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      Why Trump’s political playbook is failing in the Epstein case | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The problem with a successful playbook is that you eventually keep doing the same thing mechanically. Fresh from intimidating ABC and CBS with meritless lawsuits, Donald Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story of a lewd birthday message for Jeffrey Epstein. But, unlike with the frivolous allegations against the big broadcasters, there’s clearly a fact of the matter here: an authentic letter either exists or it does not; and there is plenty to be revealed in the process of finding out. Trump’s time-proven move – whatever happens, just counter-attack – is likely to keep the very story he wants to kill alive. Meanwhile, the other elements of his playbook – deny, deflect, distract – only work if journalists and Democrats play along. They, not the seemingly all-important Trump base, are the actors to watch.We still debate whether Trumpism is a substantial ideology or not; what we are missing is that Trumpism, for sure, is a set of tactics for exploiting weaknesses in the US political, legal and media systems. Some of these tactics were inherited from his mentor Roy Cohn and many are now being adopted by Trump’s followers – one must never admit guilt; one must always swing back; and one must reject, or ideally entirely bury, defeats (such as Trump’s case against Bob Woodward and Woodward’s publisher being dismissed recently).But there is also a less obvious element, and it has to do with managing political time (a challenge for all politicians, come to think of it). The point is not just seizing opportunities or exploiting opponents’ weaknesses in a timely manner; rather, it is about the art of speeding things up or slowing them down to one’s advantage. Think of how we appear to have become inured to Trump doing and saying things that would have ended previous presidencies (OK, previous presidents did not have AI-generated images of themselves as kings or popes available, but still).One reason is this: an administration that faces one or two big scandals in a four-year period may well be damaged beyond repair; one that produces three very big scandals a day seems to have nothing to worry about since no one can keep up. It is difficult to stick with one story, as the newest outrage already appears so much bigger (the Qatar plane scandal can feel like it happened years ago). To be sure, not all scandals are consciously produced, but there is little doubt that Trump’s posting an AI-generated clip of Barack Obama being arrested in the White House and identifying Obama as a “ringleader” of election fraud are meant to distract – which is not to deny that they would justify impeachment.While the frequency of scandals is maximized to game the news cycle, the legal system is used to slow things down. Releasing the grand jury testimonies in the Epstein case will take time, if the request is not rejected altogether by courts (as has already happened in Florida). Even if they are released, they are unlikely to contain anything relevant about Trump. The calculation is that, a few weeks from now, the files will be forgotten.None of this is to suggest Trump is a master Machiavellian who can manipulate Americans (or even just his base) at will. His approach partly works because institutional and cultural contexts have changed: news cycles are shorter, as are attention spans. His behavior has become progressively normalized – and generalized: shamelessness once unique to him is now in the manual of required GOP conduct (just think of blatant lies about Medicaid). Most important, a free press sticking relentlessly with scandals and ignoring intimidation can no longer be taken for granted; broadcasters in particular have become vulnerable to parent companies putting profits before everything else. Democrats, understandably not wanting to look like they mainly focus on the sordid details of the Epstein story, are tempted to move on and deal with the vaunted “kitchen-table issues”. But it should give them pause that the story is apparently so scary for the other side that Republicans would rather shut down the House than deal with it in any shape or form.Are they right to panic? For sure, Trump made a mistake with his social media post urging followers to move on, which was the equivalent of “don’t think of an elephant” (while also providing further evidence for the Streisand effect: censorship generates the very attention meant to be avoided). Trump lobbying Murdoch to kill the story will give pause to all still naive enough to think of Republicans as free speech defenders. By now, the fact that releasing only the grand jury testimony is relatively meaningless has sunk in and – never mind the base – what political scientists call “low-information voters” will be left with a lasting impression of a Trump-Epstein connection or at least a chaotic administration. In the lawsuit, Trump has to prove “actual malice” on the part of the newspaper – a difficult hurdle to jump. Unlike with the Russia investigation, Trump himself is the instigator of a lengthy process overshadowing his presidency; unlike with the many investigations between his presidential terms, when his lawyers outran the clock, time is not really on his side. In fact, he might be lucky if the case is dismissed on a technicality – he apparently failed to comply with a Florida law that requires giving defendants five days’ notice.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Trump administration orders release of Epstein court documents amid mounting pressure – US politics live

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      The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:

      Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.

      Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.

      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.

      Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

      Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
      As Donald Trump tries to claim he was “not a fan” of Jeffrey Epstein, photos, videos and anecdotes paint a picture of their relationship, writes Adam Gabbatt:Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added:
      The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.
      Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.
      No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.
      Indigenous leaders have warn higher education institutions will close if the funding-slashing 2026 budget proposal passes, Meliss Hellmann reports:The former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison will testify at a US House panel hearing next week about countering China’s “economic coercion against democracies,” the committee said on Friday.Rahm Emanuel, the former US ambassador to Japan, will also testify before the House select committee on China.Relations with China, already rocky after Australia banned Huawei from its 5G broadband network in 2018, cooled further in 2020 after the Morrison government called for an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus.China responded by imposing tariffs on Australian commodities, including wine and barley and limited imports of Australian beef, coal and grapes, moves described by the United States as “economic coercion”.Morrison was defeated in a bid for reelection in 2022. His successor, Anthony Albanese, visited China this week, underscoring a warming of ties.Away from the main story on the blog today, Japan’s top tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said on Saturday he planned to visit Washington next week to hold further ministerial-level talks with the United States.Tokyo hopes to clinch a deal by a 1 August deadline that will avert President Donald Trump’s tariff of 25% on imports from Japan.“I intend to keep on seeking actively an agreement that is beneficial to both Japan and the United States, while safeguarding our national interest,” Akazawa told reporters in the western region of Osaka, according to Reuters.Akazawa was visiting Osaka to host a US delegation, led by treasury secretary Scott Bessent, that participated in the US national aay event at World Expo 2025. Akazawa said he did not discuss tariffs with Bessent.Here is the Guardian’s story on Donald Trump’s plans to sue the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over its Jeffrey Epstein report:Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.The lawsuit seeks at least $10bn in damages.It came after the Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared.It was reportedly a contribution to a birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in Florida after being found guilty of sex-trafficking and other charges in 2021.“A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” the Journal reported of the alleged drawing. The letter allegedly concluded: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”Trump vehemently denied the Journal report and claimed the letter was fake. He said on Truth Social that he warned Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, the newspaper’s parent company, that he planned to sue.Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.In the filing, Trump calls the Wall Street Journal’s report “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.Read the court documents in full at the below link:A lawsuit. Angry calls to editors. Public denunciations. In the wake of the Wall Street Journal’s story claiming Donald Trump contributed to a “bawdy” letter to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – featuring a drawing of a naked woman’s silhouette around a typewritten personal message – the president’s relationship with the outlet’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, appears on the surface to have deteriorated from temperamental to terminal.Just a few days ago, the 94-year-old mogul was spotted among the president’s high-profile guests at the Fifa Club World Cup final. Following the publication of the article, however, Murdoch now finds himself on the president’s lengthy list of media opponents threatened with court action.In an unprecedented environment in which a sitting president regularly takes direct aim at the media, there have been numerous claims of big outlets making decisions that make life easier for their billionaire owners. Yet the Journal published the Epstein allegations even after Trump picked up the phone to its British editor, Emma Tucker, to demand that she ditch the story. Trump also claims Murdoch himself was approached to stop the article, to no avail.According to some media watchers, it is the latest sign that Murdoch is taking a different approach to Trump’s return than some of his fellow billionaire moguls. Even before the Epstein story dropped on Thursday, Murdoch’s Journal continued to criticise Trump from the right over some of his early decisions.The justice department said in the court filings that it will work with prosecutors in New York to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personally identifying information before transcripts are released.“Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims,” Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general wrote.But despite the new push to release the grand jury transcripts, the administration has not announced plans to reverse course and release other evidence in its possession. Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, had hyped the release of more materials after the first Epstein files disclosure in February sparked outrage because it contained no new revelations.A judge would have to approve the release of the grand jury transcripts, and it’s likely to be a lengthy process to decide what can become public and to make redactions to protect sensitive witness and victim information.The records would show testimony of witnesses and other evidence that was presented by prosecutions during the secret grand jury proceedings, when a panel decides whether there is enough evidence to bring an indictment, or a formal criminal charge.The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:

      Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.

      Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.

      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.

      Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

      Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.” More

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      I chaired the FCC. The 60 Minutes settlement shows Trump has weaponized the agency | Tom Wheeler

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      It is time to unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Paramount Global, the parent of CBS Television, has agreed to pay $16m to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Presumably, the FCC can now cease its slow-walking of the Paramount-Skydance Media merger.Just two days after the president took office, the agency’s new chair, Brendan Carr, inserted the FCC into the issues in the Trump lawsuit that alleged “news distortion”. As the New York Post headlined: “Trump’s FCC pick Brendan Carr says ‘60 Minutes’ editing scandal could affect Paramount-Skydance merger review.”That lawsuit was filed in the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a statute historically used against false advertising. The case was filed in a single-judge federal district court that one legal publication characterized as “a favored jurisdiction for conservative legal causes and plaintiffs”. CBS characterized the case as “without merit”.The 60 Minutes broadcast aired in October; the day before, a different excerpt had appeared on Face the Nation. Soon after, the Center for American Rights – a group that describes itself as “a public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans’ most fundamental constitutional rights” – filed a complaint at the FCC alleging CBS had engaged in “significant and substantial news alteration”. The complaint was dismissed as seeking “to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment”. Immediately upon becoming the FCC chair, Carr reversed that decision and ordered a formal proceeding on the matter (but let stand the dismissal of a complaint against a local Fox station over its 2020 election coverage).The election of Trump and the installation of a Trump-appointed FCC chair transformed the Paramount/CBS merger from a review of the public interest merits of the transfer of broadcast licenses into a broader question that included the 60 Minutes editing. Carr told an interviewer: “I’m pretty confident that the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”The formal paperwork for FCC approval of the license transfers was submitted 10 months ago, on 6 September 2024. Now that the lawsuit has been settled, it will be interesting to see how quickly the FCC acts.The CBS case is just one example of the tactical leverage the Trump FCC regularly exerts over those it regulates. Carr, who wrote the FCC chapter in the “Project 2025” Maga blueprint, has not been shy about using this authority to achieve such political goals.Even before formally assuming the FCC chair position, Carr began exercising chair-like authority to advance the Maga agenda. This began with a letter to the CEOs of Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft and Apple alleging: “you participated in a censorship cartel … [that is] an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled.” Going beyond traditional FCC authority, he threatened: “As you know, Big Tech’s prized liability shield, Section 230, is codified in the Communications Act, which the FCC administers.” Carr suggested he might investigate whether those editorial decisions were made in good faith.Recently, Carr conditioned the approval of Verizon’s acquisition of Frontier Communications on Verizon agreeing to drop its corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Continuing his anti-diversity efforts, he launched an investigation into Comcast Corporation because it promotes DEI as “a core value of our business”.In his pre-FCC chair days, Carr championed press freedom. In a 2021 statement, he wrote: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” Once he became Trump’s FCC chair, however, he not only picked up on the 60 Minutes matter, but also launched an investigation into the public broadcasters NPR and PBS “regarding the airing of … programming across your broadcast member stations”.The FCC’s regulatory authority directly covers about one-sixth of the American economy while also affecting the other five-sixths that rely on the nation’s communications networks. What was once an independent, policy-based agency has been transformed into a performance-based agency, using any leverage it can discover or invent to further the Trump Maga message.

