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    The loss of editorial freedom at 60 Minutes is a sorry milestone for US media | Margaret Sullivan

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    There have been so many red alerts for press freedom in the United States over the past few months that it can be hard to know which ones really matter.The one at CBS’s 60 Minutes really matters.It came as a one-two punch. First, Bill Owens, the highly respected executive producer of the venerable news show stepped down, writing in a letter to employees that he no longer felt he had crucial editorial independence. It had become clear, he wrote, “that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it”.Although he wasn’t specific, corporate interference was clearly the problem, as the network’s parent company, Paramount, has been trying to get federal approval for a big media merger.Owens’s departure was a shocker, but one that was mostly felt internally at CBS and in media-watching circles.Last Sunday night, the problem went public – dramatically so. One of the most well-known faces of 60 Minutes, the correspondent Scott Pelley, closed out the program with a remarkable statement to the audience. He praised Owens and made the context painfully clear.“Stories we’ve pursued for 57 years are often controversial – lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration,” Pelley said. “Bill made sure they were accurate and fair … but our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways.”Pelley said that, to date, no story had been killed but that Owens “felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires”.Pelley’s comments were picked up widely, and now the world knows that viewers can no longer fully trust what they see on the Sunday evening show that has done such important and groundbreaking journalism for decades.Of course, as with so many of the red alerts mentioned above – lawsuits, threats, changes in long-held practices that protect the public’s right to know – the problem involves Donald Trump’s overweening desire to control the media. Controlling the message is what would-be authoritarians always do.Trump sued 60 Minutes for $20bn a few months ago, claiming unfair and deceptive editing of an interview with his then rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris. And his newly appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, took an aggressive approach by reopening an investigation into CBS over supposed distortion of the news. The editing of the Harris interview, by all reasonable accounts, followed standard practices.What has happened with 60 Minutes is a high-octane version of what is happening everywhere in Trump 2.0.Those who could stand up to Trump’s bullying are instead doing what scholars of authoritarianism say must be avoided, if democracy is to be salvaged. They are obeying in advance.Not everyone, of course. It’s inspiring to see prominent institutions – Harvard and other universities, many law firms, Georgetown law school and the Associated Press – refusing to buckle.They may pay a price. Perhaps a lucrative merger won’t go through, perhaps important federal grants will be lost, perhaps they’ll lose access to news sources, or be punished in some other way. But they’ll have their reputations and integrity intact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor universities, for law firms and certainly for media companies like CBS, that’s extremely important.And what’s more, yielding to Trump’s bullying is never successful in the long run. The goalposts of appeasement will be moved, again and again.Just think of what happened with Jeff Bezos, who has put at risk the editorial independence of the Washington Post, which he owns, in order to please Trump and protect the fortunes of his companies, including Amazon.Did all his bending the knee – including killing a Post endorsement of Harris just before the election – buy him long-term protection? Certainly not. When Amazon reportedly planned to display the cost of Trump’s tariffs next to prices on the site, the White House went ballistic, calling it a “hostile and political act”.You can guess what happened next. Amazon buckled, disavowing and scrapping the plan.If the rich and powerful won’t stand up to Trump, what hope can there be for the disenfranchised and powerless?Journalists at 60 Minutes are telling us that Shari Redstone, the executive and heiress who is the controlling shareholder of Paramount, is doing real damage by appearing to intrude into her venerable show’s independence. She may get the merger she wants but only at great cost to the journalism of which she should be a stalwart steward.There was another road to take – certainly a less traveled one but one with a far better destination in mind.

