The larger American establishment's ongoing surrender to Trump and his fascist regime is a story with many high-profile cowards, culprits, and collaborators. But given the frequently self-declared role of American media to speak truth to power, and protect our "democracy," I think it's entirely fair that corporate news outlets paving the way for Downmarket Mussolini to install a fascist dictatorship come in for extra vigorous criticism by honest observers who understand what they're doing. Take for example this recent piece for the Intercept by Natasha Leonard, examining how corporate media outlets reported the Department of Justice's outrageous plans to prosecute Democratic Congresswoman LaMonica McIver on wholly fabricated assault charges, after she attempted to conduct legal oversight on a privately-run ICE facility in her district.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/20/trump-prosecuting-democrat-mciver-ice-media/

Trump Is Prosecuting a Congressional Democrat for Doing Her Job. The Media’s Response: No Big Deal.

“Democratic Rep. McIver charged with assault after skirmish at ICE center, New Jersey prosecutor says,” The Associated Press reported. “Rep. LaMonica McIver charged by DOJ over incident with ICE agents,” read the ABC News headline. “The Justice Department charged a New Jersey congresswoman with assaulting federal agents during a clash outside a Newark immigration detention center,” began the New York Times’s coverage.

All of these are technically accurate: Alina Habba, Trump’s sometime personal lawyer and the interim federal prosecutor for New Jersey, announced on X that the administration was charging the member of Congress with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” after an incident when McIver and two other House members went to view ICE’s privately run Delaney Hall detention facility.

News organizations should, however, have long ago stopped affording the Trump administration such credulous coverage. Even the most bare-bones, facts-only reporting here fails the basic task of truth-telling if it doesn’t lead by pointing out that these charges are manufactured, malicious, politically motivated attacks."

I've written a bit about both the (now dropped) charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and the pending charges against Congresswoman McIver so I won't rehash all the details here again; needless to say I agree wholeheartedly with Leonard's assertion that the charges against McIver are trumped up fascist nonsense, a clear case of attempted political intimidation, and part of a seemingly racist pattern of targeting its political opponents with the Justice Department, by the Trump administration. Furthermore, given that the incident that motivated interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba to file assault charges that each carry a maximum sentence of eight years was captured entirely on video, I don't think it is at all reasonable to pretend the Trump regime might have a point, or that this is a "she said, they said" kind of issue. Yet as Leonard documents, that's exactly how subservient media reported not only the story of McIver's targeting, but also the attempted prosecution of Baraka as well.

Look folks, this isn't a question of partisan political coverage; I'm no friend of the Democratic Party, and based on the significant quantity of her writing I've read, I'd be willing to bet neither is Leonard. There is something fundamentally wrong, and actively dangerous, about a US corporate media complex that can watch a fascist, white nationalist, and openly nativist regime engage in a clear act of authoritarian political intimidation against its duly-elected political opposition, to protect a nightmare mass deportation scheme built on legal arguments you know are extremely dubious, and report it as a "clash" while accepting Alina Habba of all people's arguments at face value. This isn't bad journalism, this is paving the way for the fascist repression of Trump's political opponents in real time and whether its a result of cowardice, or open collaboration, is absolutely fucking irrelevant. The United States is speedrunning a descent into a fascist dictatorship run by a brainwormed septuagenarian racist and his openly white nationalist toady Stephen Miller, and these chucklefucks are out here pretending just maybe a Congresswoman should do a couple decades of hard time for bumping into an ICE murderpig while literally being prevented from doing her job; even though we have the entire interaction on fucking video.

If this is the kind of coverage corporate media outlets intend to provide during the second Trump administration, then Downmarket Mussolini doesn't need to suppress the media. After all, they're already happy to work for him and his fascist agenda right now, and Der Leader is rather busy tearing what passes for American democracy apart as we speak.

I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.

None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.

Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:

https://archive.ph/qR6tf

NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It

"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."

Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.

You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hysterically pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.

I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticism them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.

A lot of things have changed, mostly for the worst, between the first and second Trump presidency. For example, during our first dance with assclown fascism under Downmarket Mussolini, American corporate media made a massive show of "opposing" Trump; despite the fact that I (and many other observers) pointed out that their coverage of the administration typically benefitted the regime more often than it hurt them, and the class solidarity inherent to corporate media outlets often resulted in them covering up for the wealthy donors and supporters that propped up Trump's administration until the precise moment it became clear he wasn't going to win a second term in 2020. The story has been quite different here in the second Trump era however; as this Guardian article notes, despite Trump's threats and smears towards the media, corporate outlets like WaPo, LA Times, and now CBS have willingly collaborated with Trump's fascist regime and agenda. What changed? As it turns out, the whims and financial motivations of billionaire reactionaries who own corporate media companies.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/11/trump-media-journalists-60-minutes

Trump complains the US media aren’t bending to his will. Aren’t they?

"Despite that acquiescence, Trump has continued to threaten journalists, branding pollsters “negative criminals” who “should be investigated for election fraud”. In April, he attacked “radical lunatic Democrats and their comrades in the fake news media”, adding: “Those lying to the American People on behalf of violent criminals have to be held responsible by the Agencies and the Courts.”

The attacks overlook the ways in which some outlets have submitted to Trump’s will – either by executives settling frivolous lawsuits or wealthy owners interfering to avoid upsetting Trump.

Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post owner, ordered an overhaul to the paper’s editorial pages in February that effectively muzzled the newspaper’s criticism of Trump. The Los Angeles Times dropped its endorsement of Kamala Harris under pressure from Patrick Soon-Shiong, its billionaire owner.

In December, ABC News settled a Trump lawsuit, in a move first amendment experts said could foster more attacks on the media. And in another blow, the owner of CBS News is said to be considering settling a $10bn lawsuit brought against the network over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview."

Folks, this is a story about greed and cowardice and that's not just my opinion. Trump isn't right, and the activities he's undertaking to cow the American media, be they government investigations or frivolous lawsuits, have no basis in the law. If folks like Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Shari Redstone wanted to fight this, they'd win. Since surrendering and collaborating is more profitable to these billionaire leeches however, they're directing their media companies to roll over. Furthermore, the cost of this collaboration with fascism goes far beyond the mitigation of Trump criticism in our media environment; with billionaire media barons kissing his ring, and corporate outlets scrambling to settle his obscenely conspiratorial lawsuits based on open lies, the Kelpto Kaiser will now argue that he's been right about the media all along and that justifies further cracking down on the so-called "free press" in America. Collaborating with fascism, will merely breed more fascism; not that any of these rich reactionaries who own media companies seem to give a shit at all.

As someone who engages in a lot of media criticism and analysis, I can't say any of this is surprising to me; if anything, corporate media's outward posture of hostility towards Trump at points during his first administration is the historical aberration here. For profit media in America has always consistently sided with power and the state; after all the same class of people who own corporate media companies, also own most of the country. Just because we can easily predict class solidarity and billionaire ownership rolling over for fascism however, doesn't change the horrifying reality of what's going on here; nobody is handing out Pulitzer's here, but both WaPo and the LA Times did some excellent critical reporting during the first Trump regime and have been nowhere as effective here in Der Leader's second term. This is a big win for the Kelpto Kaiser; which makes it a devastating loss for all of us who don't want the fascists to win.