      Tom Wheeler was the chair of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017 More

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      Struggling in politics? Consider a war – the media will help | Margaret Sullivan

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      “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” was the storied response of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington after the illustrator was sent to Cuba to cover an insurrection and cabled back to the boss that there was little going on.Much has changed since that famous (if true) exchange of the late 19th century, in the heyday of sensationalism known as yellow journalism.But one thing that hasn’t changed is that there’s nothing like military conflict to capture the attention of the public, with plenty of help from the media. And the media – whether a tabloid newspaper or a cable news network – benefits, too.These days, Donald Trump’s recent strike on Iran has proved the point once again, with the media’s attention intensely focused on Operation Midnight Hammer, as it was dramatically dubbed.First the emphasis was on the threat of attacks to Iran’s budding nuclear arsenal, then on the possibility of all-out global war, then on the strikes themselves and then the announcement of a supposed ceasefire.All to the greater glory of Trump, at least as he tells it.For those who are trying to bring public attention to other important matters – even matters of life and death – that’s a frustrating reality.Jennifer Mascia knows this all too well.She is a founding reporter for the Trace, a non-profit news site dedicated to tracking the epidemic of gun violence in America and trying to do something about it, through exploring solutions.When elected officials in Minnesota were shot earlier this month – the former state House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and the state legislator John Hoffman and his wife were wounded – it was a huge story.Huge, but fleeting.“Pitted against a global conflict, domestic news doesn’t really stand a chance,” said Mascia, who previously contributed to the now-defunct Gun Report at the New York Times, begun by the then columnist Joe Nocera.That’s true for domestic news that, in an earlier era, would have commanded the media’s attention for many days, if not weeks. The Minnesota violence was even more newsworthy because of an early manhunt and disinformation swirling around the apparent assassin’s political leanings.Still, coverage seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye.“The Trump era has all but ensured that important news will get smacked out of the news cycle in favor of the latest development in Trumpworld,” Mascia wrote to me in an email, after we had talked by phone.Mascia is quick to clarify that she’s not suggesting that the media ignore what the chaotic president is doing.“It’s important that we cover Trump’s constitutional breaches. We shouldn’t become numb or complacent in the face of eroding democracy,” she said.But it was remarkable to see how quickly the Minnesota shootings faded from media attention. A CNN contributor herself, Mascia is often called in to provide perspective for “Day Two” of coverage after the initial reporting of gun-related news. But often these days, she notes, there is no Day Two.By then, the media has moved on.“Maybe if the Israel-Iran war wasn’t going on, we’d still be talking about it,” she said. “Anderson Cooper would be broadcasting from Melissa Hortman’s funeral. But instead, he’s in Tel Aviv.”And, of course, this extends to all sorts of other subjects, not just gun violence.Those who try to focus attention on voting rights, the rule of law, crucial supreme court decisions, widespread citizen action such as the vast “No Kings” protests – to mention just a few – may get a modicum of attention.But nothing compares to a show of military force. And Trump, always attuned to how he’s being perceived, is well aware of that.“A spectacular military success,” he crowed after the strikes. “A historic success,” echoed his defense secretary. Pete Hegseth couldn’t countenance being asked actual questions and claimed the press was trying to distort the story “for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country”.Was the administration’s bragging accurate? Perhaps not, said intelligence reports that indicated the strikes may have only added months to the time Iran needs to produce the material for a nuclear weapon.But no matter.The strikes – from the lead-up to the aftermath – sucked up all the oxygen in the media universe for many days.Even by Thursday early afternoon, the top four news articles (plus one photo) on the Washington Post mobile app, for example, were Iran-related.And Fox News, of course, remained largely a cheering section.Whatever the effect on world peace, military conflict sure is good for ratings, as William Randolph Hearst knew in his bones.“Historians point to the Spanish-American war as the first press-driven war,” noted a PBS article accompanying the film Crucible of Empire.It wouldn’t be the last.