    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Journalists defend press freedom at muted White House correspondents’ dinner

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      Journalists rallied in defence of press freedom on Saturday, insisting they “are not the enemy of the people” at a Washington media gala snubbed by Donald Trump.The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner was a muted affair with no US president, no comedian and notably fewer politicians or Hollywood stars than in past years.The event took place under the shadow of a second Trump administration that has launched a wave of fresh attacks on freedom of the press, barring the Associated Press from the presidential pool and moving to shut down the Voice of America broadcaster.In a typical year the president attends the WHCA dinner to congratulate journalists on their work, give a jokey speech and take it on the chin as a comedian jabs at their expense. But Trump, who has branded the media “the enemy of the people”, gave the dinner a wide berth during his first term and stayed away again this time.Eugene Daniels, who leads the WHCA, noted that presidents from both sides of the political spectrum are invited every year. “We don’t invite presidents of the United States to this because it’s for them,” he said. “We don’t invite them because we want to cosy up to them or curry favour.“We don’t only extend invites to the presidents who say they love journalists or who say they’re defenders of the first amendment and a free press. We invite them to remind them that they should be.”Daniels then showed a video montage of past presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, addressing the dinner with self-deprecating jokes while also expressing their admiration for the press and its central importance in safeguarding democracy. Trump was conspicuous by his absence.As guests watched, Daniels continued: “We journalists are a lot of things. We are competitive and pushy. We are impatient and sometimes we think we know everything, but we’re also human. We miss our families and significant life moments in service to this job.“We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the opposition, what we are not is the enemy of the people and what we are not is the enemy of the state.” The giant ballroom erupted in applause.The Trump administration has had multiple skirmishes with the press in recent months. Federal funding for public broadcasters NPR and PBS is under threat. Trump has also launched legal assaults on private network CBS and the local Des Moines Register newspaper in Iowa, and brought to heel ABC, which paid $15m under threat of a libel lawsuit.The dinner announced scholarships for aspiring journalists and paid tribute to trailblazing figures in White House press history. It presented awards recognising excellence in reporting, writing and visual journalism. Winners delivered acceptance speeches that were careful not to criticise Trump directly but did unite around the theme of defending the first amendment, which protects freedom of speech.Alex Thompson of Axios, who won an award for coverage of Biden, silenced a room that was otherwise buzzing all night when he called out the media for failing to adequately investigate Biden’s mental acuity. The issue blew up when the 81-year-old gave a disastrous debate performance four months before the election.“President Biden’s decline and its cover up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said. “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves.“We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of that. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust and being defensive about the further erodes it. We should have done better.”It was a night of few laughs. The WHCA had invited then cancelled comedian Amber Ruffin after she referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” and asserted that “nobody wants” Trump to attend the dinner.Ruffin was excoriating in her response to being dropped, telling talk show host Seth Meyers: “We have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners. That’s what it says in the first amendment.”The dinner – a formal occasion where the dress code is tuxedos and gowns – has in past years hosted celebrities such as George Clooney, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hiddleston Scarlett Johansson, Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg. Not on Saturday, although Jason Isaacs, the British actor who stars in the latest series of The White Lotus, put in an appearance.White House officials and members of Congress were also unusually scarce but did include Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator for Minnesota. She told the Guardian: “I thought it was great. The dinner was back at its roots, honouring these incredible journalists and it was actually a lot of fun. I felt like I was at the journalists’ Academy Awards and it was really good.”Klobuchar added: “They hardly talked about Donald Trump. They just talked about their work and through Democratic and Republican presidents and why they do it.” More

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      ‘Everyone’s scared’: little appetite for mirth before White House correspondents’ dinner

