On anticipatory obedience and the media
Trump’s campaign against the Fourth Estate has been unfolding before our eyes—far more effectively than some in the press would like to believe.
In early 2017, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, an adviser to our organization, Protect Democracy, who’d spent roughly a decade living in Hungary during the rise of Viktor Orbán, offered us a warning: beware that the newly elected American president might copy Orbán’s autocratic technique of using the regulatory state to punish media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
Prime Minister Orbán did this to great effect. The barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment he directed at his media critics, coupled with orders that his government agencies direct public advertising dollars only to media sufficiently loyal to him, drove independent media from the field. Orbán didn’t neutralize the media overnight. It happened gradually and in plain sight.
We have examined Trump’s public statements, and put them together with the actions of the government and of media outlets over the past eight years, and we fear that, despite the conventional wisdom that American media independence survived the tests of Trump’s first term unscathed, developments in the years since he left office tell a different story. That story is that, like Orbán’s, Trump’s campaign against the media has taken time to have its intended effect, but have an effect it has, and the trajectory discernible now, in hindsight, doesn’t bode well for the media should Trump return to power.
