The Columbia Broadcasting Network (CBS) was for many years one of the three major producers of nightly news; the other two were the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). In 1981, CBS lost a lawsuit upholding an FCC ruling requiring it to offer airtime to presidential candidates who purchased it.
Trump and CBS News
More recently, President Donald Trump on Nov. 1, 2024, filed a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit alleging that CBS had deceptively edited an interview with his opponent in the race, Kamala Harris, airing different answers from the same interview on "Face the Nation" and the next night on "60 Minutes." The question was related to Israel and Gaza and Trump demanded to see a transcript of the raw interview.
Trump accused the network in the lawsuit of engaging in “unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion” and was also upset over the network’s more general coverage of the conflict in Gaza.
Although many legal observers thought CBS had the right to exercise discretion over how it edited materials, CBS, whose parent company Paramount had an acquisition offer from Skydance Media, which requires governmental approval, has appeared willing to come to a settlement.
In February, CBS announced it would turn over an unedited transcript of its interview with Kamala Harris to the Federal Communications Commission, for a parallel investigation by the commission.
On April 22, 2025, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” resigned over what he considered to be the company’s acquiescence and over what he thought to be improper controls over his program.
Other Trump actions against the press and their responses
For many years, Trump has been calling the press the “enemy of the people” (Kalb 2018). His pressure on CBS is not an isolated example.
The parent company of ABC paid $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library and another $1 million in legal costs after Trump sued for defamation over a misstatement by anchor George Stephanopoulous who had said that Trump has been convicted for rape rather than sexual abuse. ABC settled even though it is doubtful that courts would have considered this misstatement to meet the legal definition of actual malice, which is required to show libel of public figures as established in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
Meta, a large social media outlet, paid $25 million to settle a suit, which one commentator has described as “laughable” (Jaffer 2025). Trump’s suit was over Meta excluding him from Facebook after rioters, egged on by Trump, sought to stop certification of the presidential election at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, whose owners had financial interests tied to possible presidential actions, both canceled their papers’ endorsements of Harris in the 2024 election in what some viewed as an attempt to curry favor with the administration.
In the meantime, Trump is suing the Des Moines Register, which is owned by Gannett, for inaccurately forecasting the results of the 2024 presidential election.
After the Associated Press refused to change its stylebook to designate what had been known as the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Trump denied its members access to key White House venues.
In a move against which the District Court for the District of Columbia has issued a preliminary injunction, the Trump Administration has also attempted to dismantle the United States Agency for Global Media, which is responsible for the Voice of America and broadcasts news into nations that do not have a strong free press.
Pam Bondi rescinds policy against searching journalist phones
Many administrations have been plagued by leaks from inside the government, which often provide the basis of journalistic exposes of governmental wrongdoing. Leaks to the press were extremely important during the Watergate investigation that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
After it was revealed that the Justice Department had sought phone records from CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times both in Trump’s first administration and in his own, President Joe Biden announced that the Justice Department would no longer search the phone records of journalists who had published leaked information.
His attorney general Merrick Garland observed that “Because freedom of the press requires that members of the news media have the freedom to investigate and report the news, the new regulations are intended to provide enhanced protection to members of the news media from certain law enforcement tools and actions that might unreasonably impair newsgathering” (Barrett 2022).
At the time of Garland’s announcement, Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, observed that this represented “a historic shift in protecting the rights of news organizations reporting on stories of critical public importance” (Barrett (2022).
On April 25, 2025, Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Biden’s order in a memorandum entitled “Updated Policy Regarding Obtaining Information From, or Records of, Members of the News Media” in which she indicated that “safeguarding classified, privileged, and other sensitive information is essential to effective governance and law enforcement.”
Although her assurances hardly satisfied the press, she did indicate that her department would only search reporters’ conversations as a last resort and that she would have to approve all measures to either question or arrest journalists (Stein and Roebuck 2025).
Bondi’s announcement came at a time when aides to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been fired after an inquiry into leaks that indicated that he had shared information about a pending military action over an unsecured phone line.
Dangers to First Amendment freedoms and a chilling effect
Referring to media concessions to the Trump Administration, Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, observes that “each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend. They create precedents—not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless—that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. They also damage the media institutions’ prestige and credibility (2025).
Many of these cases resemble frivolous SLAPP suits, which are more designed to deter criticism than to secure monetary judgments. Like a number of executive orders that Trump has issued affecting law firms and colleges and universities, they exert a strong chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights.
Others might see Trump’s efforts as a form of “patrimonialism,” which commentator David Brooks, relying in an article by Jonathan Rauch, describes as “the attempt to turn the government into a family business” demanding personal loyalty and furthering its power through political corruption (Schlueter 2025).
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.