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      It is no laughing matter. The annual dinner for journalists who cover the White House is best known for American presidents trying to be funny and comedians trying to be political. But this year’s edition will feature neither.Instead the event in a downtown Washington hotel on Saturday night will, critics say, resemble something closer to a wake for legacy media still trying to find an effective response to Donald Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics and the rise of the Maga media ecosystem.Joe Biden’s effort to restore norms included the former president giving humorous speeches at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner. But just as in his first term, Trump will not be joining the group he has long branded “the enemy of the people” and most of his staff are expected to boycott.News outlets, including the Guardian, will be present but there will also be another major gap this year. The WHCA had lined up the comedian and writer Amber Ruffin but last month withdrew her invitation. Eugene Daniels, president of the association, wrote in an email: “I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”Ruffin had referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast the previous week and asserted that “nobody wants” Trump to attend the dinner. The WHCA may have been seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2018 dinner in which the comedian Michelle Wolf savaged Trump administration officials sitting just feet away and was condemned by some for going too far.But critics described the decision to drop Ruffin as an exercise in capitulation and cowardice, a metaphor for the failure of the media to unite around a strategy to push back against Trump’s all-out assault. Since returning to office he has seized control of the pool of journalists that follows the president, barred the Associated Press news agency from the Oval Office and handed access and prominence to far-right influencers.Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, NewsNation contributor and former Breitbart News spokesperson, said: “I expect that for those who attend the dinner this year it’s going to just be a collective bitch fest of the Washington legacy media that has been completely neutered and embarrassed during this time of Trump.“The idea that there would be this gathering of self-proclaimed media elites who on their watch have been completely dismantled, whose parent companies have all kissed the ring at this point, it’s like, what are you celebrating, exactly? I’m not entirely sure.”The media were unified in fact-checking Trump during his first term, Bardella argued, whereas now the ecosystem is radically different, for example with the Trump ally Elon Musk in control of the X social media platform and the Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, ordering that the newspaper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market.Bardella added: “I would get it if it was the White House correspondents’ party thrown by Fox News or Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan were throwing a big party. But for the traditional legacy media to throw this parade of parties is almost embarrassing.”The first White House correspondents’ dinner was held in 1921. Three years later Calvin Coolidge became the first president to attend and all have since except Trump. In 2006 the comedian Stephen Colbert roasted George W Bush and the media over the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2011 Barack Obama mocked a stone-faced Trump and even displayed a pastiche of what the White House would look like if the reality TV star became president one day.The event also allows the WHCA to present reporting awards, raise money for scholarships and celebrate the constitutional first amendment that protects freedom of speech. During Trump’s first term the speakers included the Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and the historian Ron Chernow, who warned: “When you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy.” Saturday’s version is again likely to take a sober tone for a sobering time.Steve Clemons, editor at large of the National Interest and a guest at numerous WHCA dinners, said: “It’s not going to be as much fun. We’re going to see a tribute to quality journalism and there’s always a place for that but there’s a toxicity out there that is hard to ignore at this moment. In a way we all need to take a break for a year and see if we can get to a better place next year.”Clemons supports the WHCA’s decision to revoke Ruffin’s invitation. “You can’t use the dinner as a reason to do battle with the president,” he said. “When you have a comedian that goes out and says nobody wanted the president there that’s a real problem. That’s a dismissive and disrespectful position that the White House Correspondents’ Association cannot take, no matter what its grievances or problems are in working out the terms of trade.“You can’t create something that is institutionally biased against the presidency. That’s not our job. It’s not journalism’s job. Journalism is to report on the White House and the president in a fair and objectively distant way what’s going on. That exercise of having that comedian, if we’d gone through it, was not anything connected to the qualities of fair and objective journalism and celebrating the first amendment.”The WHCA, which is not a formal trade union, has an unenviable task. Its members are diverse, spanning wire service and newspaper reporters, photographers and TV and radio journalists from the US and countries all over the world. They work for outlets of all political stripes and inevitably hold conflicting views on whether to aggressively tackle Trump head-on or lie low and hope to wait out the storm.The association’s annual dinner could be a moment to regroup, renew a shared sense of purpose and gain brief respite from the relentless grind of the Trump beat. But it might just as easily prove a gloomy affair, full of chatter about declining relevance and failing strategies for combating Trump’s war on truth. And whereas celebrities were clamouring for a seat during the Obama years, the dinner has arguably also lost some of its glamour.Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and socialite, said: “I will never, ever, ever go to the White House correspondents’ dinner again because it’s the worst event in Washington every year. First of all, there are too many people in the Hilton Hotel; there are like 3,000 people jammed in; it’s like being in the subway in Manhattan at rush hour with bad food and bad jokes.“You stand in line forever and ever to get your ticket. Last year I was in line with the British ambassador in the rain because the line went all the way outside and we stood there and stood there and stood there and it was a nightmare.”For Quinn, the widow of Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, the lack of an entertainer at the dinner is no great loss because there is not much to laugh at in Washington right now.“Everyone’s scared,” she said. “You’re scared you’re going to get thrown in jail if you write something he doesn’t like and that’s going to happen very soon.“Then you have the owners of these news organisations who keep keeling over and bending the knee so you’ve got all these people in the media who are quitting in protest. It’s a horrible time to be covering Trump. If you’re a journalist and you want to be on the story, this is the story to cover, but people are not having fun covering it. It’s very intense and very upsetting.” More

