One critic warned that President Donald Trump "almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to."
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has scrapped a Biden-era policy that sharply restricted the Justice Department's ability to seize journalists' records and force them to testify in leak investigations, an alarming move that press freedom advocates said carries dire implications for reporters and whistleblowers.
In an internal memo first reported Friday by CBS News, Bondi wrote that the Justice Department "will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President [Donald] Trump's policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people."
"The perpetrators of these leaks aid our foreign adversaries by spilling sensitive and sometimes classified information onto the Internet. The damage is significant and irreversible," Bondi continued. "Accountability, including criminal prosecutions, is necessary to set a new course."
As part of a renewed crackdown on leaks, Bondi said she is issuing revised Justice Department regulations stating that media outlets "must answer subpoenas" related to efforts to uncover sources of unauthorized disclosures within the federal government.
"The policy contemplates the use of subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to compel production of information and testimony by and relating to members of the news media, subject to the Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000aa, and the approval of the department's leadership in some instances," the memo states. "The attorney general must also approve efforts to question or arrest members of the news media."
"Some of the most consequential reporting in U.S. history—from Watergate to warrantless wiretapping after 9/11—was and continues to be made possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources."
The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF)—a group co-founded by the late Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked classified documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers—noted in a statement that Bondi's memo followed "news that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asked the Department of Justice to investigate recent leaks to reporters."
Seth Stern, FPF's advocacy director, said Bondi's move was made possible by lawmakers' failure to pass the PRESS Act, bipartisan legislation would have codified into law rules prohibiting the federal government from forcing journalists or telecom companies from disclosing information about their sources.
"Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed," said Stern. "Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight."
"Because of them," Stern added, "a president who threatens journalists with prison rape for protecting their sources and says reporting critically on his administration should be illegal can and almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to."
After his victory in the 2024 presidential election, Trump instructed Republicans to block the PRESS Act, writing on his social media platform, "REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!"
Since the start of his second term, Trump has launched what Reporters Without Borders (RSF) characterized as "a monumental assault on press freedom," including by engaging in "legal intimidation" against media outlets.
"When you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear," Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF North America, said late last week. "RSF refuses to accept this massive attack on press freedom as the new normal. We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them. We urge every American who values press freedom to do the same."
Earlier this month, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a safety advisory to journalists planning to visit the United States, warning "journalists who are at high risk of being detained at the border" to "consider leaving their personal and/or work devices at home and instead carry separate devices and a new SIM card."
Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement following Bondi's memo that "strong protections for journalists serve the American public by safeguarding the free flow of information."
"Some of the most consequential reporting in U.S. history—from Watergate to warrantless wiretapping after 9/11—was and continues to be made possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources and uncover and report stories that matter to people across the political spectrum," Brown said.
U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.
And he is winning.
Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.
CBS
Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.
Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.
Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.
Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.
On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”
The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.
In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:
“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.
The Washington Post
In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.
After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.
On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.
After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.
Facebook
More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)
Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”
Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”
Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.
PBS and NPR
On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.
Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel
Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”
Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”
Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:
Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…
Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.
Just like Tom Paine, and until the very end, Bob saw hope in the people who were rising up and demanding a future defined by their humanity, as opposed to corporate power.
Bob McChesney, who died on Tuesday at the age of 72, first introduced himself to me almost 30 years ago, on the set of a public television news program in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob was a distinguished University of Wisconsin professor who was gaining an international reputation for his groundbreaking analysis of the threat to democracy posed by corporate control of media. Raising his arguments in books, speeches, and frequent C-Span appearances, he was well on his way to becoming one of the great public intellectuals of his time. I was a young newspaper editor who had earned a slim measure of recognition for my advocacy on behalf of investigative journalism and press freedom.
The program was framed as a debate about the future of journalism. Bob was positioned as the doomsayer, warning about how media consolidation was killing journalism. I was expected to counter that the future was actually bright. As it turned out, neither of us wanted to follow the script. Instead of arguing, we both agreed that profit-obsessed corporations were destroying American journalism, and that this destruction would pose an ever more serious threat to American democracy.
