Trump's war on journalists starts now

Assessing the early damage stateside and abroad.

2025 official portrait of President Trump. (The White House)

The second Trump Administration’s early attacks on journalism are landing off-center from the usual areas of press freedom and the First Amendment — instead arriving via broader blanket actions in the areas of international funding and U.S. labor regulations.

The U.S. government is a major funder of independent international media in developing democracies through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where international aid has now been ordered frozen for 90 days.

“This was truly Black Monday for independent media in Europe,” Marcin Gadziński, a Program Director for Europe at the Media Development Investment Fund, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday. “In coming days, weeks, months, probably years, we will remember this day when the aid stopped… Just today I heard from independent media outlets in Romania, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Bosnia. Tomorrow I will probably hear from other corners of CEE and Balkans.”

What’s ironic about America’s underfunding of public media at home is that our foreign service has long understood independent journalism’s role as a bulwark against authoritarianism abroad. “Media for democracy help to compensate where there is a weak, and often non-independent, judiciary and shine a light on corruption,” as one past USAID guide on media and democracy promotion puts it, practically holding up a mirror to the American reader’s present predicament:

Long-standing challenges like corruption, weak rule of law, lack of independence in the judiciary and media, weak funding for the “third sector,” and a lack of political will to take up the reforms needed to democratize have been key obstacles for much of the past 30 years. According to the Center for International Media Assistance, democratic backslides have also occurred due to “soft censorship” by local media. Soft censorship promotes positive coverage of government officials or their actions. …

Other challenges faced by media now include technological disruption to already fragile media organizations and systems. Changes in audience consumption patterns mean that media are in a constant chase for new audiences and revenue streams. Newer challenges brought on by the collapse of traditional business models that sustained media and disruptive technologies have given rise to a host of problems like online surveillance, online harassment, and smear campaigns, and the widespread misuse of online platforms to distribute a range of disinformation. In addition, in contrast to previous generations of media development (i.e., after the fall of the Berlin Wall), there is sharp power exerted worldwide by authoritarian actors that are seeking greater influence over the information domain.

Thankfully none of that is happening here in the U.S., and independent journalism is something that only needs to be supported abroad, right?

The other piece of anti-journalist ugliness landed this morning with Trump’s unexpected and (probably illegal?) firing of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, a Democrat, whose term was supposed to run through August 2028.

The NLRB is normally split between Republican and Democratic members, with the board’s majority — and its legal interpretations — shifting from administration to administration between generally favoring workers or their employers. What’s novel about Wilcox’s firing is that the NLRB would lack a quorum and thus be unable to resolve labor disputes and violations, effectively making the National Labor Relations Act unenforceable.

“Trump could opt not to fill any NLRB vacancies and prevent the agency from issuing decisions for his entire term,” NLRB watcher Matt Bruenig wrote in a quick legal analysis.

So what does this have to do with journalism? If conditions at the NLRB continue to deteriorate as expected, I forecast more and longer-lasting chaos between journalists and media owners in U.S. newsrooms.

Many U.S. newsrooms are now unionized, and the overall state of labor relations between journalists and industry management in an ailing industry is reliably awful. It’s no secret that newsroom ownership tends to despise their journalists’ guilds, usually having fought and failed to prevent unionization in the first place. (In an industry dominated by Wall Street ownership and where many journalists go years without raises, that’s a no-brainer: Unionization doesn’t tend to hurt productivity, but it does cut down on exploitative profit margins.)

The contempt from newsrooms is typically mutual: You only have to look up a couple of your better known news companies on the NLRB’s case docket to see how often journalists have been accusing their own employers of breaking federal labor law in recent years. The whole point of the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935, is to provide a legal framework to resolve these sorts of animosities so they don’t constantly turn into out-of-control disputes that cause “substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce.”

However, despite recently having the most pro-union U.S. presidential administration pretty much since FDR, underfunding and understaffing made the NLRB a poor referee in timely resolving all those newsroom fights. Many months can go by, or longer, without adjudication of an Unfair Labor Practices charge.

The greatest damage delayed NLRB enforcement inflicts on journalism happens during disputes related to collective bargaining, which implicates everybody in a newsroom. Short disputes turn into long disputes, and long disputes turn into work stoppages. You may not know that the number of strikes by NewsGuild journalists has soared in recent years. I’d be shocked if any of them weren’t connected in some way to an Unfair Labor Practices charge, and yet I doubt few if any of those strikes ended because the NLRB weighed in. This is an industry where fights are increasingly getting settled out in the proverbial and literal streets.

The news industry has already experienced a worst-case scenario for this at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has become the site of the current longest-running strike in America after the owning Block family “didn’t negotiate in good faith, illegally imposed working conditions and unlawfully surveilled workers engaged in union activities.” This is a lawless news company, and yet only recently did the NLRB file for an injunction against the Blochs. Meanwhile, the strike drags on without an end in sight.

There’s a more local-to-me version of this that unfolded at the nonprofit Long Beach Post, which laid off most of its staff a week after they requested voluntary recognition from management; the survivors went on strike. That was nearly a year ago, and the journalists’ NLRB charge against the Post, and their strike, remains pending. Many of them have since formed the cooperative Long Beach Watchdog, and while it’s great that Long Beachers have an ethical alternative news source, it’s not great that so many journalists and publications are embroiled in seemingly never-ending disputes.

Unless teleport to some alternate reality where journalists and news owners come to love and trust each other and organizing became unnecessary, it all just brings us back to the world of brutal industrial strife before the National Labor Relations Act. That was not a happy era for this country. But it’s the one that Trump officials seem to have been dreaming of nonetheless.