No other singular week in Donald Trump’s second presidency has made it clearer that control of the media is now a central MAGA objective. To wrap a remarkable span of days at the White House, he permitted New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, who was visiting the Oval Office at Trump’s invitation, to reaffirm his assessment that the president is indeed a fascist. Hosting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday, Trump heaped praise on the strongman tied by U.S. intelligence to the brutal 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “We’ve always been on the same side of every issue,” Trump said of bin Salman in front of the gathered journalists, one of whom quickly found herself in the president’s firing line.
ABC News reporter Mary Bruce asked Trump about the crown prince’s connection to Khashoggi’s murder and Trump’s reversal on releasing the Epstein files. The president reprimanded her, calling her “insubordinate” and a “terrible person,” and recommending that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr revoke ABC’s broadcast license.
Beyond the president, other MAGA figures are exerting pressure on major journalistic institutions to place ideological loyalists into key media roles while pushing out dissenting voices: A hallmark of authoritarian control.
Beyond the president, other MAGA figures are exerting pressure on major journalistic institutions to place ideological loyalists into key media roles while pushing out dissenting voices: A hallmark of authoritarian control.
This week Vice President JD Vance revealed that he wants Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Post, to hand over control of his newsroom to Matthew Boyle, an editor at the conservative media outlet Breitbart. “I am being dead serious,” Vance said in a Nov. 20 fireside chat with Boyle that was livestreamed on the White House YouTube channel, calling him “the most well-sourced journalist in Washington, D.C.”
Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, Bezos announced a “significant shift” of the Post’s opinion page to focus on “free markets and personal liberties.” Vance said that he reached out to Bezos at that time to promote Boyle. “I texted Jeff Bezos and I said, ‘If you’re really serious about this, you should just hire Matt Boyle and make him run your entire political reporting shop… Unfortunately for the Washington Post, they did not take my advice.”
It doesn’t matter that Bezos was unlikely ever to take Vance’s unsolicited recommendation. The vice president’s public flattery of Boyle flaunts the fact that the far-right Breitbart staffer is not a marginal voice. Although he is not in control of the Post’s political coverage, Boyle sat beside the vice president this week as a central ideologue for MAGA’s media takeover movement. Vance’s bragging about his direct political intervention into the Post newsroom is intended to reveal MAGA’s control and normalize such backchannel influence.
“We’re doing what’s called journalism,” Boyle said earlier this year of his website, which infamously featured a “Black crime” vertical. The mainstream media, he said, are “doing what’s called propaganda.” His antipathy toward legitimate news outlets isn’t new. In a 2017 speech, Boyle declared that “the goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media…We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business; we envision a day where the New York Times closes its doors.”
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This week, the Guardian reported that Larry Ellison, a major stakeholder in Paramount Skydance — which is owned by his son David — held informal talks with White House officials about a potential CNN takeover. Paramount Skydance is currently trying to force Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, to sell the network to him, Ellison has reportedly floated the idea of firing CNN hosts who are critical of Trump, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, to sweeten the deal.
Such a deal would undoubtedly thrill Trump, who is widely seen as favoring CNN’s acquisition by Paramount Skydance over an anticipated bid by Comcast. Earlier this year, Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS News, paid the president a $16 million settlement over a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris that he claimed was deceptively edited. Meanwhile, Trump has called Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts a “disgrace” to broadcasting.
The reported push behind closed doors comes after the president publicly demanded the firing of another CNN reporter. In June, correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported on air that an internal intelligence assessment found that U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities set back Tehran’s nuclear program by only a few months. “She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog,’” Trump posted on Truth Social.
So the MAGA effort to restructure mainstream media from the inside out is not just focused on the opinion pages, but also on newsrooms themselves. Institutional capture through ownership, power over personnel and regulatory instruments to exert control over mass media is a defining characteristic of fascism. Trump has long referred to the press as the “enemy of the people,” a phrase that has a brutal history with its use by authoritarians including Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels. The president’s contempt for a free, independent press tells us where his loyalties lie — and what a bleak future could hold.
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