The Washington Post sounds an alarm about the erosion of press freedom. They outline all the cases that are pending and the collapse of the ABC case, all of which sounds pretty bad when you see it all together. They seem to be serious.
It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information.
But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.
“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News.
Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.
“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.””
One of the articles I read about the ABC case (which I can’t seem to find now unfortunately) said that the corporate legal suits were very nervous about the Florida judge who was hearing the case. Apparently, they interpreted her earlier rulings to be a little bit eccentric and not in a good way. I got the sense they thought there was a little Aileen Cannon energy.
Whether that’s just rationalization, I don’t know. it’s very possible the cave was just another gesture to the Dear Leader from Disney, which was already feeling a little bit vulnerable after the DeSantis business. But reading it did remind me that that with judge shopping being so prevalent and so many hardcore right wing judges on the bench from Trump’s first term, it might be smart to recognize that all the assurance we hear from the various legal beagles that the suits or indictments can’t possibly be found to have merit in the courts may not be taking that into account. With Clarence Thomas talking about overturning NY Times v. Sullivan defamation case, who knows what might happen? The courts are a very weak guardrail at the moment.