Spectacle Over Substance

The White House's war on legacy media is changing who gets access across the government

(From the Journalism Monday Memo, my weekly Substack about media, tech, and the ever-shrinking space between them.)

The Trump Administration is continuing its push to turn media backbenchers into full-time starters—with mixed results.

Last Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi met with 15 handpicked right-wing influencers to reveal what had been touted as “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Each was given a white binder full of documents that were supposed to reveal gobs of new information about Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire and sexual predatory who died mysteriously in jail in 2019. Instead, the heavily redacted pages had already been public for years, something some of the influencers, including podcaster Liz Wheeler, quickly complained about to their followers. The whole thing became a media fiasco that resulted in Bondi having to swiftly place blame on unnamed New York FBI agents for supposedly withholding documents from her.

The next day, in selecting media outlets to cover that Zelensky White House meeting, staff allowed a reporter for the Russian state-owned news agency TASS into the Oval Office. At check-in, reporters from outlets like the Associated Press and Reuters were turned away by press officials while the TASS reporter—essentially a propaganda writer for Russia—was waved through. When others in the press complained, the TASS reporter was eventually removed.

This all is a result of the White House’s ongoing fight with the AP. Pres. Trump barred the AP from attending press events at the White House, Mar-A-Lago, and on Air Force One in a spat over the news agency’s refusal to change its style guidance on the Gulf of Mexico to align with Trump’s executive order renaming it the “Gulf of America.” AP sued over the slight, saying it violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden issued an early ruling in the case that said the AP had not demonstrate it had suffered irreparable harm from its ousting, forcing the AP to peak through the White House’s windows until the suit goes to trial March 20. The Trump Administration then took that victory and, on Tuesday, announced that from now on it would hand-select media outlets allowed into press events.

All of this fits in with the administration’s war on the media, punishing those Republicans see as having a liberal bias. Within days of taking office, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bumped eight news outlets that had been critical of the president, including the New York Times, NBC News, and CNN, from their offices at the Pentagon. He replaced them with seven conservative outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart News, and Newsmax. The only outlier was Huffpost, which had just laid off 20 percent of its newsroom and, as a result, has had to limit its coverage.

At the same time Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr opened investigations into NPR and PBS, alleging they’ve been violating the terms of their broadcasting licenses. Carr claimed that the 1,500 public radio and television stations were essentially selling commercials instead of merely listing corporate donors to the stations. It could result in every public media outlet in the country losing its broadcasting license.

Of course, if Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) have their way, those same stations would also lose their federal funding. The two have introduced the “No Propaganda Act” in both chambers of Congress. The bill would strip funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization for both NPR and PBS, which Perry says have “actively pushed Chinese propaganda and have prioritized disinformation over free speech.” While the move wouldn’t shut down all public media, it would result in limited access, particularly in rural areas.

Carr also decided to reopen “news distortion” cases against ABC, CBS, and NBC, all of which had been dismissed by the previous FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel. The CBS case focuses on the same “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice Pres. Kamala Harris that Pres. Trump is suing the network over, claiming that the editing of her answer to a question on the Israeli-Hamas conflict amounted to consumer fraud under a Texas law. The ABC case alleges that the network showed favoritism to Harris because she wasn’t fact checked as much as Trump during their Sept. 24, 2024, debate. Finally, the NBC case claims that the network violated the “equal time” rule because Harris appeared for 90 seconds during a “Saturday Night Live” sketch Nov. 2, 2024, and Trump did not. JMM isn’t sure how that last one counts as news distortion—which Rosenworcel agreed with in dismissing that complaint and the others. Carr is now taking a deeper at all of them.

Of course, in one of those moments where past statements can come back to haunt you, a 2021 press release from when Carr was serving as an FCC commissioner has resurfaced. It was a statement he released after the House Energy and Commerce Committee began investigating misinformation. He decried a letter sent by Representatives Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both Democrats from California, to cable provides asking what they had done to block the spread of misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. Carr saw such tactics as reprehensible.

“By writing letters… the Democrats are sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling—these regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats’ preferred political narratives,” he said in the press release. “This is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.”

But then he doubled down, saying, “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.”

JMM wholly agrees with that statement. It seems Carr and the rest of the Trump Administration do not.