The capitulation of the US media is not an aberration

American democracy is arguably in more peril than at any moment in recent history. Not only are United States President Donald Trump and his Republican allies seeking to guarantee that Americans never again participate in a truly free and fair election, but public officials and Trump-aligned figures in the media industry are also manipulating the information environment at an unprecedented scale. The point isn’t that information disappears; rather, it’s that those in power curate, delay, and redirect it.

Consider the so-called Epstein files related to the investigation into child sex trafficking by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration has worked hard to bury it.
In early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised transparency on Fox News, claiming that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on [her] desk right now”.

Weeks later, however, Bondi and the US Justice Department she oversees executed a sharp about-face: she released “phase 1” of the Epstein files, but the release turned out to be little more than “a whole lot of heavily-redacted nothing”. In July, she shut the door on the client list altogether, with officials saying no additional Epstein files would be released to the public.

Many have reasonably concluded that Bondi is seeking to protect Trump, whom she reportedly briefed in May about repeated references to him in the files.

That suspicion was only reinforced by House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to adjourn Congress to prevent a vote on the release of the Epstein files, and his desperate attempt to recast Trump as an FBI “informant” working to bring Epstein down. Taken together, all this looks less like transparency and more like one of the more consequential government cover-ups in US history.This pattern fits a larger authoritarian playbook: Trump has also heavily consolidated executive power, militarised the immigration system, and repeatedly used emergency powers, among other actions that have undermined the US Constitution.

The same authoritarian instincts show up in efforts to police dissent and narrow the boundaries of acceptable speech.

The media – the so-called “fourth pillar of democracy” – have, at times, pushed back against some of Trump’s overreaches. But too often, they have buckled under pressure from the White House. In December 2024, even before Trump took office, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit with him for $15m.

Seven months later, Paramount, CBS News’s parent company, also settled a lawsuit that many experts thought it could easily win; it paid Trump $16m. Anchors and talk show hosts who have been too critical have been quietly removed, as newsrooms have shifted right to try not to antagonise the US president.