“Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience,” exclaimed top executive producer of the CBS News show 60 Minutes Bill Owens in a widely covered resignation letter. The resignation comes after a very public battle between 60 Minutes and President Donald Trump. In the first 100 days of his administration, Trump used the levers of power to intimidate the CBS and its 60 Minutes program through methods such as intimidation, lawsuits, and threats.
Presumably, Trump utilizes these tactics in the first 100 days of his second term to enforce ideological conformity across key American institutions like higher education and government—sectors where similar tactics have already been used to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The press is no exception. Owens’ departure signals that Trump is gaining the upper hand in his ongoing conflict with CBS, reflecting a broader conservative campaign that has targeted press freedom for decades. This long-running effort to undermine the credibility and independence of journalists has found success in the first 100 days of Trump 2.0.
In a democracy, the press is more than a Fourth Estate — it’s the essential pillar. Citizens can’t be everywhere or know everything, so journalists are charged with holding power to account, as the saying goes, “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That’s why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution exists — to shield the press from state retaliation and ensure the public has access to factual information about what is going on in society and around the world.
Presidents know this. Many have resented the scrutiny of a free press. But Trump has taken it further than any modern predecessor, weaponizing the term “fake news” to discredit factual journalism. Though this rhetoric echoes former President Richard Nixon’s “liberal media” smear, Trump has escalated it into a full-blown strategy to erode public trust.
The irony? He’s been effective partly because trust in media was already fraying. For example, in 1972 nearly 70 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence and trust in news media. By 2015 when Trump ran for president the first time it was at 40 percent and in 2024 it was down to 31 percent. The public’s faith in news media saw a large drop in 2003-2004 when legacy news media outlets uncritically helped sell the Iraq War under false pretenses. Trump capitalized on this mistrust, using it to dismiss criticism as biased or illegitimate — regardless of truth.
His tactics include restricting access. Trump has also used the language of “reform” to justify sidelining critical media voices—an approach that echoes tactics used by President Richard Nixon. Nixon famously moved the press from a central White House space to a more comfortable but more distant location, under the guise of improvement, but with the intent to reduce media access. Similarly, Trump reshaped the White House press pool by pushing out legacy media outlets such as The Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg. He replaced these outlets with digital news outlets and partisan influencers who are administration loyalists. In fact, Mary Margaret Olohan of The Daily Wire noted, “It’s a little bit of a who’s who of my friends in the conservative ecosystem that have suddenly popped up in the White House.”
Legacy media outlets who want to maintain access to the White House must genuflect to President Trump and refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America.” The press outlets that refused to make this Orwellian alteration have been banned. In fact, the Associated Press refused — and has been shut out ever since.
Trump has also continued a longstanding tactic of weaponizing federal funding as a political tool to silence public media. Working with Congress and members of his cabinet, Trump has attempted to cut or eliminate funding for public media organizations such as NPR and PBS. This push to defund public broadcasting has been a conservative goal dating back to the Nixon administration, which tried something similar. Congress is currently considering Trump’s proposal to defund public media.
In a move reminiscent of Nixon’s use of government power to target his “enemies” in the press, Trump has repurposed the Federal Communications Commission—an agency meant to regulate media in the public interest—into a tool for undermining the free press and advancing his political agenda. FCC Chair Brendan Carr launched investigations widely seen as politically motivated — like probing Disney over ABC’s diversity policies or refusing to approve a proposed CBS-Skydance merger over editorial disagreements. CBS even faced threats to its affiliate licenses after refusing to echo Trump’s positions on Greenland or Ukraine. Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler called Carr’s actions “an unprecedented expansion of government intrusion into free speech.”
Part of Trump’s success in dismantling the free press in the U.S. played out in the courts prior to taking his second oath of office. In December 2024, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit brought Trump for $15 million, where they were accused of incorrectly claiming he had been found guilty of “rape” when it was in fact “sexual abuse.” Similarly, before taking office he had already sued CBS for $10 billion for editing a Harris’ interview, which Trump claimed amounted to election interference. While editing interviews is standard practice, the lawsuit planted the seed of pressure that likely contributed to Owens’ departure from 60 Minutes.
Trump’s consolidation of power over the press in his first 100 days is partially a result of his bold action, but it is also due to the feckless response from media owners and personalities. Case in point, recognizing the awesome political power of Trump, some prominent media figures who had previously positioned themselves as critics of Donald Trump appeared to backpedal. Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Bill Maher, for instance, seemingly gave in to their own hubris—believing they were uniquely positioned to engage Trump amicably and influence the direction of a potential second term. They reportedly opened backchannels to the White House, a move that provoked backlash from liberals. Writing as a guest to The New York Times, Larry David mocked Maher in an essay by comparing his dinner with Trump to a hypothetical fantasy dinner David had with Adolf Hitler.
Media owners, too, showed cowardice and genuflected to Trump. For example, recognizing that Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, was running a dead-end campaign, Jeff Bezos, once a vocal Trump critic, reportedly spiked the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris, right after his executives met with Trump (likely to curry favor with his campaign). After the election, Bezos became a donor to Trump’s inauguration. His paper took a more friendly approach to Trump and even killed editorial cartoons criticizing billionaires’ coziness with Trump. He was not alone as other former Trump critics such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, (owner of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram) who had previously banned Trump and introduced fact-checking, now reversed course, donated to Trump’s inauguration, and embraced the new regime.
The result is that even new media has been shaped by Trump’s influence. Meta has demonstrated that it is willing to take marching order from him. He owns Truth Social. Elon Musk, a key donor and unofficial cabinet ally, owns X (formerly Twitter). Both platforms amplify pro-Trump content, and Musk reportedly manipulated trending topics in Trump’s favor after the election.
Undermining the news media clears a path for lies to go unchecked—which is exactly what Trump and his allies want. Let’s not forget that his first term ended with right-wing media figures and President Donald Trump bemoaning that legacy media was spreading fake news, while they spread falsehoods about the 2020 election being stolen. In fact, a lawsuit revealed internal text messages showing that Fox News Channel hosts knowingly lied to their audience about the election results. This deception followed a pattern: Fox had previously aired footage of Black Lives Matter protests, that were actually from a different protest in a different city, out of context to portray them as violent.
During his second term this trend has continued. As audiences lose access to a free press, they turn to Trump supporters in media such as Joe Rogan, who recently hosted a string of guests that pushed blatant falsehoods—such as the claim that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, or that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created specifically to target conservatives, or that Social Security is Ponzi scheme that is sending check to dead people aged over 100. Trump’s refusal to condemn or correct these lies highlights that his war on the press has nothing to do with defending facts or journalistic integrity, it is about control.
The courts are trying to hold the line — most recently by dismissing Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times. Courts have ordered the Trump Administration to allow the Associated Press into briefings, though he has ignored that order. But legal wins don’t stop the broader chilling effect. Trump is using the White House to dismantle one of democracy’s core institutions: a free press. And while the so-called mainstream media has hurt its own credibility with partisan framing and corporate bias, that doesn’t justify silencing journalism. We don’t need blind loyalty to outlets or anchors — we need to defend the independence of journalists who follow the facts, wherever they may lead.
Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored National Judge. Higdon’s areas of concentration include critical AI literacy, podcasting, digital culture, news media history & propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.