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      The AP’s win against Trump shows principles still have power in America | Margaret Sullivan

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      Given the constant flow of bad news – recession nearing, markets tanking, federal agencies run amok – a victory in court for a news wire service might seem trivial.But the Associated Press’s win against the Trump administration this week is meaningful for two reasons. It underscores the judiciary’s commitment to the first amendment, and it suggests that standing up for one’s principles may not be just a gesture made in vain.Here’s what the US district court judge Trevor McFadden – a Trump appointee – had to say about the AP’s being denied access to White House news events because of the organization’s editorial decision to continue using the term Gulf of Mexico instead of Gulf of America:“The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists – be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere, it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”The Trump administration is appealing the ruling. It is not clear that a higher court will not overrule McFadden.But what is clear is that Julie Pace, the AP’s top editor, was right when she made the argument in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that more was at stake here than the name of a body of water. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say,” Pace wrote.This administration wants to do that – and it is willing to punish those who don’t fall in line.Yet, courageous voices are out there. And sometimes, they make a difference.When Jaime Cook, the school principal in Sackets Harbor, New York, put out a heartfelt public statement about three students and their mother being abruptly taken to a Texas detention facility by federal agents, her words required the same kind of guts.“Our 3 students who were taken away by ICE were doing everything right,” Cook wrote. “They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process. They are not criminals.”Others found their voices, too. In this tiny town of fewer than 1,400 people – which happens to be a vacation residence of the US “border czar”, Tom Homan – nearly 1,000 people came out to protest last weekend. This week, the mother and three children were on their way back home.Courage mattered.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConsider, too, the words of the Princeton University president, Christopher Eisgruber, in an NPR interview about how that university plans to navigate the suspension of federal funding: “We make our decisions at Princeton based on our values and our principles.” When asked by a reporter whether that meant no concessions, as other universities have made to the Trump administration, Eisgruber responded with strength.“We believe it’s important to defend academic freedom, and that’s not something that can be compromised,” he said.Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University, which took a far different approach by capitulating to Trump administration demands, compared the universities to two law firms, one of which has capitulated to Donald Trump’s bullying while the other has refused to do so.“Princeton is making us [Columbia] look like Paul Weiss to their Wilmer Hale,” Wu wrote.These cases have something in common: a line in the sand and the courage to defend it.The same was true of the former Department of Justice prosecutor Ryan Crosswell, testifying before Congress, as he explained why he felt compelled to resign recently after federal corruption charges against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, were abruptly dropped. Too many lines had been crossed, he said; he had no choice.“The day after I resigned,” Crosswell testified, “my sister had her first daughter and I want my niece to know the same democracy that I’ve known. That’s worth any cost.”None of this is easy. After all, Trump and those around him are famously vindictive. It’s not hard to understand why law firms, universities, school officials, news organizations and so many others have decided to avoid the fight and to rationalize the decision to give in or remain silent.But those mentioned here chose to act on principle. In so doing, they have the power to inspire the rest of us, which is likely to be important in the long run.Do brave words or principled resignations or expensive, possibly fruitless lawsuits really accomplish anything? Will they keep America’s teetering democracy from falling off a cliff?Maybe not. But everyone who cares about fairness, freedom and the rule of law ought to be grateful nonetheless for these demonstrations of integrity. Amid the darkness, they cast some faint light along our treacherous path.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Revenge is his number one motivation’: how Trump is waging war on the media

