The Russification of American Media

The illusion of a free press in a soft autocracy.

When Donald Trump won the White House for a second time last November, we all knew that he was going to launch a full-scale assault on American journalism. It wasn’t exactly a secret: he gleefully promised it, and his fans thrilled to the idea. “Trump Signals Plans to Use All Levers of Power Against The Media,” read a headline in The Washington Post in late December, before that paper became a victim of that very campaign, and its owner a quisling collaborator in it.

Six months into that second administration, we are seeing that attack fully underway.

This insidious campaign consists both of straightforward frontal assaults employing the power of the presidency, and more oblique ones, which is to say, legal action and the threat thereof, relying on that same power. “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting, says Marty Baron, former editor of The Washington Post, who compared Trump’s approach to Viktor Orbán’s. Worse, Trump’s efforts have been aided by a jawdropping degree of what the historian and author Tim Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” by some of the biggest newspapers, broadcast TV networks, and media companies in the country — apropos of the WaPo — a craven preemptive surrender to Donald before he even attacks…