Autocracy 101: Crush the free press

Joanne Lipman on Catie Couric Media:

Last fall, I created a scorecard for the journalism class I teach at Yale. It listed five strategies that authoritarian-leaning leaders have used to crush the free press in their countries. I flashed the scorecard on a screen. “Take a picture,” I suggested to the students, “and keep track of which of those strategies might migrate to the United States.”

I had culled the five strategies from a Washington Post essay, “How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America,” by New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. His piece focused on leaders in democracies like Hungary and India who have weaponized existing laws and norms to cripple the news media, deploying an arsenal that includes normalizing harassment of journalists, abusing regulatory authority, and exploiting the courts with frivolous lawsuits.

Sulzberger’s piece was intended to be a warning. The Trump administration apparently read it as a playbook.

Like my students, I’ve been keeping score too. I’ve been around for a while — my first Trump-adjacent article was about the “new” USFL (Google it!) — so I’m not surprised by much. But honestly, it is astonishing how quickly the scorecard has filled out. And it’s growing longer by the day.

By my latest count – and it is likely incomplete– there have been more than 100 actions that threaten American press freedom, most taken since the November election or shortly before. And that doesn’t count yesterday’s headlines about Trump allegedly seeking more than $25 million from Paramount to settle a lawsuit over routine editing of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview. The case is so widely considered frivolous – my pal Katie Couric yesterday called it “bullshit” – that some company execs fear settling it may lead to criminal charges of bribery.

All of these measures have been reported individually. But the visual list is a gut punch — and a wake-up call.

Here’s the original scorecard:

Go HERE to see Trump Administration scorecard.

Mainstream media, for the most part, has remained steadfast in the face of the onslaught. Reporting from major outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica, remains robust, as does that from smaller news organizations and independent journalists, like those writing on Substack.

And to be clear, there are valid criticisms of the news media. Trust in the press has been declining for about half a century, long before the current moment, for a variety of reasons, including some that were self-inflicted.

But what’s happening now is an order of magnitude greater than anything we have seen before. And it’s taking a toll — from threatening journalists’ safety to prompting self-censorship among news organizations for fear of reprisals for factual reporting. Already, executives at news organizations from CBS and WNET to The New York Post have allegedly pressured newsrooms to tone down or even kill some coverage of the Trump administration.

I’m a firm believer in the notion, which I realize some colleagues think is outdated, that the role of the news media isn’t to be the resistance. It is to hold power to account and to seek the truth, regardless of who is in power.

If this scorecard shows us anything, it illustrates that the watchdog role is more important than ever, and how crucial it is for journalists, and all of us, to hold the line.

As Sulzberger rightly pointed out in a recently updated speech on the topic, “Fear is contagious. But courage is also contagious.”