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      On Tuesday 4 March, Donald Trump stood in the House of Representatives to issue a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first of his second term.Near the beginning of what was to be a marathon address, the president declared: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”What Trump did not mention was that less than three weeks earlier he had barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, because the news agency refused to use his preferred nomenclature for the Gulf of Mexico. He did not mention that he was waging lawsuits against ABC and CBS, nor that the man he appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission had ordered a flurry of investigations into NBC News, NPR and PBS.The president ignored entirely what has become an all out attack on the media and other institutions, something that media experts have described as a “broad, systematic assault” on free speech, a vendetta that threatens “the essential fundamental freedoms of a democracy”.Since that speech the situation has only got worse. The anti-media rhetoric has ramped up from Trump officials, Trump has suggested some media groups should be “illegal”, funding has been cut from organisations like Voice of America and last week the White House lambasted journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic magazine for breaking a scoop about national security lapses on a Signal messaging app.“Revenge is Trump’s number one motivation for anything in this second term of office, and he believes he has been treated unfairly by the media, and he is going to strike out against those in the media who he considers his enemies,” said Bill Press, a longtime liberal political commentator and host of The Bill Press Pod.“He’s going in the direction of really curtailing the freedom of the press, following the pattern of every autocrat ever on the planet: they need to shut down a free and independent press in order to get away with their unlimited use of power.”Trump was critical of the media in his first term. But as Press pointed out, that was more verbal attacks: the never-ending accusations of “fake news”, the encouragement of anti-CNN chants at rallies. Two months into Trump’s second term, he has already taken it further. Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news agencies which is relied upon by thousands of news outlets, remains banned from the Oval Office and Air Force one: the president angered by the agency’s refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico.Trump is suing the owner of CBS News for $10bn, alleging the channel selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which the network denies, and the Des Moines Register newspaper, which he accuses of “election interference” over a poll from before the election that showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa.The FCC investigations, led by the hardline Trump appointee and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, are ongoing, while in February Trump ejected a HuffPost reporter from the press pool – which refers to a rotating group of reporters allowed close access to the White House – and denied reporters from the news agency Reuters access to a cabinet meeting.View image in fullscreenAt various times Trump and rightwing groups have accused each of the outlets of bias or of presenting negative coverage of his presidency. By contrast, the White House has allowed rightwing news outlets, including Real America’s Voice and Blaze Media and Newsmax, to be included in the press pool.“It’s designed to shut down criticism, and I think that the danger of that is that there is this effort to make it look like everyone approves of the government and of the Trump administration,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, a non-profit which seeks to preserve and advance first amendment freedom rights.“It’s a threat to the ability of the of the press to critically cover the president, but perhaps more importantly, the function of the press is to inform the public about the workings of government, and allow the public to decide whether or not it wants to vote for these people again, or whether it approves. And so it’s more than just its effect on the media, its effect on the general public.”In recent days the Trump administration’s attack-the-media playbook has been on show in the way senior officials have sought to discredit Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic who was invited into a secret Signal group where a coming US attack on Yemen’s Houthi militia was being discussed.The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and Trump himself have criticized Goldberg: Waltz described him as “the bottom scum of journalists”, while Trump called the reporting “a witch-hunt” and described the Atlantic as a “failed magazine”.Trump has also appeared to flirt with using law enforcement to target the media, including a speech to federal law enforcement officials in March. “As the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” Trump said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe disparaged certain lawyers and non-profits, before later adding: “The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and MSDNC, and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, they’ll write whatever they say.”Trump continued: “It’s totally illegal what they do,” adding: “I just hope you can all watch for it, but it’s totally illegal.”The war on free speech has not just been limited to the media. Trump’s efforts have increasingly also focussed on areas including education, law and charitable organizations, as the government seeks to bring key aspects of society into line.“You have to look at this as part of a broad, systematic assault that the president and his administration have been waging since he returned to office on every other power center that impacts politics in any way,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a watchdog group.“All the sort of liberal, civil society institutions: big law firms, universities, the government itself, the courts and the press have come under fire, and as part of that, we have this really unprecedented multifront attack on media institutions.”Trump has been aided in this endeavor by the owners of some media organizations. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and owner of the Washington Post, pulled an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris during the campaign and recently overhauled the newspaper’s opinion pages.Amazon donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, and Bezos’ space company Blue Origin competes for federal government contracts. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, also blocked the newspaper from endorsing Harris, while Mark Zuckerberg dismantled Facebook’s factchecking network after Trump won the presidency. (Like Bezos, Zuckerberg donated to, and attended, Trump’s inauguration.)“What makes the situation so worrying is that for the last several years, Donald Trump himself and the leading lights of the rightwing media and political movement: from Tucker Carlson to Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, have cited as their exemplar Viktor Orbán of Hungary. That’s what they want to accomplish,” Gertz said.“And what Orbán did with the press was squeeze different media corporation owners until they agreed to either make their press more palatable to him, or sell their outlets to someone who would. I think that is basically, by their own admission, what the Trump administration is trying to bring about in this country.“I think the hope is that we have more guardrails than Hungary did to prevent that from happening. But it’s unnerving that the president of the United States is trying to follow in those footsteps.” More

