.
The richest person in the world was allowed to buy X, one of the most influential news platforms on earth, and has turned it into a cesspool of rightwing lies and conspiracy theories.
The family of the second-richest person in the world now owns CBS.
The third-richest person now owns the Washington Post.
The Disney corporation — with its wide range of business enterprises — owns ABC.
The problem isn’t concentrated wealth per se. It’s that these business empires are potentially more important to their owners than is the public’s right to know.
If Democrats win back control of Congress next year, they should encode these two initiatives in legislation.
Democracy depends on a fearless press. Trump and the media that have caved in to him are jeopardizing it and thereby undermining our democracy
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Your Socialist Grandfather Wants You to Fight for Economic Democracy
"The left" must get back to what was its original reason for existence—to fight for one-person, one vote democracy in the economic as well as political systems that govern our lives.
Sep 14, 2025
What’s the best way to pass on what you learned from more than a half century of left-wing doing, reading, writing, talking, and thinking?
Write a book. This was especially obvious to a retired union-activist-journalist-novelist grandfather. So, I did. Started writing a book tentatively titled Economic Democracy or No Democracy—An Anti Oligarchy Manifesto.
But then I actually listened to my grandchildren and learned they don’t read much. Instead, their pipeline to understanding the world is social media, mostly memes and videos, few of which exceed five minutes of attention span. At first, I argued with them. “You should read. Much more. Opens your mind to places, experiences, ideas …”
They try to be polite to grandpa, but there’s no mistaking the disinterest as cellphone-induced zombie (perhaps Zen-like?) eyes stare at a screen on the table instead of me.
How to respond? What to do? Decades of union organizing has taught me the importance of listening. Meeting people where they are at. Following their lead rather than trying to impose an "organizing template" on them. The most successful organizing drives are ones in which the "organizer" is a resource, an assistant in a process where the unorganized transform themselves into the organized. “The union is U”—an old slogan expressing a fundamental truth.
So, how to meet my grandchildren and other young people where they are at? How to say something they might consider listening to?
To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems.
Perhaps these are questions someone two generations removed can never really answer. Certainly, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I was the ages of my two oldest grandchildren, there was no way most "old people" were deemed worthy of even asking their opinion about war, politics, and life in general, let alone the really important issues of the day like sex, relationships, and feminism.
Still, it is important for a socialist and union elder to try passing on at least a few things that might help young people today learn from our experiences—successes and, most of all, failures. According to a TV documentary about elephants, the oldest females are the ones able to lead the herd to faraway, lifesaving watering holes in times of drought.
Surely this era of climate-change-ignoring-billionaire-emperor CEOs, "free-world"-supported-live-streamed genocide, Donald Trump and all the other authoritarian, about-to-turn-fascistic "world leaders" is at least the human political equivalent of a savanna drought.
We are in a crisis almost certainly about to get worse, and the young ones need our working-class socialism, union-movement elderly-elephant-like accumulated knowledge to survive. It is up to us whose tusks are falling out to do what we can to save the herd.
So, I taught myself how to make videos, created the Your Socialist Grandfather YouTube channel, and turned my book manuscript into 43 five-minute-or-so-long videos. I call it a video book, and the first few episodes are already live on YouTube with a new one added every second day.
Mostly the free videos are about creating a new inclusive language of economic democracy to replace the old socialist-Marxist-anarchist jargon that divided us and to understand capitalism as another in a long line of tiny minorities attempting to rule over the vast majority.
As Your Socialist Grandfather sees it, "the left" must get back to what was its original reason for existence—to fight for one-person, one vote democracy in the economic as well as political systems that govern our lives. To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems. We must challenge capitalists’ claim to “own” our economies.
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Unlike Maine's Governor, Platner Does Not 'Appreciate Everything Susan Collins Has Been Doing'
The US Senate candidate's comments came after Maine's Democratic governor expressed appreciation for the Republican senator.
Sep 09, 2025
Democrat Graham Platner, an oyster farmer running to unseat Republican US Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, isn't pulling any punches when it comes to the incumbent's record—unlike the state's governor, Janet Mills, who may also enter the 2026 race.
Mills on Monday confirmed that she is still "seriously considering a run" for Senate, according to News Center Maine. She said, "Every day I pick up the newspaper and I read the headlines and I watch the news, and there are a lot of very disturbing things going on in Washington."
Asked whether Collins—who sometimes votes against her party, but falls in line when her vote actually matters—has done enough to push back against things like US President Donald Trump's tariffs, Mills said: "She's in a tough position. I appreciate everything she is doing."
Platner struck a much different tone. Responding to the reporting on social media Monday night, he said, "I do not appreciate everything Susan Collins has been doing."
Welcoming Platner's retort, Jonathan Dean, a lawyer and solar energy entrepreneur running in Illinois' crowded Democratic primary race for US Senate, said, "This is more like it."
On Tuesday, Semafor congressional bureau chief Burgess Everett asked Collins about Mills' comments. The Republican senator said she was "delighted" to hear Mills' remarks and that "the governor and I have always had a good relationship."
Platner weighed in again, saying, "Susan Collins and I have never had a good relationship."
His responses align with what the US military veteran said in the video launching his campaign last month: "I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the Army. I'm not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy."
"It's the billionaires who pay for it, and the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins," he continued. "I'm not fooled by this fake charade of Collins' deliberations and moderation."
"The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz," he added, referring to a Republican US senator from Texas, "is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn."
Platner has already secured support from a key progressive in the chamber: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The pair joined Troy Jackson, who is running to replace term-limited Mills as governor, for a rally in Portland, Maine on Labor Day as part of Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
"We need senators in Washington who are prepared to take on the billionaire class and fight for working people," Sanders said in his endorsement of Platner. "He's a Mainer through and through, and he is building a movement strong enough to take on the oligarchy that is making Maine unaffordable for all except a privileged few. I look forward to Graham joining me in Washington."
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