It wasn’t a particularly satisfying exchange for our hosts that evening, but it was the beginning of a collaboration that would span three decades. Bob and I cowrote half a dozen books and dozens of articles, joined Bill Moyers for a series of PBS interviews that would examine threats to journalism and democracy, and did our best, with more allies than we could have imagined in those early days, to stir up a reform movement that recognized the crisis and endeavored to set the stage for media that serves people rather than corporate bottom lines.
Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force. His research and his insatiable curiosity helped him to see the future more clearly than any scholar of his generation, with such precision that Moyers would compare him to both Tom Paine and Paul Revere. As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.
Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force.
Bob took the “public” part of “public intellectual” seriously. You knew he wanted to swing into action when he’d say, “We need to put our heads together…” That was his call to write another book, organize another national conference on media reform, or rally another movement to defend the speak-truth-to-power journalism that the founders of the American experiment understood as the only sure footing for representative democracy.
Bob kept issuing the call, even as a series of health challenges slowed him down. He was still doing so a few days before his death following a year-long fight with cancer. His was a life fulfilled in the best sense of the word. He died a happy man, holding the hand of his beloved wife, Inger Stole, and reflecting on time spent with his daughters, Amy and Lucy.
Our last conversations recalled friends and colleagues who had answered his calls to save journalism and renew our democracy: Craig Aaron, Victor Pickard, Josh Silver, Kimberly Longey, Russell Newman, Derek Turner, Ben Scott, Joe Torres, Tim Karr, Matt Wood, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Michael Copps, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and too many others to name. Bob loved scholarship, loved activism, and loved collaborating with people who made connections between the two—sharing writing credits with former students at UW-Madison and later at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with unions of media workers and, perhaps above all, strategizing with the team at Free Press, the media reform group he co-founded in 2003 to advocate for diversity in ownership, robust pubic media, net neutrality and always, always, democracy. Bob was frustrated by the oligarchical overreach now on display in the Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk—a development he had predicted with eerie accuracy. Yet he remained undaunted to the end, still spinning out fresh ideas for upending corporate control of media, getting Big Money out of politics, and ushering in a new era of freewheeling debate and popular democracy.
That was the essence of Robert Waterman McChesney. He was a globally respected communications scholar who was wholly welcome in the halls of academia, yet he was never satisfied working within an ivory tower. He was a rigorous researcher into the worst abuse of corporate and political establishments. Yet he refused to surrender his faith in the ability of people-powered movements to upend monarchs and oligarchs and, in the words of Tom Paine, “begin the world over again.”
Bob regarded Paine—the immigrant pamphleteer who rallied the people of his adopted country to dismiss King George III and the colonial enterprise, and who spent the rest of his life demanding that this new United States live up to the egalitarian promise of liberty and justice for all—as the essential founder of the American project. Like Paine, Bob believed that with information and encouragement, grassroots activists could carry Paine’s legacy forward into the 21st century. Countless people heeded his call.
“Bob McChesney was a brilliant scholar whose ideas and insights reached far beyond the classroom. He opened the eyes of a generation of academics, journalists, politicians, and activists—including mine—to how media structures and policies shape our broader politics and possibilities,” explained Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press. “While McChesney spent much of his career charting the problems of the media and the critical junctures that created our current crises, he believed fundamentally in the public’s ability to solve those problems and build a media system that serves people’s needs and sustains democracy. His ideas were bold and transformative, and he had little patience for tinkering around the edges. Rather than fighting over Washington’s narrow vision of what was possible, he always said—and Bob loved a good sports metaphor—that we needed to throw the puck down to the other end of the ice.”
