Why the White House Attack on A.P. Matters
At first glance, the effort to ban the Associated Press from the Oval Office may seem a silly, low-stakes, Beltway kerfuffle. A veteran foreign correspondent explains that It's far more than that.
By Dan Perry Mediaite
It begins with lies and ends with eliminating the truth-tellers. Authoritarians thrive not by persuading a majority, but by confusing it. By overwhelming the public with contradictions, distortions, and doubt, would-be strongmen don’t need to win the argument.
They just need to break the scoreboard.
That’s why Donald Trump attacks the independent media – as he is doing again by boycotting the Associated Press in violation of a court order. Much-maligned and already struggling, with the news media there is no shared narrative – and the AP is the beating heart of American journalism.
In that chaos that results, power becomes hard to challenge because facts become fuzzy in the absence of the institution that exists to establish and communicate facts.
So this is not just about silencing dissent but reshaping reality.
Most people don’t even have time, much less the training, to parse legislation or verify statistics. For this to work there needs to be some faith in trained professionals to report, contextualize and explain.
Undermine those intermediaries and fog descends. That’s what Trump and his other authoritarians and wannabe-dictators seek.
Media to propaganda. And this is not a recent invention by the new crop of conmen but a playbook written by fascists a century ago. Long before “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” became MAGA rallying cries, Benito Mussolini was weaponizing the media.
Mussolini first rose through establishing a fascist newspaper called Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”) which became the official voice of the Fascist movement; after he rose to power he turned all of Italy’s media into a propaganda arm of the state, his government dictating what could be published, aired, or filmed.
Newspapers were muzzled unless they praised the regime. Even photos of Il Duce were filtered to erase signs of aging or weakness, and the regime enforced strict loyalty with slogans like “Il Duce ha sempre ragione” — The Leader is Always Right.
His strongman image was built on lies, censorship, and the illusion of invincibility. The press was either silenced or bought off. Soon, Adolf Hitler was doing the same in Germany.
How it’s done in a democracy. This is easier in a dictatorship, of course. If the goal is to maintain the pretense of democracy — or at least the holding of elections, which is only one part of a democracy — you have to persuade enough people that the media is bad. To discredit the very service that they used to depend on for information.
This is why Trump won’t shut up about “the fake news” and declares the media the “enemy of the people,” a phrase borrowed from Stalinist Russia.
That’s why his stooges actually speak of “alternative facts.” That’s why characters like Elon Musk will try to present the news media as “elites” pursuing some dark agenda to silence the valiant voices of the ordinary citizen (on social media, of course).
In order not to scare off the public, elected authoritarians don’t crush the media in one blow but erode it in stages. The playbook is familiar and consistent:
Undermine Public Trust. They deploy systematic messaging aiming to present the media not as a fair arbiter of all sides in a political landscape, but as a side. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu blames “leftist media elites.” Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan equates journalists with terrorists. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán decries “globalist influence.” The nefarious thing is that this is a self-fulfilling truth, because the constant lying does create a bias to calling out the lies. When the truth itself is a political position, the guardians of that truth become political.
Next comes legal warfare. Strategic lawsuits — libel, defamation, slander — are used to harass and exhaust. In Poland, the “Law and Justice” party’s government launched hundreds of suits against independent outlets. In Turkey, charges like “insulting the president” have become routine. Netanyahu last month sued a former official who hinted at possessing damaging information. The message is clear: Report at your own risk. If the court system has already been politicized, this is all the easier.
Specifically, codify censorship. Trump repeatedly called to change U.S. libel laws to make suing journalists easier. Turkey’s “media laws” criminalize “disinformation.” Russia’s “foreign agents” law shuttered independent newsrooms. Hungary imposed government control over editorial content. Netanyahu’s judicial reform push would give his coalition unchecked authority, making censorship easy to impose — and impossible to contest.
Buy up what you can. What censorship doesn’t reach, consolidation will. Orbán’s allies built a pro-government conglomerate by buying up hundreds of outlets and funneling state ads their way. Poland’s state oil company acquired regional newspapers. Netanyahu has long been accused of offering favors to media moguls. Trump allies like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch now control some of the most powerful narrative engines in the West. Vladimir Putin’s cronies control much of the media in Russia, allowing him to suppress dissenting voices and shape public opinion, particularly on issues like the war in Ukraine, domestic opposition, and Western policies; in return, in this vicious cycle of corruption, the authoritarian keeps them ever richer.
Lastly, intimidation — and worse. This is the final, darkest phase. In Russia, journalists have been harassed, poisoned, or killed – heroes like Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Khashoggi was butchered in a consulate in Turkey. Even in democracies, reporters face surveillance, smear campaigns, and threats. Trump has publicly fantasized about jailing journalists. This line has not been crossed in the U.S. — but the rhetoric has paved the way.
The modern twist on this is social media – what we have described on these pages as the “Tyranny of the Feed.” Platforms like TikTok, X, and YouTube use algorithms designed to maximize outrage — not truth.
Lies travel farther than facts. Nuance is buried beneath noise. Autocrats and their social media enablers defend this on grounds of free speech — but the goal is freedom to deploy algorithms designed to make us stupid. The journalistic media – with its standards and ethics and mission to seek the truth – is the enemy.
Tariffs and tax cuts. Once the free media is muzzled and all you have is social media, you can get away with aggressively presented lies.
For example, you can take tariffs, which are self-inflicted price hikes on US consumers, and trot out White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to insist with a straight face that they are a “tax cut” for the American people.
With the media muzzled, you are pretty much free to carry out a war on expertise and education, to make sure no one who tries to call out the lies is amplified.
In this worldview, scientists, professors, economists, and journalists aren’t guides to truth — they’re elitist enemies of the people. Expertise is mocked, and schools are accused of indoctrination.
With both media muzzled, you can rob the people blind.
If the judiciary tries to hold you to account, you deploy the Witch Hunt Playbook, where every investigation is branded as politically motivated. Trump, Netanyahu, and their ilk recast legitimate corruption probes as persecution, rendering accountability a partisan fiction.
In this way, the authoritarians can rob you blind and can take away basic rights, and there is no one to protect you. With social media by your side, with the remaining press loyalist, you can defang the judiciary and arrest the judges. That’s what Erdoğan did in Turkey.
Erdoğan and Orban still manage to get elected (in the former’s case barely), but the elections are suspect, and the environment is poisoned.
Democracy isn’t just about ballots. It’s about informed ballots – people who know their rights and are aware of the facts. If voters can’t trust information, their choices are compromised — and freedom is meaningless.
The assault on the press is not about protecting people from lies. It’s about ensuring they can’t tell what the lies are.
When Trump demanded the Associated Press call it the “Gulf of America” or lose Oval Office access, it wasn’t about geography — it was a shakedown to enforce loyalty and acquiescence. The agency could not comply. It should not comply.
Today, such things may seem like a bit of a joke. Tomorrow, compromises may be made to get through the day in peace. One day after that, well, this is just the way it is, and we no longer remember the time when we were free.
History offers hope. In the face of both fascism and communism, resistance grew and prevailed. Today, too, people are organizing.
But we must be clear-eyed about what we’re resisting. This is not mere politics. It is an assault on reality — with a century-old blueprint. And the free media? It is not the enemy of the people. It’s also not the friend of the people.
It is the people.
Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe/Africa editor and Cairo-based Middle East editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. He is a widely published columnist and TV commentator. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
Image: Free Speech Center, Middle Tennessee State University.