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      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

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      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

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      Trump is turning the media into a mouthpiece of the regime | Lawrence Douglas

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      You know we’re in trouble when Fox News emerges as the great defender of freedom of the press. But such was the case when Jacqui Heinrich, a senior political correspondent at Fox, responded to the news that Trump’s White House would now handpick the reporters who get to cover the president in small settings, with the post: “This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House.” Heinrich was specifically responding to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Orwellian claim that letting Donald Trump choose who would cover him was designed to restore power “back to the American people”.The fruits of the new policy were richly on display during the sickening scene that unfolded in the Oval Office last week. If the president and JD Vance’s disgraceful treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy wasn’t bad enough, there was the unprecedented role that the “press” played in the unseemly drama.Here I’m not simply referring to Brian Glenn’s pugnacious demand that the leader of a war-torn nation justify his sartorial decisions – less a question than a provocation that served as a prelude to the pile-on that followed. Trump appeared to wink at Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a far-right cable channel freshly included in the press pool, leading to speculation that Glenn’s question had been scripted in advance, a speculation that is both plausible – I mean, why not? – and irrelevant.For whether scripted or not, these are the kinds of questions we should expect when serious journalists are replaced with mouthpieces of the regime, puppets who perform the role of state propagandists in the guise of reportage. Glenn, who dates Majorie Taylor Greene and describes himself as “100% behind President Trump”, claims not to truck in far-right conspiracy theories – while insisting that January 6t was an antifa-instigated inside job and that a vast mechanism of fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.But before Glenn turned on the Ukrainian president, he had directed an earlier question to Trump: “Mr President, [do] you think ultimately your legacy will be the peacemaker and not the president that led this country into another war … ?” This puffball in the guise of a query gave Trump the opportunity to wax poetic: “I hope I’m going to be remembered as a peacemaker … I’m doing this to save lives more than anything else … Thank you, Brian, for that question. It was a nice question.”But we weren’t done with paeans to the great peacemaker. No sooner had Zelenskyy tersely assured Glenn that he would wear a suit once the war had ended, we were greeted with this question: “Keir Starmer … praised your courage and conviction to lead … What gave you the moral courage and conviction to step forward and lead?”In a properly functioning press corps, we might have expected that the question was directed to Zelenskyy, who, with exceptional fortitude and resolve, has led his countryin a war against a ruthless aggressor. But no. The question was directed to Trump, who responded: “Boy, I love this guy. Who are you with?” The answer was One America News, another network that operates to the far right of Fox, trafficking in conspiracy theories and committed to an unwavering support of Maga politics – and also a beneficiary of the White House’s commandeering of its own press pool.Once again, Trump grew almost wistful – “I like the question … it’s a very good question” – before blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel on Joe Biden. From there, as we witnessed, things grew more acrimonious, but lost in the belligerent and belittling treatment of Zelenskyy, particularly at the hands of Vance (“Have you said thank you once, this entire meeting?”) was the Pyongyang-esque quality of Trump’s hand-picked pool reporters using their questions not to challenge or examine, but to burnish and bolster the Great Leader with ever fluffier valentines of adoration.Meanwhile, the Associated Press remained barred from the historic meeting, because it continues to call a body of water that lies almost entirely outside of US jurisdiction by the name it has carried since the 16th century.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      Outcry as White House starts dictating which journalists can access Trump

