“The Easy Way or the Hard Way”

Goodfellas at the FCC

Hi friends!

We know you’re busy, because we feel it too. We’re also juggling the demands of shopping, holiday parties, school concerts, family, work, and making magic.

As the holidays kick into full swing, you can count on us to land in your inbox each weekday with something we know will be useful, thought-provoking, or meaningful. But we want you to take Christmas and New Year’s Day off, so we are too. We’ll see you the first week of January with our full weekly issue. And until then, look for our emails and leave us a comment so we know what you think.

We hope this finds you warm, safe, and enjoying the season with friends and family.

–The Preamble team

---

In September, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered a monologue about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, criticizing how supporters were trying to distance the alleged shooter from the MAGA movement. (At the time, there was speculation that the accused killer had right-wing beliefs; it turned out to be unfounded.) Kimmel also compared Trump’s grief over Kirk’s death to “how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

The next day, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appeared on a right-wing podcast and issued a thinly veiled threat to ABC, which hosts Kimmel’s show, and its local affiliates. He warned that broadcasters had an “obligation to operate in the public interest” and suggested it was time for ABC to “step up” regarding Kimmel’s content. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said.

ABC suspended Kimmel’s show that same day. No formal investigation. No regulatory finding. Just words from a government official, followed by immediate corporate capitulation. Kimmel became the second late-night host with a history of criticizing Trump to lose his show this year. CBS had canceled Stephen Colbert’s program just days after he criticized the network’s settlement of a Trump lawsuit as a “big fat bribe.”

This wasn’t enforcement. It was a demonstration of power — a president who has spent a decade denigrating journalists as purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” now wielding the machinery of government to suppress negative coverage.

ABC returned Kimmel to the air after a massive public outcry that included notable Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz, who accused Carr of mafia-like tactics “straight out of Goodfellas,” warned that his threat to retaliate against media companies for speech on their airwaves was “dangerous as hell” for conservatives.

But Kimmel’s return was the exception. Trump’s pressure campaign against the media operates on several fronts simultaneously, and it is working. He files billion-dollar lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes. He defunds public broadcasting and threatens to revoke broadcast licenses. He strips independent news organizations of press credentials and access and replaces them with friendly influencers in White House briefings. And through it all, he maintains a constant drumbeat of personal attacks against reporters and instructs his Justice Department to find ways to criminalize critical coverage.

What we’re seeing isn’t simply a president lashing out at critics. It’s the systematic application of tactics that every strongman understands: control the narrative by using the power of the state to delegitimize anyone who might challenge the individuals in power. Trump isn’t just attacking the press. He’s building the infrastructure to replace independent journalism with state-aligned propaganda, following a playbook that’s succeeded in other authoritarian states.

The Orban model

When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban consolidated power, he didn’t send jackbooted soldiers to shut down newspapers. He bought them. By 2018, Orban’s allies had acquired nearly 500 news outlets and donated them to a government-controlled conglomerate. Today, his political party, Fidesz, controls roughly 80% of Hungary’s media market. Opposition parties get five minutes of airtime during elections — the legal minimum — while state broadcasters amplify government messaging and attack Orban’s opponents.

Trump’s approach adapts this model for the American system. He isn’t buying CBS or ABC, but his administration can threaten networks’ parent companies with regulatory retaliation while their billion-dollar mergers await government approval. He can file lawsuits designed not to win in court but to drain resources and signal consequences. He can install loyalists like Brendan Carr — who wears a gold lapel pin of Trump’s face — to investigate networks over routine editorial decisions. The result has been that media companies have started self-censoring to protect their broader business interests.

The delegitimization playbook

The Orban model is designed to accomplish specific goals that authoritarian regimes depend on.

First, destroy any shared understanding of truth. When Trump labels legacy media “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” he’s not debating facts — he’s inoculating supporters against facts. If the news is inherently untrustworthy, then contradictory information can be dismissed without evaluation. It’s the American adaptation of Lügenpresse — “lying press” — tactics used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to convince Germans that information outside party control was false.

Second, dehumanize the messengers to strip away their professional status. When Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey asked in November on Air Force One about documents linking Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, Trump dismissed her with ridicule, snapping, “Quiet, piggy.” When ABC’s Mary Bruce questioned Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Trump didn’t see her as doing her job or articulating an important concern about human rights. Instead he called her a “terrible person” and said she was being “insubordinate.” That last word is particularly revealing: insubordination implies a superior–subordinate relationship. In Trump’s framework, journalists aren’t representatives of the public holding power accountable, or even private individuals pursuing their own ends. They’re akin to employees who’ve disobeyed their boss.

Third, physically remove independent journalists and replace them with propagandists. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth required journalists to pledge they wouldn’t publish information about the Pentagon without official approval — something that may violate the Supreme Court’s holding that the First Amendment prohibits the government from issuing prior restraints on what may be published. Multiple outlets preferred losing their Pentagon press credentials to submitting to government censorship. The Pentagon evicted legacy media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, and Politico from their longtime workspace in the Pentagon’s press corridor, replacing them with right-wing outlets like Newsmax and The Daily Caller.

The White House stripped the Associated Press of press pool access after the wire service continued using “Gulf of Mexico” rather than Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America.” A judge ordered the AP’s reinstatement while its lawsuit against the administration moves forward.

