Is the country of the First Amendment, where unrestricted self-expression has long been a birthright, witnessing the slow demise of free speech?
In President Donald Trump’s second term, Americans have seen an assault on press freedoms of a vehemence that legal scholars say has few precedents in the country’s history.
Media outlets critical of Trump have been saddled with multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits or punished by his enforcers in supposedly independent government agencies. Public broadcasters have been dismantled or defunded and reporters arrested for covering anti-government protests.
“The US president is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) USA. “Trump is a press freedom predator.”
The president has never concealed his contempt for traditional media such as The New York Times, ABC, CNN and NBC. Even in his first term he branded them “fake news” and an “enemy of the people”.
But in his second term the anti-media rhetoric has translated into controversial policy moves that have sent a deep chill through the media sector.
Experts worry the US could be moving in the direction of illiberal democracies such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where the government controls much of the media landscape, independent journalists are harassed and non-governmental organisations critical of the prime minister’s policies are under constant pressure.
“We’ve seen a range of tactics being used that are very familiar to us from our coverage of authoritarian regimes,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They are meant to intimidate and silence the press and control the narrative.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history to the media and his return to the White House saved the legacy media from going out of business.
“There has never been a greater champion of the First Amendment than Donald J Trump.”
Legal scholars say they must dig deep into the country’s history to find anything remotely similar to Trump’s policies — as far back as 1917, when Americans opposed to US involvement in the first world war were prosecuted and jailed.
Eugene Volokh, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said there have been occasional attempts by Democratic administrations to curb free speech: conservatives harshly criticised then-president Joe Biden for pressing tech companies to remove misinformation about Covid-19 from their social media platforms. But on the whole, he said, the executive branch has tended to steer clear of attempts to crimp First Amendment rights.
“But the Trump administration has been more active on this than most administrations in recent decades,” he said, “[and] that’s a real change.”
Concerns about free speech only intensified during the huge crackdown on undocumented foreigners by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis earlier this year, in which two US citizens protesting ICE’s actions were shot dead by federal agents.
Reporters also got swept up in the unrest. Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor, and Georgia Fort, a local independent journalist, were arrested after filming a protest at a church in St Paul, Minnesota, where an ICE official serves as pastor.
The two were charged with conspiracy and interfering with worshippers’ constitutional rights to freely exercise their religion.
“What we are seeing is a demonisation of the act of journalism itself,” said Ginsberg of the CPJ. “The idea that journalism, the bearing of witness, the documenting of facts is seen as a political act. And that is something new.”
Media experts were also alarmed by the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, carried out as part of a national security investigation, in which agents seized her phone, two laptops and a smartwatch.
RSF’s Weimers called the incident “extremely frightening”, considering Natanson’s reliance on information gleaned from confidential sources in the government. “Those sources are now in the possession of the FBI,” he said, warning of the “chilling effect” it will have on journalism.
But First Amendment activists say one of the most troubling developments of the second Trump term has been the politicisation of the Federal Communications Commission, the US broadcast regulator.
Its head Brendan Carr, a close Trump ally, is deploying the commission to tackle perceived liberal bias in the media, invoking a rarely used “news distortion” policy to investigate some of the country’s biggest television networks.
One of his first moves in office was to reinstate licensing complaints against the three major US broadcasters — ABC, CBS and NBC — over their coverage of the 2024 election. A few days later he launched a full investigation into the public media networks PBS and NPR.
The FCC found itself the focus of renewed scrutiny this week when lawyers for CBS’s parent company Paramount prohibited Stephen Colbert, the late-night host, from airing an interview with a Democratic candidate for the US Senate, the Texan James Talarico.
They said the interview would violate the FCC’s equal time rule, which requires broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to political candidates. Under Carr’s leadership, the regulator is reinterpreting the rule to include daytime and late-night talk shows, significantly expanding its scope.
Colbert addressed the issue on his show on Monday night, saying the lawyers had not only forced him to drop the interview but told him not to mention it had been dropped. “And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this — let’s talk about this,” Colbert said.
Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, said the Colbert/Talarico incident was an example of media organisations practising “enforced self-censorship”.
“The corporate ownership of these news outlets are now doing the work [of the administration] for them,” he said. “The [owners] would rather capitulate and hope that it helps their other business interests than fight it out for the freedom of the press.”
But it is not just news organisations and journalists that are being targeted. This week Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said economists at the New York Fed should be “disciplined” for publishing a report showing US businesses and consumers were shouldering the bulk of the costs of Trump’s tariffs.
Democratic legislators have also found themselves in the administration’s crosshairs. In November, Trump accused senator Mark Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers of sedition “punishable by DEATH” after they made a video urging troops not to follow unlawful orders.
Prosecutors at the Department of Justice later sought to indict Kelly on charges of seditious conspiracy but a grand jury in Washington declined their request.
The assault on First Amendment rights has come as a surprise to some media experts. Prior to Trump’s second term, leading figures in his Maga movement such as JD Vance, now vice-president, posed as staunch defenders of free speech, lambasting the “cancel culture” seen on some college campuses and social media platforms as a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Now, said Seth Stern, head of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, cancel culture was being directed from the top down.
“Here it is a matter of government policy to cancel critics, kick out reporters who don’t use the language the government likes, deport people who hold views the government doesn’t like, send Brendan Carr and the FCC after news outlets that air reporting that is not to the president’s liking, even threaten social media platforms that don’t do the government’s bidding,” he said.
“It’s a cancel culture that is far more embedded at the deepest levels of government.”