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      The Trump administration announced it will take control of the White House press pool, stripping the independent White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) of its longstanding role in deciding which journalists have access to the president in intimate settings.The move has immediately triggered an impassioned response from members of the media – including a Fox News correspondent who called it a “short-sighted decision”.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made the announcement during Tuesday’s press briefing, framing the move as democratizing access to the president.“A group of DC-based journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States,” Leavitt said.“Not any more. Today, I was proud to announce that we are giving the power back to the people.”The announcement upended more than 70 years of protocol of journalists – not government officials – determining which rotating reporters travel with the president on Air Force One and cover events in the Oval Office or Roosevelt Room.“Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team,” Leavitt said. She added that while legacy outlets would still be included, the administration would be “offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility” – notably podcasters and rightwing media.As the media reeled from the attack on the press pool, the three main wire services that routinely report on the US presidency released a joint statement protesting Donald Trump’s decision to bar the Associated Press from official events.Reuters and Bloomberg News joined AP in decrying Trump’s move to restrict AP’s access to the president. The top editors of each of the wires said the unprecedented action had threatened the principle of open reporting and would harm the spread of reliable information to individuals, communities, businesses and global financial markets.“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” the three editors said.The standoff between Trump and AP began on 14 February when the White House announced it was indefinitely barring AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One. Officials said the step had been taken to punish AP for refusing to amend its style guide to change the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, as Trump had dictated.AP immediately sued over the restriction, but on Monday a federal judge declined to restore the wire service’s access to presidential events in the short term. Another hearing in the case, which is ongoing, is scheduled for next month.The White House wasted no time implementing the new policy over the composition of the press pool, ejecting a HuffPost reporter from Wednesday’s press pool rotation and removing Reuters from its traditional spot – just one day after the announcement. Also on Wednesday morning, Trump mused on legal action against journalists and publishers in a Truth Social post.“At some point I am going to sue some of these dishonest authors and book publishers, or even media in general, to find out whether or not these ‘anonymous sources’ even exist,” Trump posted, adding: “maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”The announcement triggered immediate alarm among journalists who argue that the role of the WHCA is to make sure Americans who use any of the major mediums – including radio, television, print, wires and photography – are able to get the same access to Trump’s world.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House,” posted Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox News senior White House correspondent and WHCA board member. “The WHCA is democratically elected by the full-time White House press corps.”Heinrich added: “WHCA has determined pools for decades because only representatives FROM our outlets can determine resources all those outlets have – such as staffing – in order to get the President’s message out to the largest possible audience, no matter the day or hour.”In a separate missive on X, Heinrich also pointed out the press corps “from across a broad spectrum of tv, radio, print, stills, wires and new media” cover the White House full-time.“This is a short-sighted decision, and it will feel a lot different when a future Democratic administration kicks out conservative-leaning outlets and other critical voices,” she wrote.The WHCA president, Eugene Daniels, said the move “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States” and “suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president”. He noted the White House did not consult with the WHCA before making the announcement.Later on Wednesday, the White House denied reporters from Reuters and other news organizations access to Trump’s first cabinet meeting in keeping with the administration’s new policy regarding media coverage.The White House denied access to an Associated Press photographer and three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost and Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper. More

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      Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ debacle is no joke – this is how authoritarians get started

