Our President's Latest Attempt to Use the Federal Government to Shut Down Journalists

Dan Greenberg

President Trump’s statement on Truth Social yesterday reminded me of a sad fact: Anyone involved in public life will regularly receive angry messages from others who threaten to invoke the power of obscure government agencies, and — not to put too fine a point on it — those messages sometimes appear insane. Some years ago, a personal-injury attorney repeatedly emailed me to demand that I disclose some of my private correspondence under my state’s Freedom of Information Act (even though FOIA didn’t apply). Another poor fellow repeatedly wrote to contend that a bill I had authored to protect the rights of photographers would violate HIPAA (HIPAA applies to medical and insurance personnel only; it has nothing to do with those who take photographs in public). I guess it’s mildly amusing to read half-literate communiques filled with bizarre, mildly deranged threats of government action, but it is less amusing when those threats come from the president of the United States.

On August 30, President Donald Trump explained on Truth Social that NBC journalist Kristin Welker — because of her “purposeful inaccuracy” — “will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.” Welker had noted that the president had “mixed results” on his candidate endorsements: Trump angrily responded, “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” 

As any reasonably well-informed person knows, the FCC has no general power to rebuke or punish journalists. It is conceivable that the FCC could take action against a broadcaster that intentionally participates in a catastrophic hoax or distorts a significant news event, but an expression of opinion about the wattage of the president’s endorsements doesn’t qualify. Of course, as I have written before, it is true that we have an FCC that is chaired by an unscrupulous public official and a president who does not even try to hide his advocacy of the abuse of government power. But I doubt even someone as creative in his misuse of government power as Chairman Brendan Carr will be able to figure out how to wield government power to punish this particular instance of protected expression of opinion.

Indeed, any further critical discussion of Trump’s deeply strange accusation is something like killing a housefly with a nuclear bomb, but here goes: Trump’s provision of statistics that (somehow) purports to undercut Welker’s expression of opinion is, well, impressively thoughtless. That is because one can read Welker’s expression of opinion — that Trump’s endorsements have had mixed results — to include outcomes in past general elections; looking at general election results is an extremely conventional way to gauge election outcomes. Ultimately, most candidates care just as much about what happens to them in general elections as they do about what happens to them in primaries!

We have reached a sad state of affairs when an American president responds to a journalist’s expression of opinion by demanding action from a federal agency. That is the sort of abuse of power that people who run authoritarian governments or communist dictatorships make. It would be nice to say that President Trump has forgotten that we live in a constitutional republic — with a constitution and a First Amendment that protects freedom of speech and a free press — but that would be inaccurate. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this basic fact — covered in high school civics classes — is one the president has never bothered to learn.