Trump’s attacks on press freedom aren’t separate from his attacks on oppressed communities. We must resist them all.
By Maya Schenwar , Negin Owliaei , Ziggy West Jeffery ,
January 20, 2025
Protesters rally during the People's March on Washington in Washington, D.C. on January 18, 2025, ahead of the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void — we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate. Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
A clear look at the media landscape shows us why these commitments are necessary. Throughout the first Trump campaign and presidency, corporate newsrooms acted as if they were dinghies buoyed along a naturally occurring wave to the right. Initial rounds of shock at Trump’s demonization of migrants, his hostility toward protesters and the left, and his jingoistic policies eventually gave way to normalization of such stances in corporate news outlets around the country.
When these outlets did choose to take a stand, it was often around attacks on a free press — which mainstream media depicted as a distinct issue, rather than recognizing its connections with the attacks Trump wielded more broadly against oppressed communities.
Now, we see that even that stance may be changing. The sheen of a confrontational press has dulled. Mainstream news organizations, familiar with the threat to journalism under a Trump presidency, began to capitulate before he even took office.
Take The Washington Post. On Inauguration Day in 2017, Post reporters wrote about Trump waging war on journalists, “accusing news organizations of lying about the size of his inauguration crowd as … huge protests served notice that a vocal and resolute opposition would be a hallmark of his presidency.” The Post famously adopted a new tagline: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Fast forward to 2025, and the newsroom is in turmoil as journalists at the paper — led by a new publisher with a background at the Rupert Murdoch empire and owned by a billionaire who visibly cozies up to Trump — question choices to kill an anti-Trump endorsement and cartoon.
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As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void — we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate. Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
A clear look at the media landscape shows us why these commitments are necessary. Throughout the first Trump campaign and presidency, corporate newsrooms acted as if they were dinghies buoyed along a naturally occurring wave to the right. Initial rounds of shock at Trump’s demonization of migrants, his hostility toward protesters and the left, and his jingoistic policies eventually gave way to normalization of such stances in corporate news outlets around the country.
When these outlets did choose to take a stand, it was often around attacks on a free press — which mainstream media depicted as a distinct issue, rather than recognizing its connections with the attacks Trump wielded more broadly against oppressed communities.
Now, we see that even that stance may be changing. The sheen of a confrontational press has dulled. Mainstream news organizations, familiar with the threat to journalism under a Trump presidency, began to capitulate before he even took office.
Take The Washington Post. On Inauguration Day in 2017, Post reporters wrote about Trump waging war on journalists, “accusing news organizations of lying about the size of his inauguration crowd as … huge protests served notice that a vocal and resolute opposition would be a hallmark of his presidency.” The Post famously adopted a new tagline: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Fast forward to 2025, and the newsroom is in turmoil as journalists at the paper — led by a new publisher with a background at the Rupert Murdoch empire and owned by a billionaire who visibly cozies up to Trump — question choices to kill an anti-Trump endorsement and cartoon.
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This isn’t unique to one paper. From the moment Trump began spewing lies about immigrants coming across the southern border, The New York Times wrote in a 2016 editorial that “it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering.” Eight years later, the paper still called Trump morally and temperamentally unfit for the job. But this time, it applauded some of Trump’s aims, if not his execution — specifically choosing to praise both Trump’s China-bashing and his choice to turn away asylum seekers at the border during the pandemic, a policy championed by Stephen Miller, Trump’s adviser most known for his support of white nationalist policies.
With these choices, corporate media outlets make a rightward societal shift appear inevitable. Movement media’s role is to resist that tendency, and offer an alternative. We have a responsibility to remind people of what we have lost, and what we could still win. We highlight any potential footholds that might stabilize us as we move toward a more just world. We look around at the communities we belong to and know that the threats faced by journalists are not separate from the ones Trump is issuing to migrants, to LGBTQ+ people, to activists on the left — they’re part of the same agenda of authoritarianism, and we must resist it all.
Active participation in media is a critical part of resisting the propaganda-driven distortions and manipulations that fuel fascism.
