‘Death by a thousand cuts’: How experts warn Trump could use an authoritarian playbook to go after the media

By Hadas Gold, CNN

New York (CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to go after much of the media in his second term, threatening to jail journalists, revoke broadcast licenses and target outlets with a flurry of lawsuits. It’s a playbook he’s threatened to use before.

During his first term in the White House, Trump regularly tangled with journalists, assailed the press as the “enemy of the people,” and banned reporters from official briefings. In recent months on the campaign trail, Trump employed dark and violent rhetoric to attack the media — telling a crowd this week that he wouldn’t mind if journalists got shot — and sparking fears he will attempt to weaponize the government against the free press.

Experts on authoritarian leadership in Europe say that in a second term, enabled by more loyalists and fewer guardrails around him, Trump could do extensive damage to press freedom in the United States. A look at some countries in Europe, where Democracy is “backsliding” portends how it can happen.

Sharon Moshavi, president of the International Center for Journalists, said that in countries that have experienced a dismantling of the free press, “It’s not one thing — it’s not ‘we’re going to jail journalists.’”

Governments around the world controlled by authoritarians and strongmen, including Russia, Hungary, India, and until recently, Poland, have moved to muzzle the free press and crush dissent, she said. Trump has praised the leaders of many of these nations, especially Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s attacks from multiple angles,” she said.

Those angles include attacking journalists, discrediting their reporting, applying pressure on media owners to induce self-censorship, launching legal challenges, and leveraging wealthy allies to buy up media outlets to turn them into government mouthpieces.

Much of that pressure is indirect, Moshavi said, as business owners try to protect their access and interests.

“You see a lot of owners, a lot of big corporate owners who have other interests, start to put pressure on their own staff, or either directly or indirectly, and not to go that far (in their coverage),” Moshavi said.

Northwestern University professor Olga Kamenchuk said recent decisions by the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to halt planned endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to be an example of indirect pressure and self-censorship. Both owners have denied their business interests were behind their decisions.

“‘Democracy dies in darkness’ – and some of the media that refused to endorse Harris I think contributed to that, helped to dim that light, unfortunately,” Kamenchuk said, referencing The Washington Post’s slogan. “Owners are thinking how are they going to live for the next four years, whether they will have access to the leadership.”

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic and historian who has extensively covered the rise of authoritarians in Europe, said that in Hungary and Poland, leaders who sought to undermine the free press did so “not through direct censorship or closure, but through money and influence,” Applebaum said.

“A billionaire who’s close to Orbán would buy a newspaper and then change the way it covered the news, for example,” Applebaum said. “Or in Poland, advertisers might be spooked by the government, fearing that if they appeared to support an independent newspaper they could lose a contract.”

Applebaum said governments like Orbán’s took advantage of the precarious financial positions of many media companies “to just finish them off.”

Anna Wójcik, assistant professor at Kozminski University in Poland, said Orbán not only transformed government-funded public broadcasters “into platforms for party propaganda,” but his close allies also purchased private television and radio outlets to convert them into pro-government outlets, a process known as media capture.

Those outlets were then centralized into the powerful media conglomerate, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA). That hub now controls roughly 500 outlets, Wójcik said, “consolidating the majority of pro-government media under a single entity.”

The few remaining independent media outlets that continue to operate in the country “face challenges, including legal obstacles and broadcast license denials,” Wójcik said.

Those costly legal challenges can drain resources from media organizations and their journalists. Often, the lawsuits or investigations have nothing to do with the journalism itself, focusing instead on alleged infractions like tax violations but with the intended effect of undermining outlets’ financial sustainability.

“Journalists, especially investigative reporters, encounter harassment, intimidation, and costly lawsuits, including defamation cases and other legal actions often based on technicalities like data protection,” Wójcik said.

Trump has already embarked on lawsuits against the press. Last month, he sued CBS, demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s “60 Minutes” interview with Harris. Even if the lawsuit is ultimately tossed, the network must devote resources, time and money to fight the claims in court.

Mikhail Zygar, a Der Spiegel columnist and former Russian journalist, recently wrote in his newsletter The Last Pioneer that when Vladimir Putin dismantled the free press in Russia, “he didn’t even have to get his hands dirty.”

“Putin didn’t pass any draconian laws, shut down any newsrooms, throw journalists in jail, or have anyone killed. The media laws remained as liberal as ever, and censorship was still banned by the constitution,” he said. “It was simply that Putin got a little help from his oligarch friends.”

These threats are not just theoretical snippets from across the world. The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and a team at the newspaper recently studied how American lawmakers could draw on this exact playbook to stifle the press.

Would-be strongmen around the world “have realized that crackdowns on the press are most effective when they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers but a movie so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it,” Sulzberger wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

And yet, most of the experts said they still believe that American institutions will hold strong under pressure. Applebaum noted that the US media market, with its vast size and editorial diversity, is distinct from countries like Poland and Hungary.

“The main difference between them and us is they’re very small. So you can do more damage more quickly. But it’s also the case that the business model of media is not working for everyone anymore and you can put a lot of pressure onto it,” Applebaum said.

Kamenchuk also expressed optimism that the “levers and limits” on the executive branch enshrined in US law will work to protect the free press.

“I’m moderately optimistic that the democratic powers, including the power of the media won’t be quite as limited as we have seen in other countries that have had right-wing leaders lately,” she said. “But these probably won’t be the best of the times.”

Still, Moshavi said, Trump’s lasting damage to the news media may be his rhetorical attacks on the “fake news” that have fueled deep distrust among his supporters.

“It’s an absolute disregard and hatred for independent journalism in many circles, a lack of trust, a lack of belief, and a willingness to attack journalists,” she said. “That damage is lasting.”

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