‘He’s become America’s assignment editor’: US media owners bend to Trump

In a tumultuous first two weeks back in power in the White House, Donald Trump has targeted many familiar enemies, including one of his most passionate obsessions: the US media, whom he has frequently dubbed “enemies of the people”.

Trump’s new federal communications chair, Brendan Carr, is reported to have ordered an investigation into the sponsorship practices of taxpayer-supported NPR and PBS member stations – a media network long hated by conservatives who accuse it of a liberal slant.

At the same time, and just as concerning for some media watchers, core segments of the US media landscape – via the wealthy billionaires and gigantic corporations that own them – have seemingly caved under Trump’s pressure or apparently sought to curry favor with the new administration.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that CBS News parent Paramount is in talks to settle a $10bn claim that it deceptively edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount is currently concluding an asset sale of its Hollywood studio business.

There is no evidence that the interview was deliberately edited beyond normal practises. But the Trump team has not held back. Edward Paltzik, a lawyer for Trump in the case, said “real accountability for CBS and Paramount will ensure that the president is compensated for the harm done to him, and will deter the fake news from further distorting the facts to advance a partisan agenda”.

The news of Paramount’s decision – which has reportedly caused deep upset in the CBS newsroom – comes after ABC News agreed to pay $15m to Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit over inaccurate comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape.

It also follows the move by social media giant Meta to pay $25m to settle a first amendment protections claim for “impermissible censorship” when it bounced Trump from Facebook and Instagram in 2021. About $22m of that fee will be a donation to Trump’s presidential library.

Meta’s chief executive, the tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, has grown increasingly close to Trump since he won the 2024 election, including visiting him at Mar-a-Lago and celebrating with him at his inauguration.

In each instance, the huge companies have been accused of putting larger corporate interests before the credibility of their news divisions or ethical judgments and of making payoffs to keep the peace with the new president or perhaps with an eye on future business opportunities.

Meanwhile, media personalities associated with some high-profile criticism of Trump or his Republican allies have started to leave the scene, including NBC’s former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was one of the most famous Trump-critical journalists on American television but who left his network after his show was shunted to a midnight slot.

“He’s dictating the news on his terms,” said Michael LaRosa, spokesperson for the former first lady Jill Biden. “He’s become America’s assignment editor.”

Jeff Bezos (left), owner of the Washington Post, and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, at Trump’s inauguration in Washington DC on 20 January. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Other examples that have roiled American media are racking up.

The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, endorsed Trump’s pick for attorney general, election denier Pam Bondi, calling her “qualified” and “serious”. Before the election, it killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris. At the same time, Amazon recently paid the first lady, Melania Trump, a staggering $40m for the rights to a documentary about her life.

Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times, the billionaire owner – Patrick Soon-Shiong – recently killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and has granted significant editorial influence to Trump cheerleader Scott Jennings.

At the same time, Trump has set the pace, dominating the news cycle with a flood of executive orders and actions, raids of undocumented immigrants, fast-moving international disputes, contentious cabinet confirmations, interpretations of the causes of a tragic air crash in Washington DC and much more.

Drowning out rivals or dissenting voices is a trademark of Trump’s communication style and the US media is struggling to adjust to the new realities of reporting a Trump administration that is committed to a “shock and awe” policy of rapidly upending many aspects of American life and politics.

One of those new realities is a shake-up of the regular press briefings that the White House press secretary delivers and that form a core part of the pageantry of American journalism and politics. Trump has put a new face in the job – Karoline Leavitt, 27, who declared: “President Trump is back, and the golden age of America has most definitely begun.”

But the new age is more crowded as digital upstarts and rightwing agitators and activists are now pushing into the space traditionally inhabited by a much smaller number of correspondents.

For the White House press corps, that means now sharing the cramped briefing room with “new media” and personalities, after the restoration of press credentials for 440 individuals Leavitt said had been “wrongly revoked by the previous administration”, adding that this move would “adapt this White House to the new media landscape in 2025”. The White House would welcome applications for credentials from non-traditional journalists, Leavitt said, including creators on TikTok, podcasters and bloggers who are “producing legitimate news content”.

In practice, that means a fight for attention with Natalie Winters, 23, the White House correspondent on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, among others. Alex Jones, the former owner of Infowars, claimed he had been “invited to come” to a White House press briefing next week.

“It’s impossible now to speak of media as some kind of monolithic, unified thing we can address,” said Robert Thompson at the Newhouse school of communications at Syracuse University.

This comes as the post-election news audience slump appears to be ending, especially for rightwing media. Fox News recorded its best January ratings in its 23-year history, averaging 1.9m total day viewers and 2.78m in primetime, up 53% and 40% respectively from the same month a year earlier.

Trump, during the first two weeks of his second administration, may have figured out how to overwhelm the media’s seemingly limitless bandwidth for transmitting information. Joe Biden gave just 36 press conferences during his term, the fewest of the last seven presidents, barely taxing White House stenographers.

Now the White House is reportedly discussing hiring more stenographers to keep up with Trump’s public remarks. He delivered 22,000 words on inauguration day, and 17,000 during a trip to visit hurricane and wildfire disaster sites in North Carolina and California.

According to Thompson, journalists are going to have to decide which battles to fight and which stories to follow – as long as their ultimate corporate bosses allow them to.

“Even in a 24-hour news cycle and the infinite amount of [internet] real estate to put stuff in, there’s such a flood of stories and information that choosing what stories to cover means letting go and resetting on a lot that could be rehashed. They’ve had to make some concessions that may not, in the best of all journalistic worlds, be the best they could make,” he said.