Over 90% of all Americans agree that a free and independent press is important for the well-being of our society, revealing press freedom as a foundational American value that crosses party lines. But several of President Donald Trump’s actions since returning to the White House for his second term have alarmed free speech advocates and press freedom experts.
Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence reviews Trump’s moves against the free press and warns these moves are part of a larger attack against free speech in the United States.
The following is an excerpt from the above video:
The real goal here is to financially choke out newsrooms that challenge Trump’s narrative. And this is not new. Every authoritarian regime in history has sought to control the press.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s government systematically shut down independent media until all that remained was a state-approved outlet. And Hungary’s Viktor Orban used financial pressure and regulatory crackdown to turn the free press into an extension of his government. And now here in the United States, well, Trump is borrowing the same tactics, restricting access, stacking the press pool, and trying to starve critical outlets of revenue.
Freedom of the press isn’t about whether you like what a particular outlet has to say. It’s about whether journalists can do their jobs without fear of government retribution.
A recent report by the Reporters Without Borders, they found that press freedom has declined sharply in countries where leaders engaged in this kind of media intimidation. Now, the U.S. ranked in the top 20 worldwide, but then, under Trump’s first term, we sunk to 45. And well, with these latest attacks, we’re heading even lower. And this is not a drill.
The First Amendment is not just a line in a document. It’s a safeguard against tyranny. And when a government starts deciding which news organizations can and cannot exist and which can and cannot be silenced, well, democracy is already in decline. If Trump’s first month in office is any indication, and followed by his second, well, gosh, we are in the process of watching democracy be dismantled in real time.
When free press falls, everything else follows. So now is the time to fight back, not just for journalists, but for democracy itself. Because if we don’t, the only news left will be what the government wants us to hear. And that’s not freedom, that’s propaganda.