Through lectures, scoldings and outright threats, President Donald Trump and his aides are ratcheting up the pressure on journalists to cover the war in the Middle East the way the administration wants.
The Republican president has fumed on social media about stories he doesn’t like and berated a reporter on Air Force One. The government’s top media regulator has warned that broadcasters risk losing their licenses if they don’t stay away from “fake news.” Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have questioned the patriotism of news outlets because of their reporting.
Trump has complained about war coverage in both specific and general ways. In a social media post, he said news reports exaggerated the damage to planes that were attacked by Iran at an airport in Saudi Arabia. He attacked “Corrupt Media Outlets” for falling for AI-generated false reports created by Iran and said the media “hates to report” how well the U.S. military has performed.
All presidential administrations tangle with the press; it’s the natural byproduct of journalists’ watchdog roles in a democratic society. But the incidents of the past few days speak to a hostility toward the very idea of being questioned — in a way that, some say, scratches up against the First Amendment itself.
A contentious gaggle on Air Force One
Meeting with reporters on Air Force One while returning to the White House from Florida late Sunday, the president objected to a question from ABC News’ Mariam Khan about a fundraising message that used a photo taken at last week’s dignified transfer ceremony of the remains of U.S. service members.
Khan was working as the pool reporter on the plane, but when she told Trump she was with ABC, he said: “I think it’s maybe the most corrupt news organization on the planet. I think they’re terrible.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr cited Trump’s Truth Social message about the planes struck in Saudi Arabia in warning news outlets to be careful about what they report.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote on X over the weekend. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their license if they do not.”
Decades of court decisions have generally sided with the press over government attempts to regulate the content it produces. But Carr said making changes is in the best interest of legacy media outlets because so many people don’t trust them.
His ability to make changes, however, is limited.
The FCC does not regulate networks like CBS, NBC and ABC — although it does have the authority to reject the licenses of individual affiliates of those networks when they come up for renewal. Cable news networks CNN, Fox News Channel and MS NOW are not under the FCC’s purview. The Trump message that Carr retweeted mentioned only The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal specifically, and the FCC has no authority over newspapers.
Punishing a television affiliate for war coverage that Carr objects to is likely to run afoul of the law, noted First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams in an interview Monday.
“The broadcast media is always at risk of a sort that newspapers are not. But at its core, they are protected by the First Amendment,” Abrams said, “and these statements by the chairman seem to me are directly threatening First Amendment interests and First Amendment principles.”
Abrams said he’d argue that robust war reporting is just the sort of public interest work that television stations should be doing to justify their licenses.
Intimidation may be Carr’s motive. And that doesn’t have to mean intimidating a news outlet to pull its punches, said Barbara Starr, a former CNN Pentagon correspondent. “The risk is the climate they create,” she said. “Are people going to be afraid to talk to reporters? Some of them will be, and that’s a serious matter.”
What kind of reporting is expected from “patriotic” news outlets?
Trump said on social media that he was thrilled to see Carr looking at the licenses of the “highly corrupt and highly unpatriotic ‘News’ organizations.” Their efforts were endorsed Monday by hosts of the influential “Fox & Friends” morning show on Fox News Channel.
“The president has said enough with this coverage, from other networks that are not telling you the truth, that are so negative about what is going on,” said Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt, without specifying the outlets she was referring to. “This is a pro-America fight, and every network needs to get on board with that.”
Hegseth, in his most recent Pentagon war briefing, specifically attacked CNN. Under his administration, most legacy news outlets have been thrown out of their regular spaces in the Pentagon press room because they would not agree to his new rules that he said restricted their work. Some reporters from exiled outlets are allowed back for briefings, although Hegseth seldom takes their questions. Without an explanation, still photographers have been banned from briefings.
Hegseth said a CNN story about the administration being unprepared for Iranian attacks on the world’s oil supply was ridiculous. He offered his own edits of headlines that a “patriotic press” should use onscreen.
“The sooner that David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth said, in reference to the Paramount Global chief, whose company is expected to take over ownership of CNN. The administration is hoping that will result in more Trump-friendly coverage.
Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, said the network stands behind its work. “Politicians have an obvious motive for claiming that journalism which raises questions about their decisions is false,” he said. “At CNN, our only interest is telling the truth to our audiences in the U.S. and around the world, and no amount of political insults and threats is going to change that.”
Starr, now retired from Pentagon reporting, said she sees journalists consistently breaking stories despite the limited access and hostility toward their work under the current administration.
“That has always been the case,” she said. “The level of intimidation has definitely ramped up and, in response to that, the commitment to the First Amendment and quality journalism has ramped up even further.”
