Other outlets have asked their writers to compromise, but the Guardian has never – and would never – ask me to pull a punch
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It might be most generous to characterize the behavior of major US media organizations since 2024 as negotiating between competing incentives.
On the one hand, billionaires have consolidated their ownership over major news outlets and platforms. The Murdochs are squabbling over Fox. Jeff Bezos has remade the Washington Post in his own image. The pharmaceutical magnate Patrick Soon-Shiong places a thumb on the scale at the Los Angeles Times, and the Trump-aligned Ellison family has taken over Paramount and CBS, and spent the final weeks of this year making hostile takeover bids for CNN owner Warner Bros. The influence of these billionaire personalities has often reshaped their organizations’ newsrooms and editorial boards, directing investigations and particularly opinion sections towards ownership’s pet projects and preferred policies.
On the other hand, US media organizations are also facing tremendous pressure from the Trump administration – and from Donald Trump personally, who has used a combination of frivolous defamation suits and weaponized regulatory agencies to extract vast sums from outlets that publish coverage he does not like and threaten the licenses of broadcasters who host voices critical of his movement. He extracted a vast settlement from CBS over a shockingly banal concision edit to a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes; he sued the New York Times over unflattering coverage; his FCC chair threatened to withdraw ABC’s broadcast license over comments made on air by a comedian.