Movement media are uniquely positioned to cover fascism, because we’ve been covering it all along. We have long reported on the rise of the far right, from white supremacist militias to the growth of far right militarism inside governmental bodies. More broadly, though, some of the areas of coverage in which independent media have led the way will prove even more broadly relevant in fascist times. For example, the work of Truthout, The Appeal, Inquest, Prism, In These Times, Democracy Now!, Scalawag, and many other movement media organizations has shone a light on the prison-industrial complex, well before mainstream media deigned to regularly cover police violence or mass incarceration. This archive is now essential to revisit: Policing (in its many forms), detention and incarceration are key tools of fascism — they are the mechanisms that the Trump administration will deploy in order to enforce its draconian agenda. As William C. Anderson wrote in Prism, “So much of what we know as the terror that indicates deeper descent into fascism in the U.S. first appears in prisons.” And as Kelly Hayes and Maya wrote in Truthout amid the first Trump administration, “people who are incarcerated in the United States already live under conditions that meet many of the criteria for fascism,” and it’s essential to learn from their experiences — and their organizing, chronicled in movement media publications. Our outlets must draw from our decades-long work exposing the roots, current functions and infrastructure of policing to illuminate how fascist policies and practices will be implemented and enforced.
Connectedly, we must remain steadfast in our commitment to covering the communities that MAGA targets by amplifying voices within those communities, uplifting their organizing efforts, and providing practical information and tools for these communities’ survival. As Silky Shah recently wrote in Truthout, a large part of combating Trump’s anti-migrant agenda must involve “educating people about their rights, exposing the harms of the system” and “broadening the base of support.” Movement media must doggedly intervene to correct harmful, false narratives and highlight organizing happening around the country to stop detention and deportation. We must ramp up our coverage of efforts toward a “radical expansion of sanctuary,” as Marisa Franco framed it during the first Trump administration: “Sanctuaries must include not only undocumented people, but also non-immigrant Muslims, LGBTQ people, Black and Indigenous folks and political dissidents.”
Accordingly, as both right-wing forces and “mainstream” publications like The New York Times overtly attack trans lives, independent media must build on our long history of covering trans movements, and also support the flourishing of newer trans-focused independent media like TransLash Media, Assigned Media and Erin In The Morning, which will prove essential to both correcting the public record and uplifting grassroots struggles for trans survival and liberation. And as mainstream U.S. publications continue to shy away from reporting the scale of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, movement media have an urgent responsibility to keep Palestine in the headlines; recognize anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab violence as part of the MAGA agenda and connected to the targeting of other groups; and keep covering both movements for Palestinian liberation and the repression they face. Coalitions like Media Against Apartheid and Displacement (of which Truthout is a co-founding member) and Palestine-specific publications like Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada and Palestine Square should be supported and resourced, and journalists and audiences alike must never forget the media-makers we’ve lost to Israel’s brutal genocide.
These are just a few examples of the ways in which movement media will need to both draw on our long histories of coverage related to fascism and also forge new connections, bringing our resources to the current moment with fresh vigor.
We must also anticipate the kinds of attacks that we expect to come or evolve under a Trump presidency. Consider the threat of HR 9495, dubbed the “nonprofit killer bill,” which would allow the treasury secretary to unilaterally deem a nonprofit organization to be a “terror-supporting group,” thus changing its tax status. That bill is one piece of a broader framework from the right as it tries to close in on progressive civil society and shut down any potential spaces for dissent.
The bill sailed through the House of Representatives despite protest from a wide cross section of nonprofit organizations; if it passes through the Senate, that could put an immense amount of power in the hands of one Trump administration official.
These kinds of laws are scary in their own right. But the rhetoric from Trump and his administration makes them all the more terrifying for independent news outlets like ours. Trump himself has referred to the media as the “enemy of the people.” He has derided any kind of coverage of him that could potentially be perceived as unfavorable, and has also found ways to twist the law in his favor to go after anyone behind such coverage. He’s suing a famed Iowa pollster and the newspaper where she’s published for “election interference” after one of her polls predicted Kamala Harris would win the election. He came after ABC News when George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found “liable for rape” instead of sexual assault in a case writer E. Jean Carroll brought against him. And news organizations are already caving: ABC settled the lawsuit and agreed to pay out $15 million to Trump’s presidential library, in addition to $1 million in legal fees, rather than fighting the charge.
