Jim Rutenberg for the NYT:
Mr. Trump and his aides have called reporters for major news outlets liars; falsely accused them of accepting government payoffs for favorable treatment of Democrats (a misrepresentation of agency spending on news subscriptions); and made a show of reducing their prominence in the White House and Pentagon briefing rooms while giving more space to friendlies from newer, right-wing alternatives.
Mr. Trump has coupled those largely symbolic and by now familiar moves with an attempt to use the levers of government against traditional journalists that goes well beyond his first-term attacks.
He and people close to him have threatened to use the Federal Communications Commission to punish the broadcast news networks, to defund PBS and even to prosecute journalists for their coverage of the investigations and criminal cases against Mr. Trump and his supporters.
“We have not experienced this kind of raw, blatant use of government power for ideological purposes since Nixon,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a longtime public interest lawyer specializing in media regulations.
“In many ways,” he said, “the threat is greater,” coming with a harder edge against a weaker press corps.
Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has told reporters that “the White House believes strongly in the First Amendment.” But, in her very first briefing, she had warned, “We know for a fact that there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that.”
Much of the early action has emanated from the F.C.C., which is an independent agency with a bipartisan board whose chair is selected by the president. Mr. Trump named a longtime Republican commissioner, Brendan Carr, to the post in November, calling him a “warrior for free speech.”
Already raising Nixon-style threats to tie television-station license renewals to government determinations about content — which the agency has some leeway to do under regulations that still require licensed broadcasters to serve the “public interest” — Mr. Carr has revived previously dismissed complaints against the three traditional broadcast networks, and opened an investigation into PBS and NPR.
An inquiry into CBS played out in public in recent days when the network cooperated with the F.C.C.’s request for information relating to the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview last fall with Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump had accused the network, in his own multibillion-dollar lawsuit, of deceptively altering the interview to boost Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, which CBS denies.
Mr. Carr has said the outcome of the inquiry could factor in his agency’s review of a pending merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance, creating a division between him and Democrats on the commission…..
“It is a little bit dispiriting and worrying to see the press respond in this way to this president at this particular moment,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The settlements, though not great in number, raise questions about whether the traditional press will have the wherewithal to “stand up to power,” he said….
See also Trump’s New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum