The Trump administration has censored two more news organizations and started dictating who can ask the federal government questions directly.
American fascist dictator, Donald Trump is at it again with his obsession to crack down on speech in America. Already, the free speech hating president silenced the Associated Press for daring to properly call it the “Gulf of Mexico” during a moment of extreme presidential pettiness earlier this month.
More recently, the Trump regime has unleashed another wave of censorship onto the world of journalism. Specifically, he silenced two more news organizations, the Huffington Post and Reuters. From Huffington Post:
Donald Trump’s White House kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool of journalists set to follow the president on Wednesday, breaking with decades of precedent, and insisted they have the ability to pick and choose which reporters cover the president.
The White House also kicked the Reuters wire service out of its spot in the pool for Wednesday, escalating a fight which began after the White House insisted The Associated Press comply with Trump’s decision to arbitrarily rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
The moves fit in with the increasingly authoritarian nature of Trump’s second term, which has seen him deploy the federal government to go after his critics and political enemies, and work to expand the powers of the executive branch to unprecedented levels.
“HuffPost condemns this egregious violation of the First Amendment. Americans deserve fair and honest reporting on their president,” HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Snyder said. “The White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.”
HuffPost White House reporter S.V. Date, who questioned Trump on Air Force One earlier this month, was set to fill the spot typically reserved for a print reporter in the pool, which tracks the president throughout the day and sends updates to the broader group of reporters who cover the president.
The Trump administrations quest to stamp out free speech in the country didn’t end there. Officials were also apparently getting ready to dictate who can and cannot ask questions. From TechDirt:
And it’s only because of the willingness of some percentage of the country, and by extension those who represent them, that Trump can triple down as he’s doing now. No longer satisfied with attempting to bully one international news institution, he has now decided to exert an iron fist in controlling who gets access to the White House Press Pool, despite a century of precedent.
The White House said Tuesday that its officials “will determine” which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close — a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. Leavitt cast the change as a modernization of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore “access back to the American people” who elected Trump. But media experts said the move raised troubling First Amendment issues because the president is choosing who covers him.
“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. She added at another point: “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.”
I shan’t mince words: this is complete bullshit. And, frankly, it’s transparently bullshit. The White House is not doing this to give any kind of press coverage “back to the American people.” It’s doing this to control who can ask, and by extension what will be asked, of the administration. And, if you’ve listened to any of the “new media” that has been getting invites and called on for questions in recent press briefings, it becomes all the more obvious. Some of the smaller outlets have put forth such hard-hitting questions which amount to, essentially: “Hey, you’ve done such an awesome job so far with literally everything. How do you feel about being so awesome?”
Indeed, that appears to be exactly what is happening. After all, recent reports suggest that a Russian propaganda outlet was able to mysteriously gain access to a White House press briefing between the now infamous exchange between Ukraine and the US where Trump and JD Vance disrespected Volodymyr Zelenskyy and announced that America is not interested in peace. From Raw Story:
A reporter for Russian state media was allowed to attend a joint briefing between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, although the Trump White House claimed this was done in error.
The correspondent, who was working for the TASS Russian news agency, was first spotted by The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg, who broke news of his presence on X.
Shortly afterward, a White House official gave Feinberg a statement saying that the TASS reporter had been admitted in error.
“TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” they said. “As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the White House press secretary. He is not on the approved list for the press conference.”
Yeah, and for anyone out there who believes this was a total accident, well, I have a bridge to sell you.
Now, all of this is happening in the backdrop of efforts to turn the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into an internet speech police while other Trump lackeys are pushing to have the Department of Justice (DOJ) to do the same. This as architect of the Trump agenda, the Heritage Foundation, started putting together plans to dox Wikipedians for the crime of posting something the organization personally disagrees with.
At any rate, the effort to crack down on free speech is continuing at breakneck speeds. It’s probably no surprise that as fascism tightens its evil grip on America, liberty and free expression continues to suffer in America. It’s a trend that shows no signs of slowing down.
