HALIFAX—A wise person watching my career once gave me some sound—if ominous—advice: if you tell the truth, keep your horse saddled. 

Governments and major institutions, including the church, don’t like criticism, let alone deep exposés that bite.  

Perhaps it’s because I have been shot off my horse once or twice for speaking up that I feel such distress over what is happening just across our undefended border with the United States.

There is a wildfire burning out of control in America, and it isn’t only on the land. It is raging in the highest corridors of power, threatening to engulf institutions fundamental to the survival of democracy. President Donald Trump has set a blaze of profound constitutional combustibility with his relentless attacks on free speech. He has put a match to the First Amendment.

One by one, individual by individual, and institution by institution, the man who once promised to protect free speech is systematically burning it down.

If anyone thinks that view is progressive hyperbole, they should reflect on Trump’s record. Here are just a few of his media lowlights:

As president, Trump has defunded both the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio, (NPR), accusing them off promoting a left-agenda.  

Trump has sued The New York Times, which is generally considered one of the greatest newspapers in the world. But in his $15-billion lawsuit, the president called the paper “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the history of our country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the radical left Democratic Party…”  

It is notable that Trump’s defamation suit against The New York Times is itself defamatory. There is no specific claim of libel against him contained in the suit, just a baseless, potentially damaging rant against the paper.  

Trump also sued The Washington Post, the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down then-president Richard Nixon.  

Trump’s $10-billion suit against The Washington Post is based on a story the newspaper published about a lewd card Trump allegedly signed and sent to convicted child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The card was allegedly sent on the occasion of the now deceased felon’s 50th birthday. Despite Trump’s claim that he never sent the greeting, the card subsequently showed up with his signature on it in subpoenaed Epstein files.

Trump also sued ABC news and one of its hosts, George Stephanopoulos, after the network reported that Trump had been convicted of “rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. Trump’s claim was that he was not convicted of rape, but “sexual abuse.”

After CBS ran an edited interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Trump sued Sixty Minutes. He alleged that the show had made changes to the interview to allegedly make Harris look more coherent.  

To its everlasting shame, Paramount settled its lawsuit by paying Trump multi-million-dollar settlements, rather than standing up for free speech in court. And that is despite the fact that U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that the media has the right to be wrong in order to protect robust debate on public affairs.  

The sad fact is that the decision to cave in to Trump’s bullying attempts to sculpt media coverage of his presidency was made by ownership, not journalists. In fact, a CBS News president and the executive producer of Sixty Minutes resigned over the $16-million settlement with Trump.

As reported by Robert Reich, CBS also agreed to hire an ombudsman, ostensibly to police the network for bias. The hire of Kenneth R. Weinstein is itself an exercise in bias. Weinstein was the former CEO of the right-leaning Hudson institute. 

ABC made the same choice: to pay off the president, rather stand up in court for its journalists and free speech. It gave Trump $15-million for his presidential library, and another million for his legal team.  

Trump celebrated these settlements as “vindication” of his war on free speech, and even referred to other TV hosts he would like to see fired.  

What these settlements actually mean is that from an ownership’s perspective, it is a poor strategy to fight a lawsuit that is brought by the president of the United States. Even if you win in court, there are so many other ways POTUS has to get even. From a strict business post of view, it is better to pay and move on rather than fight.

Trump’s success in cowing media owners has emboldened him. His attempt to rein in free-speech critical of him has now reached into late-night comedy. Comedian and Trump critic Stephen Colbert, who was dumped from CBS, now has some company on the sidelines of unemployed funnymen.

Late-night comedy icon Jimmy Kimmel has been suspended indefinitely, and his show taken off the air. ABC made the decision after comments Kimmel made relating to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.  

Kimmel made two observations about the ghastly shooting, both true. He said that MAGA forces were doing everything in their power to take political advantage of the Kirk tragedy, pushing the line that leftist rhetoric motivated the shooter.  

But his real sin—the one that likely led to his demise—was a joke he made about Trump. Kimmel showed a clip of a reporter asking Trump how he was personally coping with Kirk’s murder.  

The president gave a curt answer, “doing good.” He then immediately directed the reporter’s attention to work that was beginning on his latest building project, a ballroom for the White House. Kimmel quipped that Trump had entered the forth stage of grief: construction.  

Whether you think that’s witty or tasteless is a subjective call everyone gets to make for themselves. But the First Amendment gives Kimmel the absolute right to say it. One of the hallmarks of American democracy is that all speech is protected.  

At least it has been up until now. One of the reasons that ABC sidelined Kimmel is direct threats from the Trump government.  

The head of the Federal Communications Commission publicly said that the offending Kimmel monologue could be dealt with in one of two ways. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr said publicly.  

The easy way, presumably, would be for the network to deal with Kimmel. The hard way would be for the government to flex its regulatory muscles and take action on the free speech file. 

Here’s how Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security put it: “We are once again calling on the media and the far left to stop the hateful rhetoric directed at President Trump and those who support him….”

Former U.S. president and founding father James Madison, and civil rights advocate Frederick Douglass must be spinning in their graves.

Trump has cast his net so wide that it now includes an attack on late-night comics.  

Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist.

The Hill Times

 

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