Members of Trump’s inner circle are no better. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) followed up with Disney, which owns ABC, writing an ominous letter to CEO Bob Iger after the settlement, CNN reported. “Dear Mr. Iger, Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” Carr wrote. “ABC’s own conduct has certainly contributed to this erosion in public trust.”
“Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” Carr wrote on social media in November, shortly after Trump announced his pick. “These media companies are required by law to operate in the public interest. If they don’t, they are going to be held accountable, as the Communications Act requires.” Experts warn Carr’s policy ambitions would exceed the FCC’s authority under federal law, and digital rights groups see a clear threat to free speech.
Some threats are more overt. Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has vowed to come after journalists over Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said back in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense, has also come after journalists simply for doing their jobs. When nonprofit outlet ProPublica looked into a claim that Hegseth had not been accepted into West Point, something about which he has bragged, reporters reached out to Hegseth for comment, a standard journalistic practice. The story didn’t end up being true, and ProPublica never published anything. But that didn’t stop Hegseth from going after ProPublica on social media. “We understand that ProPublica (the Left Wing hack group) is planning to publish a knowingly false report that I was not accepted to West Point in 1999,” Hegseth wrote. Right-wing media doubled down and spun up a tale in which ProPublica was cast as an unethical smear factory, picking apart the outlet for doing its due diligence and thus undermining journalistic best practices.
Even without these specific actors and their specific attacks, journalism’s financial and distribution models were already under threat thanks to the ever-present interference of Big Tech. That presence stands to become even more overbearing under a Trump administration; tech titans have already donated handsomely to Trump’s inauguration fund. X owner Elon Musk has wormed his way into Trump’s inner circle, while Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg recently announced changes to the way his platforms would fact check and moderate content in what appears to be a show of loyalty to Trump. Under such circumstances, we must get creative in how we distribute and interact with journalism.
Confronting the Trump administration as media-makers means we must define “media-maker” broadly and inclusively. As Maya wrote during Trump’s first administration, media work doesn’t only “mean putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or eye to camera. Those who read, watch and listen are an integral and active part of a just media, and should be recognized as such. Good journalism is just as much about listening as it is about talking or telling. Media-ing is a two-way street.” By reading this article, you’re actively participating in media — and even more so if you share it with a friend, use it to start a conversation, send it to a text thread or post it on social media. And active participation in media is a critical part of resisting the propaganda-driven distortions and manipulations that fuel fascism.
Our hope for movement media under Trump includes a recognition that “audiences” are active participants, and that community-building is essential, both among people who work in journalism on the left (see our newly co-founded Movement Media Alliance) and among all those who engage with it. How can we cultivate community, both through providing media that people find useful to share, and also grow our presences on social platforms beyond those controlled by right-wing billionaires? How can we all challenge ourselves to create more spaces for energized conversation with friends, family, neighbors and co-strugglers about collectively informing ourselves and organizing to meet the moment? From scheduling regular times for conversation groups, to starting group encrypted text threads about organizing efforts, to reading books or articles together with friends, to subscribing to more independent newsletters and feeds, we can all commit to building community around critical engagement with media.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations — either through need or greed — rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes even before his inauguration, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models. At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths — a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government. Over 80 percent of Truthout’s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone. (You can help by giving today: Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.)
Journalism is just one tool in the anti-fascist toolbox. Those of us who create it must take seriously how our responsibilities intersect with and uplift the other tools that will, together, enable people to effectively organize against authoritarianism. As we rise to meet an era of unpredictable chaos, our journalism must be creative, accurate, accountable and rooted in solidarity.
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Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also Truthout‘s board president and editor at large. She is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition; co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms; author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better; and co-editor of the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. In addition to Truthout, Maya’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance (MMA) and Media Against Apartheid and Displacement (MAAD). She lives in Chicago.
Negin Owliaei is Truthout‘s editor-in-chief. An award-winning journalist, she previously worked at Al Jazeera‘s flagship daily news podcast, The Take. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Ziggy West Jeffery is Truthout‘s executive director and board co-chair of The Real News Network. He is a passionate advocate of independent media and social justice. You can follow him on Bluesky.
