By Perry Bacon

Copyright newrepublic

ABC, CBS, the Journal and the Times are some of the largest and most prestigious journalism organizations in the country. A president going after them all amounts to declaring war on the free press. And it’s not just journalists. Stephen Colbert, host of the late night show on CBS, had his show canceled a few months ago. The network said it was a financial decision, but Colbert was a harsh critic of Trump. Now, with Kimmel also off the air at least temporarily, it’s hard to ignore the potential that comedians who slam the president nightly won’t be on the air for long.

And it’s not just Trump alone. Congressional Republicans joined in stripping funding from public media across the country. Elon Musk is suing the liberal group Media Matters, which closely scrutinizes conservatives. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, perhaps trying to curry favor with Trump, pushed out many of the paper’s left-leaning columnists, with Karen Attiah being fired last week over her social media posts about Kirk.

This is all very scary. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NPR and other outlets are still doing a lot of great investigative journalism that paints Trump in a bad light. The New York Times does great investigative work, too, like Monday’s scorcher on the Trumps and United Arab Emirates and multibillion-dollar crypto/AI chip deals, and it has some very anti-Trump columnists, such as the excellent Jamelle Bouie. But Trump, with his combination of regulatory power and lawsuits, is almost certainly making these big news outlets a bit more gun-shy about criticizing him. And I worry even more, potentially, about smaller outlets like this one and other valuable liberal magazines and websites that perhaps can’t spend millions of dollars to defend themselves from Trump’s lawsuits.