Free speech in America
Donald Trump is trying to silence his critics. He will fail
But the country could still lose
Illustration: Doug ChaykaDONALD TRUMP hates being the butt of jokes; so his henchman seized on a slender pretext to get Jimmy Kimmel off late-night TV.
The president is fed up with being criticised when he should be feted; so his lawyers sued the New York Times for $15bn.
He sees everything as a fight; so his team want wealthy allies to buy control of the American arm of TikTok from its Chinese parent.
These alarming skirmishes are part of a war against the American media.
Yet Mr Trump has hardly enjoyed a resounding success.
Mr Kimmel is back on air; a federal judge laughed the lawsuit out of court; and who knows how obedient those multibillionaire tycoons will be.
It should not need saying in the home of the First Amendment, but a craven press leads inexorably to rampant corruption, poor government and cynical, disaffected voters.
In a country where elections are won by small margins, even a partially cowed or captured media could tip the scales.
Yet wanting something is not the same as getting it.
As Mr Kimmel and the rest show, dominating America’s sprawling, unruly media and opinionated citizens will be hard.
Mr Trump’s desire to control what people see and read about him is obvious.
He seems less motivated by the—once justified—conservative gripe that much of the American media had a built-in soft-left bias than by the fact that he craves attention, and that he increasingly expects attention to mean adulation.
His people prove their loyalty by striving to ensure he gets it.
They have some formidable weapons.
One is a Trump speciality: bullying and threats.
The Wall Street Journal has been sued too, for a scoop about Mr Trump and a dead sex-criminal, Jeffrey Epstein.
So has the Des Moines Register, for a poll just before the 2024 election that had Mr Trump losing the vote in Iowa.
The Pentagon is curbing the freedom of correspondents to report, on pain of losing their credentials.
Disney was attacked by Brendan Carr, the boss of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Liking what he saw, Mr Trump then suggested that television networks which criticise him should lose their licences.
These cases are feeble in law, but they can have a chilling effect, as they are expensive to defend against.
In 2008, 92% of America’s 100 largest newspapers by circulation endorsed a presidential candidate.
Last year three-quarters did not.
Another weapon is ownership.
Mr Trump is the first American president to have his personal news service, Truth Social.
Hungary under Viktor Orban shows how friendly businessmen can bolster “official” news, either out of conviction or a desire to trade favourable coverage for commercial advantage.
X is owned by Elon Musk, who campaigned for Mr Trump.
TikTok looks likely to come under the control of other allies, including the Ellisons and the Murdochs.
David Ellison’s purchase of Paramount and, potentially, Warner Bros Discovery would also give him control over CBS and CNN.
And a last weapon is the use of pressure points.
Two networks, ABC and CBS, settled winnable multi-million-dollar lawsuits with Mr Trump, because they feared regulators’ retribution that could cost them billions of dollars.
Imagine that Alphabet and Meta were induced by a promise or threat to their artificial-intelligence businesses to ensure that YouTube and Instagram leaned towards MAGA.
With the fate of the company at stake, wouldn’t their duty to their shareholders be to fall into line?
All this is worrying, but Mr Trump is not as strong as he appears.
Television news obsesses the elderly man with the remote in the White House, but it is vulnerable mostly because it is a declining industry.
Outside debate season, CBS is a main source of political news for just 3% of Americans.
The media conglomerates are focused instead on the streaming wars—one reason Disney reinstated Mr Kimmel was pressure from outraged “talent” in Hollywood.
For newspapers, news and opinion is their main business.
If they tough it out, they will win in court, and each time Mr Trump brings a nuisance libel case he will be further exposed as a vain bully.
America’s media market is also hard to control because it is fragmented.
In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi only a few channels mattered and he owned nearly half of them.
A market of 9.5m Hungarian-speakers is small enough to be captured.
America is different.
Moreover, each social-media network is itself a fragmented universe of individual content-providers.
Unlike William Randolph Hearst, their proprietors cannot call editors and tell them what to print—and the FCC has no jurisdiction.
Algorithms can steer users, but to kill news one story at a time requires a Chinese-style army of censors.
The Biden administration tried to get social networks to mute vaccine scepticism.
It seems to have had the opposite effect.
Free speech in America is protected by a constitutional guarantee, a vast media market and the appetites of the half of the country that does not vote Trump.
A captured media, if it were possible, would be a huge business opportunity for the other side.
America has deep capital markets and lots of risk-takers.
It has never been easier to start a video show or a podcast or publish words.
Building new networks is hard, but look at Threads and TikTok as alternatives to X, or how the pecking order of social networks has changed in the past.
As so often with Mr Trump, his great asset is speed.
The courts follow procedure; businesses have to work out how to fight back; new ventures need time to get off the ground.
Lights, camera, legal action
Yet even if Mr Trump does not win his battle, America could still lose.
In a fragmented attention economy the best way to break through is to call everything an apocalypse, urge revolution or denounce fascism.
If all the rewards go to divisive political entertainment, then founding good government on a common understanding of facts becomes ever harder.
America survived a partisan press in the 19th century; it will probably do so in the 21st.
But the vaudevillisation of the public square is a heavy burden on an overburdened democracy.
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