WASHINGTON: United States President Donald Trump is taking his long-standing battle with the country’s media to a new level by targeting the finances of organisations already struggling in an increasingly tough commercial climate.
Armed with multimillion-dollar lawsuits and regulatory threats now, President Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with mainstream news outlets, deriding them as the “enemy of the people”.
A notable exception is the powerful conservative broadcaster Fox News, some of whose hosts have taken on major roles in his administration and where his daughter-in-law Lara Trump is set to start as a prime time host.
Trump now appears to be doubling down on his anti-media rhetoric in his first month in office, focusing on cutting government agencies’ news subscriptions in what observers call a case of manufactured outrage.
News outlet Politico was at the centre of a social media storm, with Trump supporters including Elon Musk posting screenshots that falsely purported to show more than $8 million was funnelled from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the site.
The humanitarian agency has been the target of a sweeping cost-cutting campaign by billionaire Musk, a key Trump adviser, with the president calling for its closure.
Records on USAspending.gov, an online tracker of government payments, showed that federal agencies paid about $8 million to Politico for subscriptions, including to its Politico Pro service.
Payments from USAID were a small fraction of that total, the records showed.
But the facts did not stop Trump from falsely claiming that billions of dollars from USAID and other agencies had improperly gone to the “fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats”.
“We have never received any government funding — no subsidies, no grants, no handouts,” Goli Sheikholeslami, Politico’s chief executive, and John Harris, its editor-in-chief, wrote in a note to readers.
“Government agencies that subscribe do so through standard public procurement processes — just like any other tool they buy to work smarter and be more efficient. This is not funding. It is a transaction,” he added.
‘Moving beyond mere threats’
The White House has said it will cancel its Politico subscriptions.
Other media outlets also risk losing millions of dollars if the government drops more subscriptions, a lever for the Trump administration to undermine a press that is already facing financial strain, observers say.
“The upshot of all of this nonsense is that the (Make America Great Again) base has new lore they can use to explain away any unfavourable coverage for Trump,” said Matt Gertz, from the left-leaning think tank Media Matters, referring to the president’s key “MAGA” political slogan.
In another kind of pressure, Brendan Carr, Trump’s new head of the Federal Communications Commission, has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS, a move that some worry is aimed at unravelling federal funding for public broadcasters.
“The new administration seems to be ramping up a multifaceted effort to punish the media,” Roy Gutterman, a Syracuse University professor, told AFP.
“We are moving beyond mere threats.”
$10 billion lawsuit
In an unprecedented move, Trump’s administration announced that eight media organisations including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC and NPR must vacate their dedicated office spaces in the Pentagon.
It cited the need to create room for other outlets including the conservative New York Post and Breitbart.
In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump which contended the network’s star anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him.
The settlement was seen as a major concession by a large media organisation to Trump, whose previous efforts to sue news outlets have often ended in defeat.
“The spectacle of powerful media organisations debasing themselves before Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote in a New York Times column.
CBS News, a broadcaster at the centre of another FCC probe and a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump, recently complied with an FCC request to hand over the raw footage from an interview last year with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, with the president accusing it of deceitful editing.
Paramount, CBS’s parent company, is now considering settling the lawsuit, media reports say, at a time when it needs Trump’s support for its proposed merger with Skydance.