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

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      The mainstream media has enabled Trump’s war on universities | Jason Stanley

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      US universities are facing the Trump regime’s fury. The justification given by the regime is that universities are run by leftist ideologues, who have indoctrinated students to adopt supposedly leftist ideological orientations, as well as hostility to Israel, anti-whiteness and trans inclusivity. Donald Trump and his allies believe the election gave them the mandate to crush America’s system of higher education. But what may be less clear is that it is the mainstream media’s obsession with leftists on campus that has led to the current moment.The US mainstream media has waged a decade-long propaganda campaign against American universities, culminating in the systematic misrepresentation of last year’s campus anti-war protests. This campaign has been the normalizing force behind the Trump administration’s attack on universities, as well as a primary cause of his multiple electoral successes. Unless the media recognizes the central role it has played, we cannot expect the attack to relent.It is easy to pinpoint the time that US confidence in higher education started to drastically plummet – the year was 2015. For those of us who have followed this attack throughout the last decade, there is no surprise about this date. It was the year that a spate of political attacks against universities started to emerge, resurrecting the 1980s and 90s conservative panic about “political correctness on campus”, except this time in mainstream media outlets.In 2016, the media scholar Moira Weigel, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”, laid out in detail how this attack, suddenly legitimized by mainstream media outlets, led to Trump’s 2016 victory. Weigel singles out an enormously influential piece in the Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The coddling of the American mind”. In it, Haidt and Lukianoff decried the supposed trend of shielding students from “words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort”. Haidt and Lukianoff’s goal was to suggest that younger generations were “coddled” and protected from emotional harm by college campuses, beginning a trend of infantilizing college students.From 2015 on, much of the mainstream media went on a crusade to vilify universities for political correctness. The Trump regime’s vicious targeting of US universities was justified and normalized by a decade of panicked op-eds about leftists on campus in the New York Times, which included laying the basis for the administration’s cynical attack on DEI (to understand the staggering number of concern-trolling op-eds about leftists on campus the New York Times has published over the last decade, consider this article in Slate, by Ben Mathis-Lilly, about this exact topic; it was published in 2018.)There have always been excesses of what was called “political correctness” and now is called “wokeness”. During times of moral panic, excesses are held up as paradigms. One might single out attempts to de-platform speakers as one such excess. To judge by the mainstream media, there have been a wave of such attempts. The organization that counts them, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), has recorded 1,740 attempts to de-platform speakers at colleges and universities over the last two decades or so. That sounds like a lot. However, the methodology for counting a “de-platforming attempt” includes petitions calling for the speaker’s invitation to be canceled or withdrawn – so if a dozen people sign a petition to revoke a speaker’s invitation, it counts as an “de-platforming attempt”, even when (as is often the case) nothing comes of it. Even in the case of successful de-platforming attempts, a speaker whose talk is postponed or who is reinvited counts as a case, as is when a venue has to be switched from one on-campus auditorium to another (say, for safety concerns). This methodology blatantly inflates the prevalence of problematic cancellations of speakers (given that de-platforming attempts count towards evaluating a university’s position on Fire’s influential “Campus Free Speech Rankings”, this methodology also distorts public conversation about the topic). Fire unquestionably does good things. But its very existence depends on fanning the flames of moral panic about universities.More generally, in many cases of university actions that can legitimately be regarded as problematic, the fault was not “political correctness” or “wokeness”, but a corporate and legalistic environment at universities that requires the investigation of every complaint, no matter how overblown. We college professors are fairly uniformly opposed to this culture. But it is hardly the fault of leftists.Finally, no one should mistake an epidemic of faculty members performatively quitting their jobs with an epidemic of firings. When a university fires an academic for their speech, that is a crisis. When a faculty member chooses to resign rather than face student opprobrium, that is just life.It may surprise the reader to learn that during the last decade, the main “chill” at universities has not been “leftists on campus”. It has instead been a relentless attack on college professors and students by rightwing outlets. In 2016, Turning Point USA introduced its “Professor Watchlist”, targeting supposedly radical professors on campus. Campus Reform is an outlet devoted to reporting on liberal professors for their speech – for example, by student reports, social media usage or academic publications. For around a decade, Rod Dreher used his position as a senior editor at the American Conservative to target leftist academics, often to devastating effect. And Canary Mission has steadily and for many years targeted professors for their advocacy for the Palestinian cause. These