Donald Trump has ramped up his attacks on the media to a level without precedent in American history in the first 17 months of his second presidency.
But have Trump and his allies won their war against the media – or at least put the industry on a weaker footing than in the past? The answer isn’t so straightforward.
The list of assaults is dizzying.
Trump and his associates have launched numerous lawsuits against disfavored media companies; networks that have produced critical coverage of Trump’s actions, including ABC, have been the target of regulatory pressure from the once-independent Federal Communications Commission; press access has been either cut off or significantly curtailed at both the White House and Pentagon; the administration has utilized labor law to put pressure on the New York Times via an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that was decried by the newspaper as “politically motivated”; and perhaps most alarmingly for first amendment advocates, the federal government has both raided a Washington Post journalist’s home and reportedly issued subpoenas – later withdrawn – to Post and Wall Street Journal reporters over their coverage of “national security matters”.
In perhaps the most significant escalation yet of Trump’s battle against the press, on Friday the Times reported that five of its reporters received subpoenas forcing them to testify this week in front of a grand jury in New York. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs,” Times lawyer David McCraw said in response.
Chuck Todd, the former anchor of Meet the Press on NBC, said the Trump administration had “successfully infiltrated the press corps” by increasing the ranks – and prominence – of conservative influencers who are reflexively favorable to the president. “They’ve diluted the press corps so that there are essentially fan journalists there, pro-Trump influencers, or whatever you want to call them, who are participating in the pool,” he told the Guardian. “In that sense, I feel like they’ve done a good job of diluting the impact of accountability journalists.”
While networks like CBS News continue to do high-quality reporting on the Trump administration, that coverage is still looked at with skepticism by some because of the close ties between the company’s top brass and the Trump administration – and because of concessions that its then-ownership made to win approval from the FCC to complete a merger in the summer of 2025. Those Trump-aligned owners – David Ellison and his father, the Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison – have already received permission from the Department of Justice to take over the president’s most-hated cable network, CNN, leading to concerns that its coverage of the administration could be defanged to appease him.
Trump speaks to the media onboard Air Force One after returning from the Nato summit in Ankara. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
While it’s undeniable that media companies are operating with a level of instability and uncertainty that would ordinarily be expected to dampen the reporting they produce, some media industry leaders say the work is strong despite the circumstances.
“I think the greatest evidence that the media continues to do its job in holding the government accountable is the fact that this administration is completely obsessed by leaks,” Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, said in an interview. “There’s been a tremendous amount of really good work even by media institutions that have been portrayed as having yielded to Trump. Every day, there’s another story coming out about what’s happening in this administration and something that seems to outrage the administration, and they crank up their efforts to stop leaks [in response], going to an extreme that we haven’t seen before.”
The FBI, after all, raided Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home in January after the newspaper published critical reporting about US involvement in Venezuela, before and after the then Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, was captured. (Natanson’s work computer remains in the possession of the federal government while a magistrate judge searches her files for classified information allegedly leaked by a federal contractor facing trial in Maryland.)
Trump also threatened to sue the Times and CNN – though he did not follow through – for reporting on a leaked preliminary intelligence report that raised questions about the effectiveness of a June 2025 bombing mission in Iran. In early April, he threatened to jail an unnamed reporter for not revealing the source of information that a second US airman was still missing after being shot down by Iran.
When assessing the media’s performance, Baron noted that it was impossible to determine “the chilling effect” of Trump’s actions and words.
ABC, in a 6 July legal filing pushing back on an FCC investigation of the daytime talkshow The View for a potential violation of equal time rules governing interviews of political candidates, asserted that the commission’s “actions are already chilling speech ahead of the fast-approaching 2026 general election, and every day of uncertainty compounds that harm” – though the company didn’t give specific examples.
“The question is: what are the stories that we’re not seeing?” Baron said. “We don’t know what stories perhaps have been held back for fear of reprisals by Donald Trump.”
A veteran television journalist, who requested anonymity to protect relationships, said that some network executives are wary of attracting Trump’s ire.
“It’s pretty clear that the bigger media companies just don’t want to be targets. So I can’t tell you they’re saying, ‘Stand down,’ but it’s pretty clear that they have ratcheted back. They’ve toned rhetoric down,” the veteran journalist said. “I think some of it is just this fear of becoming a target, because the executives don’t want it, because all of these companies can get harassed by the government and Trump has proven that he will use government to punish companies.”
Still, numerous media companies have stood up to the administration, most notably ABC and the New York Times. The television network has fervently challenged the FCC’s investigation into The View and the commission’s highly unusual order requiring it to apply years early to renew licenses for the eight local television stations it owns and operates, which came a day after the president and Melania Trump called on ABC to fire the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a poorly timed joke.
“There’s no question we’ve seen cowardly capitulation, settlements signed under pressure, executives second-guessing their own newsrooms, and hosts pulled off the air to avoid a fight,” said Anna M Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC. “That is a shameful period of American history with which we will have to spend some time reckoning. But I think the tide is turning. ABC and Disney’s willingness to fight rather than fold shows other broadcasters it’s time to grow a spine and find the courage to do the same.”
The Times, led by publisher AG Sulzberger, has shunned a strategy of appeasement and taken on the administration head-on, filing multiple lawsuits to restore access at the Pentagon for its journalists, while fighting off lawsuits against it. When members of the administration have criticized the Times’s reporting on social media, the company has responded with strong – and at times cutting – statements of support for the work, often several times per day.
Some media companies, however, have refrained from directly suing the administration, either out of concern about appearing adversarial or simply because of the cost of hiring expensive corporate lawyers. “It’s a real expensive undertaking, and I think people are concerned about spending their resources,” one media industry lawyer said.
While Baron said the media “has done a remarkable job of staying true to its mission” in covering the administration, he added: “We have two and a half more years of this, and the pressure will only get greater. It’s already immense.”