In response, the White House eliminated the permanent wire service slot entirely, forcing the AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg News to rotate with a larger group of outlets rather than maintain their guaranteed daily access. The move reduces the wire services’ ability to cover the president’s activities in real time and gives the administration greater control over who gets to question Trump. The press pool had traditionally been managed by the White House Correspondents’ Association — a responsibility Trump’s West Wing seized earlier this year.

Fourth, replace independent information with state-approved narratives. The White House’s “Media Bias Tracker“ website features a rotating “Media Offender of the Week,” a “Hall of Shame,” and a leaderboard ranking outlets by their number of alleged infractions. Each flagged story includes government-written “Truth” sections with dubious verification. Categories include “lie,” “left-wing lunacy,” and “malpractice.”

The site actively solicits public participation through a tip line: “So-called ‘journalists’ have made it impossible to identify every false or misleading story, which is why help from the American people is essential,” the White House announced, encouraging citizens to submit their own examples of media bias.

This isn’t holding journalists accountable. It’s replacing journalism with government press releases while labeling the substitution as truth.

Why corporate media folds

The pressure works because media companies have vulnerabilities that extend far beyond their newsrooms. For billionaire owners or multimedia conglomerates, news divisions represent a tiny fraction of overall business interests — interests that require federal contracts, regulatory approval, and freedom from retaliatory investigation.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos needs government contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin. After he killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before the 2024 election and demanded that the paper’s opinion section advocate “personal liberties and free markets” exclusively, his reward came quickly. Trump publicly praised Bezos for “trying to do a real job with The Washington Post.”

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose fortune comes from biotech, needs FDA approval for his medical patents. He’s transformed the paper by killing critical editorials, adding conservative commentators, and sitting for friendly interviews with Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Patrick Soon-Shiong

David Ellison needs FCC blessing for a merger between Paramount and his company, Skydance. The threat was explicit: Carr told podcasters that “news distortion” of CBS (which is owned by Paramount) in a 60 Minutes interview would “likely arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”

Trump had sued CBS, claiming the network “deceptively” edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her appear more coherent — a claim CBS disputed. Paramount settled for $16 million, to be donated to Trump’s presidential library, as the merger awaited approval.

Disney, owner of ABC News, agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found “liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s civil case. Technically, the jury had found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” not rape.

Trump would later threaten ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl that he was next. Karl had asked Trump about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement that the Justice Department would go after hate speech (by which she meant people making offensive comments about Charlie Kirk after his death). “I’d probably go after people like you,” Trump told Karl, “because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe I’ll come after ABC.”

This week, President Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over what he called deceptive editing of his January 6, 2021, speech to “intentionally misrepresent” his words. The BBC apologized for what it termed an “error of judgment” — an admission that triggered the resignations of its top executive and head of news — but rejected claims of defamation.

Trump has also threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from networks for being critical of him, telling reporters that networks giving him “97% negative” coverage should have their licenses “taken away.”

Hungarian media analyst Gabor Polyak watched the capitulations to Trump with grim recognition. “There is a very strange kind of self-censorship in America,” he told reporters. “Even with European eyes, it is very frightening to see to what degree individual bravery does not exist. From Zuckerberg to ABC, everyone immediately surrenders.”

The cost of the vacuum

When independent journalism collapses, what fills the void isn’t silence. It’s propaganda dressed as news.

More than 8,000 government webpages were taken down after Trump took office — removed without explanation, eliminating public access to information on health, crime, and federal programs that Americans rely on for everything from disease tracking to consumer-safety data.

The pattern mirrors not just the Orban playbook, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s. Putin consolidated control of national television early in his rule, and then progressively tightened restrictions until critical journalism essentially ceased to exist. It mirrors Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s approach, in which comedians face arrest for jokes deemed offensive and critics endure lawsuits and harassment from nationalist groups. It mirrors Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s tactics, in which journalists report “under immense political pressure, faced with physical violence, censorship, smear campaigns, abusive lawsuits, and daily death threats, according to a recent report by the Media Freedom Rapid Response group, which monitors press freedom in Europe.

The strategy works because it doesn’t require formal censorship. Journalists self-censor. Editors kill critical stories. Owners push newsrooms rightward. Corporate lawyers recommend settling Trump’s lawsuits over fighting them in court. The chilling effect becomes self-sustaining.

What’s at stake

After Trump’s first month in office, Reporters Without Borders had a blunt assessment: under Trump’s second presidency, the press is “under siege.” The organization now ranks the United States at a historic low in press freedom.

This isn’t about protecting Trump from unfair coverage. No president in modern history has received more airtime or shaped news cycles more completely than Trump. What Trump actually hates is accountability. He’s building a system where accountability becomes impossible — where government defines truth, corporations choose profits over journalism, and asking uncomfortable questions becomes professional suicide. Trump himself said in a speech to lawyers at the Justice Department that critical coverage of him is “illegal” and suggested they find ways to make it stop.

The First Amendment still exists. Courts still sometimes rule against the administration. But when media companies settle rather than fight, when journalists are banned for using standard geographical terms, when comedians lose their shows hours after regulators threaten their networks, the formal protections matter less than the practical reality: presidential power is reshaping what can be said, who can say it, and whether anyone will hear it.