Trump’s War on the Free Press has Crossed the Atlantic, and We Can’t Allow Him to Win

Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with the media. That fact shouldn’t particularly shock anyone, as he seems to have a fairly complicated relationship with everything – Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein must certainly have thought so, at the very least.

His relationship with the news media, however, has always stuck out. Beginning all the way back during his campaign for presidency in 2016, Trump has fought tooth and nail against what he designates as “fake news”, culminating in what can only be described as an all-out war against the free press. A new policy that bans journalists from entering the Pentagon unless they agree to report information approved by the Department of Defence, for example, has been rejected by a vast amount of news organisations. That alone should worry anyone remotely attached to democracy – even Nixon and Ziegler didn’t ban the Washington Post from press conferences.

Specific organisations have been targeted as well. Having filed lawsuits against ABC, CNN, CBS and asked for the heads of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmell for their anti-Republican broadcasts, there is a not-so-exclusive club growing of Trump’s legal targets in his pursuit of media authoritarianism - a club which the BBC now find themselves in.

Indeed, the news of BBC’s Panorama using misleading editing to negatively depict the President’s involvement in the January 6^th riots has done little to aid Anglo-American relations, and in typical Trump fashion, he now seeks “at least” $1bn in damages from the broadcaster – even after the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and news head Deborah Turness. As the UK’s primary state-funded broadcaster, and one which prides itself on impartiality and non-partisanship at that, the BBC being found to deliberately splice together a speech which insinuates that Donald Trump, of all people, encouraged violence and rioting on January 6^th, can be seen as outrageous to many in the MAGA clan.

There is a small problem with this outrage, however. Trump did encourage violence and rioting on January 6^th. In fact, there is a litany of evidence to suggest the attack on the Capitol ‘bears his responsibility’, according to a team of federal prosecutors headed by special counsel Jack Smith last year.

The BBC undoubtedly made a severe mistake in their coverage, but the mistake was not that they needed to change the footage to implicate Trump, it was the fact they didn’t. The reality of the broadcast is duplicitous at best, and at worst a stark reminder of disinformation in the media being used to shape public opinion. However, no footage was fabricated. Trump may not have said “we fight, we fight like hell” right after he said, “we’re going to march down to the Capitol”, but he still said it. He still made false claims online about vote irregularities and fraud and he still said, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”. The Panorama broadcast, as a news report, was incorrectly edited, that much is irrefutable - but it couldn’t have been much closer to the truth.

Reports suggest that Trump is unlikely to win a penny if his lawsuit against the BBC is to go ahead. With the resignations of Davie and Turness, that would seem a fair, if perhaps not satisfactory, turnout for everyone involved. But the reality is that Trump’s actions set a far more dangerous precedent for the British media and the British public.

The Trump administration has led a legal crusade against countless American news organisations, often taking tens of millions in settlements from those who choose not to bend the knee, which has led to further polarisation of an already fractured media dynamic. Political reporting can seem like night and day as a result, with ideological bias morphing “objective” news into seemingly polar opposite stories depending on the source. It comes as little surprise that Fox News have never been “served” by the administration for their stream of misrepresented stories, or that Joe Rogan and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point have been platformed by Trump as independent news sources. In a modern, neoliberal world, where the big bucks are no longer found in the papers, the President has finally found a democratic channel through which he can enforce who says what in the news.

For weeks after the news of the Panorama fiasco broke, British papers led with stories that Trump could offer asylum to British “thought prisoners”, prosecuted for “voicing their opinions” – slightly ironic, given his previous stance on asylum seekers. His foot is already in the door, and if we fall down the trap of unchecked and unquestioning populist rhetoric headlining our papers, what will we have left? 

This is why we can’t let Trump’s war on the media into the UK. Aside from the fact we’re not his biggest fans across the pond, our newspapers are already having to survive on memberships and donations. The integrity of journalists is all that stands between men like him and people like us, and if that integrity is threatened by a lawsuit or a public condemnation every time Trump, or anyone with enough political capital, finds something they don’t like, we will lose the free press we so desperately rely on.

Image: Flickr/Trump White House (Joyce N. Boghosian)

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