Over the past few weeks, many of the largest American media institutions and technology companies have prostrated themselves, one after another, before Donald Trump, offering obscene sums of money to settle feeble or frivolous lawsuits that they had previously insisted they would contest. American media institutions—including newspapers, broadcasters, and social media companies—enjoy constitutional freedoms that are the envy of their counterparts around the world, but it seems that many of these institutions simply lack the will or courage to assert them. I wrote about this dispiriting and ominous phenomenon for the New York Times:
Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights.
As I write in the essay, the settlements that media organizations are entering into with Trump weaken the liberties on which the media organizations depend. They will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. And each settlement also increases the pressure on other media organizations to settle their own disputes with Trump or find other ways of ingratiating themselves with him. Soon, I fear, “it may be unusual and even more perilous for a news organization to protest when it is accused by the president of reportorial recklessness, however outlandish the charge might be.”
Please read the whole essay here.