President Donald Trump’s sustained assault on the First Amendment reached a new level this week. According to ABC’s legal counsel, the network’s news division has been tempering its editorial decisions, particularly its election coverage, for fear of retribution. “We sit with our head on the guillotine,” Beth Wilkinson, an attorney representing ABC, told a judge Tuesday. “We are watching everything we do.”
One of America’s most prominent news organizations — which also happens to be owned by one of the most powerful corporations in the world, The Walt Disney Company — is saying in open court that the president and his administration’s bullying is chilling its ability to report on the government.
This is censorship, period. And much like Trump’s long history of filing bogus defamation lawsuits, the administration doesn’t have to win in court for its targets to be cowed into submission. As Trump told The Washington Post in 2016 after one of his many anti-free speech suits was tossed, “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” These days, Trump no longer needs to spend a dime to muzzle speech he doesn’t like — not when he has the American taxpayers doing it for him.
The Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.
MAGA-adjacent journalists, one of whom now runs CBS News, have claimed there was a vast “censorship industrial complex” — run exclusively by Democrats, of course. In 2022, they peddled Elon Musk’s nothingburger “Twitter Files” as the free speech scandal of the century. It was, in fact, a fake controversy driven by politically motivated reasoning and faux-journalistic laziness, and none of them ever had the integrity to admit they were led by the nose by the world’s richest man or that they got the story completely wrong.
But the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.
“Over the last two years, there’s been escalating threats against ABC,” Wilkinson said in court Tuesday. She added that the president “has control over vast regulatory powers that he’s willing to use against those he does not like” and “has put in place a chairman at the FCC who understands his marching orders and is not shy about saying so. These are blatant violations of the U.S. Constitution.”
Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chair in question, has indeed been Trump’s most gleeful attack poodle. He is a hyperpartisan hack and hypocrite, brazenly wielding the power of government to intimidate broadcasters and their parent companies into submission, all while preposterously claiming to be a “free speech warrior.” And his petty attacks on ABC’s late-night comedians and female-led daytime talk shows have now reached what was always the likely intended target: the company’s well-resourced news organization, which regularly investigates this flagrantly corrupt and law-skirting administration.
The Trump administration’s juvenile bullying has already restricted The Associated Press’ White House access for more than a year over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those efforts have now bled over into MAGA Republican-dominated states, like Alabama, where a new law requires “all state and local entities and their employees” to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of America. That means public schools, colleges and even the state’s NPR affiliate have to abide by Trump’s embarrassing attempt at patriotic virtue signaling.
Carr has threatened broadcasters’ licenses for reporting accurately on Trump’s asinine and failing war on Iran. The administration is still in a legal battle with MS NOW, CNN and Politico, as it preposterously claims its ban on the three news organizations is a national security issue. And the administration has been siccing its secret police force on private citizens who’ve written social media posts criticizing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown on immigrants — and U.S. citizens caught in their lawless dragnets.
Elon Musk’s devotees and Trump-friendly opinion writers might still cling to the fiction that there was a Joe Biden-led “censorship industrial complex,” but the assaults on free speech enumerated in this column are actually happening. And with the Trump-compliant Skydance boss David Ellison now in ownership of CNN as well as CBS, the potential consequences of Trump’s unconstitutional attacks on ABC and other news organizations are increasingly grave.
The Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is real and it is a threat to democracy. Call it out, resist it and (this is for the corporate bosses) do not willingly hand over your lunch money to the schoolyard bully. He’ll only come back for more.
The post The Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is real. This ABC lawyer just admitted it. appeared first on MS NOW.
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