American Fascism and Its Accomplices - Part VI. Controlled Mass Media

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This is the sixth in a series in which we show how Trump’s MAGA movement is the new American fascism. We use a template laid out in an article published in 2003 by historian Lawrence Britt, which analyzed seven fascist regimes and the common threads linking them. After a holiday break, you can read our last blog on the topic here. 

Week VI. Controlled Mass Media.

Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation or by sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Government censorship and secrecy, especially in war time, are very common.

Trump knows the power of the media.  He has manipulated it all his life.  His strategy as a politician is three-fold. Destroy the credibility of traditional media; cultivate relationships with right wing cable news networks; build a social media presence that serves his image and his base.  And he has succeeded.  The question is, how far will a second Trump administration go to make the media a megaphone for his policies?

Trump has already reshaped modern communications media. He surfed the changes in the news industry after the “fairness doctrine” was struck down, and the legislative changes that led to the rise of the massive media monopolies and conglomerates that birthed Fox news. He has ridden the consistent belief on the right that the media are controlled by a “liberal elite,”biased against them, and turned it into grievance politics.  At his campaign rallies he routinely attacks journalists. He has repeatedly called the press “fake news,” “the enemy of the people,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” “low life reporters,” “bad people,” “human scum” and “some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet,”, and he turns the attention of the crowd to their presence to be greeted with obscenities and taunts.  There is no mystery why he does this.  He told Leslie Stahl that he bashes press “to demean you and discredit you so ... no one will believe” negative stories about him. And the strategy has worked. Trump undermines confidence in reporting and raises doubts about verifiable facts. It is meat and drink to his base.

Trump weaponized Twitter as no one else has done, until his suspension from the platform in 2021.  His use follows a familiar pattern - the use of dog whistles, coded or suggestive language to provide plausible deniability when the base attacks his target.  He’s not asking anyone to attack his critics, he’s just airing his grievances. 

As Libby Nelson put it, “Trump’s Twitter account isn’t just a way for him to sound off. It’s a weapon he can use to exact revenge against his critics, including ordinary people, by sending mobs of his fans after them.

“A tweet from Trump is enough to ensure that his target’s phone will start to ring with vague threats from strangers. His or her inbox will fill up with explicit messages and invective. If the harassment gins up media coverage, that ensures more of it.”

After Trump was banned from Twitter (and before Elon Musk reinstated his account in 2023), the NY Times produced a catalog of Trump’s Twitter insults since he announced his candidacy.  There are hundreds….. Truly, there has been nothing like it ever seen in American politics, and it is a huge contributor to the wedge Trump has driven into our culture.

Trump had an incestuous relationship with Fox News for years. Here is Sean Hannity interviewing Trump at a campaign rally in Las Vegas in 2018.

In the Trump Presidency, Fox relished a democracy-decaying role as a White House propaganda organ masquerading as conservative journalism. That relationship deteriorated  after the station called Arizona for Biden in 2020, and Rupert Murdoch reportedly fell out of love with his money-spinning “bro.” But should Trump win again, we can be certain that the station will resume its role as cheer-leader in chief for a media-obsessed President.

Perhaps none of this would matter if the “traditional” news media had been effective in the past and in the present, and if it will be allowed to be effective in the future.

But the media played into Trump’s hands during his first run for the Presidency, and for much of his first term and his current run. By one estimate, Trump’s antics garnered $5 billion of free media coverage in his 2016 campaign - he didn't spend nearly as much on advertising as typical presidential candidates, and he didn't have to. And now, while the media have an absolute obligation to cover Trump’s many legal issues, by focusing on his rants and bombastic rhetoric, he gains the platform he wants and needs, to lash out at his imagined enemies. It is a form of political theater, honed to a sharp edge by authoritarian leaders, perfectly suited for modern media.  

What can we expect in a second Trump administration? Kash Patel is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank that is part of a network of conservative groups that is preparing for a Trump second term.  He served in Trump’s Justice Department, and was also chief of staff in the defense department. Two weeks ago, he announced that if Trump  is elected again, his administration will retaliate against people in the media “criminally or civilly”. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” he told us on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

How are they going to go about degrading a free press? In April 2023, Trump announced through his website that he wants to bring the Federal Communications Commission under the authority of the President, giving himself direct control over broadcast licenses and other regulatory matters. What would he do with that authority? As recently as October this year  he threatened to investigate Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, NBC News and MSNBC, over the outlet’s coverage of him should he be elected president again. And on Truth Social on November 28, he called on the government to "come down hard" on MSNBC and "make them pay" for its critical coverage of Republicans, 

We can’t pretend “it cannot happen here.” Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines, both provide examples of authoritarian regimes that have reduced a free press to an irrelevance.

We should heed the words of the late Madeleine Albright in her book, “Fascism: A Warning.” 

“The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.”

Next week: Obsession with National Security