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      Last week, the Associated Press sued White House officials for violating its free press rights by punishing the organization for defying Donald Trump’s executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Unfortunately, on Monday, a federal judge refused to immediately strike down the White House’s retaliatory treatment of the AP. But the case is far from over.Granting access to the White House on the suppressive conditions set by the Trump administration is a blow to the first amendment and the free press. If the retaliation against the AP is allowed to stand, more restrictions on the press are certain to follow, creating Kremlin-like conditions that will affect all Americans who might question, or be suspected of questioning, the Trump party line.This is why a seemingly trivial issue – what to call the Gulf – is freighted with importance. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf unmistakably delivers his “America first” message. He has every right to his message. But he doesn’t have the right to turn the press into his messenger.The controversy began on Trump’s first day back in office, when he issued a unilateral order that an international sea, known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico, henceforth be named the Gulf of America. Certain organizations, such as Google, immediately complied by changing the Gulf’s name on Google Maps and redirecting searches for “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”.However, the AP, along with several other news organizations, resisted. Noting that the Trump order had no effect outside the US, the AP made an editorial judgment that its status as an international reporting agency was best served by continuing to refer to the Gulf by the name known to global readers.The Trump administration retaliated by barring AP reporters from the press pool that covers media events at the White House or on Air Force One, and on Tuesday it went further, announcing it would determine which organizations had access to the pool – traditionally the job of the White House Correspondents’ Association. While limited seating capacity may give the White House some discretion about who gets to be in the press pool, the first amendment does not permit that discretion to be used to punish the press or to limit access to outlets favorable to Trump. As the AP stated in its complaint: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government. The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech” by controlling access.As tempting as it is to follow Shakespeare in shrugging the shoulders at “what’s in a name,” we should turn to history to learn what follows when authoritarian leaders start out with seemingly harmless verbal imperialisms. One of the first actions Hitler took after seizing power in 1933 was to scrub streets and public spaces of names that reflected Jewish influence or Weimar republicanism in favor of tributes to National Socialism. Stalin celebrated his own greatness by changing Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd, to “Stalingrad”. Before Stalingrad, there was the switch from Petrograd to Leningrad. In today’s China, the name “Tibet” has disappeared from Chinese maps in favor of the Mandarin name, “Xizang”.It is hard to know how seriously to take Trump’s flagging of territorial, as well as verbal, imperialism. He has suggested the US reclaim the Panama Canal Zone, buy Greenland from Denmark, incorporate Canada as a 51st state, and take over the Gaza Strip for resort real estate development. Even if these are mere paper ambitions, the disdain Trump shows for international law is already doing irreparable harm.Appealing to his Maga base with the “America first” rhetoric in the Gulf, he is selling out Ukraine to Putin’s Russia in ways reminiscent of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938 by ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Ignoring this lesson of history – in Munich of all places – this month, JD Vance stopped short of endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party by name, but made clear that the Trump administration would be happy if Europe adopted the same anti-immigrant policies that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf signaled.The ripple effect of Trump commandeering global waters reaches beyond the sea to all Americans. His actions must be considered alongside his other executive orders on his first day back in office, declaring the arrival of immigrants at the southern border an “invasion” and suspending grants of asylum, no matter how dire the situation of refugees. When we let Trump scapegoat vulnerable immigrants for this country’s – and the world’s – problems, we are in fascist territory. That is why Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America is no laughing matter. It expresses a level of disrespect for Mexico that could well be a precursor for how strongmen treat peoples whom they first strip of dignity. Substitute Jew, Catholic, Turk, Armenian, Arab, gay or transgender for Trump’s talk of an invasion of aliens across the Gulf, and you get the point.What the Gulf needs is not more nationalistic power grabs but international cooperation to tackle its most pressing problems – worsening pollution, rising sea levels from the climate crisis, intensifying hurricanes, crumbling infrastructure, and loss of shoreline and habitat. Far from squabbling over what to call the Gulf, the US and Mexico should recognize that no one owns the Gulf; it belongs to nature.In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet made her “what’s in a name” speech to declare love for Romeo even though he bore the family name of her family’s blood enemy. It didn’t turn out well for Juliet, and it won’t turn out well for us if we let Trump intimidate the AP because its editors had the courage to stand up to his bullying.

      Jeffrey Abramson is author of Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Jack E Davis is the author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018. More