Bob examined the relationship between media and democracy with scholarly seriousness. Yet he coupled that seriousness with a penchant not just for sports metaphors and references to rock-and-roll songs but spot-on cinematic analogies, which invited Americans to recognize the crisis. Speaking to Moyers about how America’s media policies were forged behind closed doors in Washington, by lobbyists and politicians, Bob succintly defined that process: “Pure corruption. This is really where Big Money crowds everything else out. The way to understand how policymakers make media in this country [is to watch] a great movie: The Godfather: Part II. There’s a scene early in the movie where all the American gangsters are on top of a hotel roof in Havana. It’s a classic scene featuring Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone. They’ve got a cake being wheeled out to them. And Hyman Roth is cutting up slices of the cake. The cake’s got the outline of Cuba on it, and they’re giving each gangster a slice of Cuba. And while he’s doing this, Hyman Roth’s [talking about how they can work with government to carve up Cuba in ways that make them all rich]. That’s how media policy is made in the United States.”
The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius. He wanted to upend the money power and tip the balance toward systems that would empower working-class people—as opposed to billionaires—to shape the future of media: with strategies for giving citizens democracy vouchers that they could use to support independent media, and a host of other remedies. Like his friend Bernie Sanders, Bob believed it essential to have a media free enough from corporate influence to speak truth to economic and political power, boldly critique the excesses of capitalism, and raise the alarm against creeping oligarchy.
The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius.
This was the premise that underpinned an academic career that saw Bob author or co-author almost 30 books—including the groundbreaking Rich Media, Poor Democracy, his 1999 manifesto on how the decay of journalism would lead to a collapse of democratic norms, and 2013’s Digital Disconnect, his essential assessment of the danger of allowing Silicon Valley billionaires to define online communications. Many of the same themes ran through examinations of the shuttering of newspapers by corporate conglomerates that left communities as news deserts, of the destructive influence of political advertising on the national discourse, and of the failure of political and media elites to bring citizens into debates about automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Noam Chomsky, whose own work on the media’s manufacturing of consent had profoundly influenced Bob’s scholarship (along with that of Ben Bagdikian, the journalist who wrote The Media Democracy), became Bob’s most ardent champion. “Robert McChesney’s work has been of extraordinary importance,” explained Chomsky. “It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights.”
Bob’s research—and the books, lectures and activism that extended from it—earned him Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize, the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Newspaper Guild’s Herbert Block Freedom Award (for “having done more for press freedom than anyone”), and the International Communications Association’s C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. It also gained him a hearing from thoughtful members of Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. Even if they did not always follow his advice, progressive officials recognized the wisdom of his analysis and incorporated it into their work. That’s one of the reasons why, in 2009, Utne Reader named Bob as one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world.” Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, simply referred to Bob as “the conscience of the media in America.”
Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…”
Lewis wrote those words the better part of two decades ago. Bob remained that conscience, even as “media deserts” spread their arid path across America, as disinformation and misinformation overwhelmed the Internet, as propagandistic advertising warped our politics and as democratic expectations were undermined. It was all as he had predicted. But he was not inclined toward “I told you so” rejoinders.
Rather, Bob kept the faith that popular movements would push back against the decay, and the chaos, just as they had in the Progressive Era, the New Deal years, and the 1960s. “You’ve got to look in the mirror and understand that, if you act like change for the better is impossible, you guarantee it will be impossible,” he would say. “That’s the one decision each individual faces.”
Bob looked in that mirror confidently and courageously throughout a life of scholarship and activism. Some of our last conversations were about the huge crowds Bernie Sanders was attracting for his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and the thousands of Americans who have been showing up to challenge Republican members of Congress at town hall meetings. Just like Tom Paine, Bob saw fresh hope in the people who were rising up and demanding a future defined by their humanity, as opposed to corporate power. This might, he suggested, be the opening for a new surge in activism for journalism and democracy, a surge that might “begin the world over again.”
Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…” In other words, let’s make a plan. Let’s do something. That was his charge to those of us who cherished Bob McChesney’s mission and his spirit. We honor him best by accepting it.
