Trump threatens to ‘shape the news’ – Mother Jones

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday. Julia Demarie Nihinson/AP

Donald Trump intensifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, with a widespread threat of industry retaliation for covering criticism of him.

“To make America great, you really have to shape the news,” Trump said Fox News on Saturday morning.

Later that day, during a rally in North Carolina, Trump called the journalists covering the event “monsters” and “horrible, terrible, dishonest people.”

During an interview with Fox News, Trump attacked several media outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” reiterating that anchor David Muir correctly noted during a September debate that FBI data showed violent crime. declinewhich contradicts Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “over the top.”

Trump doesn’t just target the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, claiming that editing a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris “is a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US presidential election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas, where the single judge is Matthew Kaczmarik, a Trump appointee known for his partisan rulings in support of the Republican Party. Despite this, the claim has little chance of success. TV channels regularly edit interviews (including those with Trump, who retreated on an appearance on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy has written more about this lawsuit and its chances of success. Here.

Trump’s lawsuit is “without merit,” a CBS spokesman said last week. “The interview was not faked; and 60 Minutes did not withhold any part of the Vice President’s response to the question posed… 60 Minutes presented the interview honestly to inform rather than mislead its viewing audience.”

Trump also has said that CBS should lose its news broadcast license because of the Harris interview. This is one of many such threats. CNN recently marked that Trump over the past two years has called on every major American television news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump also has swore that if he retakes the White House, he plans to gain greater control over independent regulators, including the Federal Communications Commission.

As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition parent company of CNN and refuse to award a cloud computing contract to Amazon, founded Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he believes has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, was accused for illegally possessing highly classified national security documents, which he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently markedTrump has repeatedly said the prospect of rape in prison would force reporters to reveal sources. “When this man realizes that he is soon going to be the bride of another prisoner, he will say, ‘I really wish I could tell you who it was,'” Trump said at an event in Texas.

All of these statements pose a continuing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to restrict speech critical of him. This is a direct challenge to the First Amendment and is therefore unlikely to be entirely successful, even among increasingly partisans judges.

But Trump can still make life difficult for the media, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic voter registration efforts in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg tried to extract yourself from politics, including limiting what the company considers to be political content on its platforms. Washington Post not supporting Harris on the editorial page was widely seen as Bezos trying to avoid angering Trump, although Bezos disputes What. Los Angeles Times also drew criticism for refusing to endorse a candidate this year.

MailThe move did not appease Trump. The former president tore up the newspaper during his visit to Fox on Saturday, even suggesting that the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to disapproval were due to his dissatisfaction with the paper. Why Mail facing these problems? According to Trump, this is “because they have no credibility.”