are hardly the only, or even the most powerful, outlets involved in this long assault (I have not even mentioned Fox News). University professors are terrified of being targeted by these organizations.Major mainstream media outlets have consistently failed to report on the rightwing media assault on college professors over the last two decades. This exacerbated the effects of these attacks. In 2016, when Dreher targeted me in several posts for an offhand comment I made on a private Facebook post, I was inundated by hate mail and phone calls to my office. This was my first experience with such an attack; it deeply destabilized me. In the meantime, my colleagues assured me that Dreher was simply a worried liberal with the sorts of concerns about free speech on campus they had been reading about in the liberal media they consumed (Dreher has since moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he is a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank funded by Viktor Orbán autocratic government).Finally, last year, the media committed its worst error yet, for months erasing the participation of sizable numbers of Jewish students in the protests on college campuses in support of divesting from US military support for Israel, including as movement leaders. In truth, there is a generational conflict about Israel among American Jews. As many American Jews under 40 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as believe this claim to be antisemitic (about one-third). The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism.None of this is to deny the obvious fact that college professors skew heavily Democratic. In some disciplines, there are clear reasons for this. Sociology has few Republican voters, because rightwing ideology since the 1980s has generally rejected its metaphysical presuppositions – such as the existence and importance of societies. Women and gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, and African American studies are disciplines whose very existence is directly and regularly attacked by Republican politicians. But the fact is that the partisan tilt of universities has basically nothing to do with these departments.A study of my university by a conservative campus group found that out of 23 professors in the chemistry department whose political affiliation could be identified, 19 were Democrats and one was a Republican. Astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, economics, molecular biophysics and biochemistry were all departments with zero professors with Republican affiliations. According to this study, biology and biomedical sciences at Yale had 229 professors with Democratic party affiliations, and eight with Republican party affiliations. None of these are areas in which it makes sense to speak of political bias. As the “asymmetric polarization” of the Republican party has accelerated over the last decade, is it any wonder that there are fewer and fewer professors who vote for Trump’s Republican party? Why would academics vote for a party that is now bent on dismantling the US system of higher education?Unfortunately, instead of debunking the media-driven moral panic about leftists on campus, universities have largely accepted the premises of the drivers of this panic – that there is a problem on campus exemplified by the fact that few professors support Trump (“intellectual diversity”), and that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza (with large representations of Jewish students) were antisemitic. Even universities that are challenging the Trump regime’s assault seem to accept its nonsensical premises that college students have been overly protected from controversial speech, and, simultaneously, that Jewish students must be shielded to the maximum extent of the law from criticism of Israel’s actions.In the meantime, the media has elevated some of the very academics most responsible for the moral panic, such as Steven Pinker, who has described universities as having a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”, into spokespersons for universities, and continues to trumpet the propaganda that led to this moment. For example, the New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who has long promoted the moral panic about “wokeness” that fuels the Maga movement, still simply pre-supposes that “ideological conformity and past failures to restrain antisemitism” are “vulnerabilities” of the current US higher education system.According to the agents of the moral panic, the blame for Trump’s all-out assault on the American system of higher education falls squarely on supposed “leftists on campus” whose actions supposedly undermined trust in these institutions. But the fault, instead, lies squarely with those responsible for driving this moral panic. The mainstream media has delivered the Republicans a win in a multidecade long propaganda war against academia, one that began with William F Buckley in the 1950s. Within the university, powerful actors are superficially standing against the Trump regime’s attack, while implementing its agenda themselves (giving the lie to the absurd pre-supposition that universities are run by gender studies departments).The “war on woke” is the calling card of the global fascist right. Orbán’s attack on Central European University for “gender ideology” began his destruction of Hungarian democracy. Putin justified his full-scale invasion of Ukraine by appealing to the supposed dangers Ukraine’s liberal democracy poses for traditional gender roles. Americans should hold mainstream media’s Trump enablers responsible for Trump and his actions, and not let them pretend otherwise. As we witness the entire research apparatus of the US being taken down in the name of attacking DEI, trans rights and antisemitism, the mainstream media must halt its absurd fantasy that leftists control universities, and focus instead on the problem it has spent the last decade enabling – namely, fascism.

      Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Yes, the media’s Biden coverage was flawed. But its reporting on Trump was far worse | Margaret Sullivan

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      With a new book out about Joe Biden’s failed re-election campaign, a media reckoning is in full swing.It goes something like this: mainstream journalism failed the voters. Reporters were complicit; they didn’t tell us how much the elderly president had declined. They didn’t dig beneath the surface of what Biden aides were doing as they covered up the physical and cognitive decline of the leader of the free world.And some of that is valid, no doubt. Under fire in recent days, CNN’s Jake Tapper, co-author of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has even nodded to his own role in downplaying Biden’s increasing frailty.There’s plenty of blame to go around for Biden’s ultimate loss – and the horrors that it brought the whole world in the election of Donald Trump to a second term. Bruce Springsteen laid it out to a concert audience last week as he opened his European tour: “My home, the America I love, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”As a media critic, I’m always happy to see a good reckoning for the mainstream press.But this one makes me wonder. When is the reckoning coming for the failures to cover Trump effectively?At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.What would be the elements of this reckoning?Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures.“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”From 2015 – when Trump first declared his candidacy for president – right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.When the New York Times infamously set the tone in 2016 by vastly overplaying the supposedly shocking scandal of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, that was only the beginning. But it was a consequential beginning since, even in our fragmented and polarized media system, the Times was then, and is now, still extremely influential.I’ve long believed that Times editors were so dedicated to proving that they could be tough on Candidate Clinton – convinced she would be the president and that Trump was no real threat – that they went way overboard.Was the fault for electing Trump entirely theirs or even the fault of the mainstream media in general led by them? Of course not. But they played a destructive role, one that has never been adequately acknowledged.Then, during Trump’s first term – and especially during the 2024 campaign – the mainstream press constantly normalized the would-be autocrat.The ever-so-apt term “sanewashing” was born to describe what was going on, and the media’s role. Talk about a cover-up. Trump’s rallies were exercises in lunacy, as he spun tales about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, rambling for hours.But the coverage seldom came close to getting across the reality. Instead, we’d hear descriptions about his “freewheeling” style or “brash” approach.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs for the autocracy in waiting, there were excellent stories about the blueprint for his second term known as Project 2025, but it was far from obvious whether news leaders stopped to ask if voters really understood the stakes. Now we see the Trump administration quite literally enacting that same Project 2025 that he claimed he barely knew anything about.Horserace coverage prevailed, day after day. And then, when Biden’s decline became impossible to ignore – after that earth-shattering presidential debate last June – news organizations changed their tune.For weeks, there was nothing but “hey, Biden is old” coverage, once again failing to put the emphasis where it belonged: on the dangers of a Trump presidency.Heads of news organizations and reporters themselves are fond of distancing themselves from their real mission at times like these: to communicate the reality of an election’s actual stakes. Instead, they talk in lofty terms of merely covering the news, as if their daily decisions about the volume, choice and tone of coverage didn’t matter.It certainly mattered just before the 2016 election, when the entire top of a front page – and many an evening newscast – were given over to the reigniting of the justice department’s investigation of Clinton’s emails.It certainly mattered when influential opinion sections were ceaselessly baying about Biden’s cognitive decline last summer in order to force him out of the race.Despite wishful thinking, there’s no such thing as “just the facts” or complete neutrality, because editorial decisions and reporting choices always matter.What do you investigate? What is the precise wording of that news alert? How prominently do you display that story? Whom do you quote and to whom do you grant anonymity? What photo do you choose? Do you use terms like “straining the bounds of propriety” to describe what looks more like a bribe?So if the media were going to put their thumb on the scale – as they inevitably do – they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency.The failure to do so is playing out in our shattered world, and at a frightening pace.That’s a reckoning we ought to have, but I doubt we ever will.

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

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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