Kenneth Glad
Public trust has been strained by years of conflict, suspicion and political pressure. The deeper question is who gains when accountability is recast as partisan attack.
The charge of a “liberal media” has become so familiar in American politics that it is often treated as mere fact rather than argument. It appears after hostile interviews, damaging investigations and unfavorable election coverage, usually as a way to shift attention from what was reported to who reported it.
That framing did not emerge by accident. It was built over decades by conservative activists, publishers and politicians who understood that attacking the credibility of the press could be as powerful as answering its questions.
Donald Trump did not invent the claim that American journalism is controlled by liberals. He just inherited a political weapon that conservatives had spent generations refining.
Historian Nicole Hemmer wrote in The Atlantic in 2014 that right-wing media activists were developing the “liberal bias” argument long before Fox News became a cable power.
Publications such as Human Events and conservative publishers including Regnery promoted the idea that mainstream journalism’s claim to neutrality concealed a liberal worldview.
That argument became sharper in the 1950s and 1960s, when conservative media figures insisted they were not abandoning facts by taking sides. They claimed they could be objective while openly advancing conservative values.
That distinction allowed partisan media to present itself as a corrective to a supposedly biased establishment, rather than as an ideological project of its own.
Fairness became a battlefield
The Fairness Doctrine became central because it required broadcasters covering controversial public issues to provide room for contrasting views.
Many conservatives saw the policy differently. They argued that mainstream news was already liberal, which meant conservative programming was not the imbalance. It was the response.
As Hemmer explained in The Atlantic, this disagreement helped turn a regulatory dispute into a broader theory of media power.
Conservatives increasingly treated federal oversight, network news and liberal politics as parts of the same system.
By the time Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election, the accusation had become a political explanation. His supporters argued that hostile coverage had helped defeat him, and “media bias” became a lasting Republican grievance.
Nixon took it national
Richard Nixon’s White House brought the charge into the center of national politics.
Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked television news leaders as an unelected elite shaping public opinion from New York and Washington. The point was not only to criticize reporters. It was to weaken trust in institutions that could challenge the administration.
Hemmer also noted that Edith Efron’s The News Twisters became influential because it appeared to quantify bias in network election coverage.
According to Hemmer’s analysis, Efron’s conclusions rested on a highly subjective process. While she counted thousands of words from network broadcasts, she alone determined which statements were positive and which were negative.
Critics argued that such classifications could easily reflect the researcher’s own political assumptions.
Nevertheless, the study became influential because it wrapped accusations of liberal bias in the language of statistics, allowing conservatives to present a political argument as an empirical finding.
The book basically gave the argument a harder edge. Numbers, tables and percentages made a political accusation look like a settled finding.
Trump made punishment the point
Trump took that inherited grievance and made it more direct. Earlier conservatives talked about balance. Trump talks about consequences for coverage he dislikes.
According to CBS News, Trump said in December 2025 that broadcast licenses should be terminated if network news and late-night shows were “almost 100% Negative” toward him, MAGA and Republicans.
The same report noted, however, that the FCC says broadcasters, not the government, choose what they air, and that the First Amendment and Communications Act restrict FCC censorship.
That is a major escalation from the older conservative complaint. The issue is no longer simply whether the press is fair. Trump’s version asks whether unfavorable coverage should be treated as illegitimate.
According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, Trump’s legal pressure on the press has become a sustained strategy rather than an occasional reaction. The tracker, a project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, began a dedicated effort to follow lawsuits Trump files against journalists and news organizations as president-elect and president.
Lawsuits became a weapon
The cases show a recurring pattern. Trump has targeted outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, the BBC, The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, often demanding enormous damages and framing unfavorable reporting as defamation, consumer fraud or even election interference.
One example came in September 2025, when Trump filed a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times, several journalists and Penguin Random House over coverage and books he described as false and malicious.
Four days later, a federal judge dismissed the complaint as improper, writing that a lawsuit is not “a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.” Trump later filed an amended complaint.
The tracker also documented Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on alleged Jeffrey Epstein birthday letters. A federal judge dismissed the original complaint in April, finding Trump had not shown that the paper and its reporters acted with actual malice. Trump then filed an amended suit in may.
CBS became another major example. Trump sued over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and Paramount, CBS News’ parent company, later agreed to pay $16 million.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez criticized the settlement, saying Paramount had chosen “a payout” instead of standing on principle and warning that the decision set a dangerous First Amendment precedent.
Together, these lawsuits illustrate how the “liberal media” accusation now operates beyond rhetoric. Even when courts dismiss claims or outlets call them meritless, the litigation can impose costs, create pressure and send a warning to other news organizations that aggressive reporting may bring legal retaliation.
Ownership tells another story
The claim of a left-wing media establishment becomes weaker when ownership is examined.
Fox News and The Wall Street Journal sit inside Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, while the Los Angeles Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. CNN is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, and CBS is controlled by Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison.
Major online platforms where Americans encounter news are also controlled or dominated by figures such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
That ownership map does not resemble a left-wing media monopoly. It shows a concentrated corporate system in which billionaires, conglomerates and merger-seeking executives often hold more power over journalism than the reporters accused of liberal bias.
Became a test case
CBS has long been held up by conservatives as part of the mainstream media they describe as liberal. But its recent direction shows how misleading that framing can be.
In October 2025, Paramount announced that it had acquired The Free Press and that Bari Weiss would become editor-in-chief of CBS News.
The change did not come from reporters inside the newsroom demanding a left-wing agenda. It came from ownership.
That is the larger point. The public argument often focuses on the politics of journalists, while the most consequential decisions are made by executives, owners and investors above them.
Consolidation raises the stakes
The same pattern may soon become even larger.
On June 9, 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a merger inquiry into Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, launching a formal review of whether the deal could substantially reduce competition in the British media market.
The Guardian reported in March that the proposed $110 billion deal would bring together major streaming services, television assets and Hollywood studios.
The transaction is not complete and still faces regulatory review. But it points toward a media future with fewer owners, larger conglomerates and more journalism tied to companies whose interests stretch far beyond news.
The newsroom is not where power ends
Trump’s achievement was not creating the anti-media story. It was turning it into a governing method.
- The accusation tells supporters to distrust damaging reporting before they see the evidence.
- It turns ordinary questions into signs of persecution.
- It gives corporate leaders a reason to avoid confrontation.
- It shifts attention away from the owners, investors and regulators who often matter more than individual reporters.
The result is a political culture where scrutiny is treated as hostility and accountability is framed as sabotage.
For decades, the public was told to fear liberal journalists with too much influence. The more urgent problem now is concentrated ownership, regulatory pressure and presidential retaliation shaping what journalism can survive.
Sources: The Atlantic, CNN, CBS News, U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, The Guardian, UK Competition and Markets Authority, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, Human Events, Reuters, NPR
