15.4: The Adversarial Press

Exchanges between the news media and the government are often contentious and occasionally outright hostile. Reporters aggressively interrogate politicians in an attempt to trap them in contradictions, and politicians brusquely refuse to comment or question reporters’ professionalism or integrity. Journalists seem to delight in pouncing on scandals and exposing the details for the world to see, and politicians relish when their journalistic foes get caught making embarrassing factual errors and are forced to eat crow. (Sometimes this animosity gets physical: the current Governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, once body-slammed a reporter the day before an election.)

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki takes questions from reporters during a White House daily briefing.

It can be challenging to interpret the way politicians and journalists get along — or fail to get along — as anything resembling a healthy relationship. But this tension, like many other seemingly dysfunctional aspects of American politics, is mostly by design. The freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment was put there because the Founders recognized the need for media to be a formidable adversary to government, capable of holding it accountable by asking tough questions and getting on politicians’ nerves (though they probably weren’t thinking of body slams at the time). Thomas Jefferson underscored the importance of the media when he wrote, “[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

The United States has long been one of world’s strongest bastions of press freedoms. With very few exceptions (such as military secrets which could endanger the lives of Americans if published), information is not subject to prior restraint, meaning the government cannot prevent its publication. News organizations may face lawsuits if they publish false information that damages someone’s reputation (which is called libel when published in print and slander otherwise). However, slander and libel laws are notoriously loose in the United States, particularly when public figures are involved, giving American media considerable leeway to report what they want, how they want.

Americans have a long history of not taking kindly to attempts by the government to limit freedom of the press. The Sedition Act of 1798, which restricted the ability of newspapers to criticize the government, was so widely reviled by the public that it contributed to President John Adams’s failed reelection bid and the collapse of his Federalist Party, which had supported the law.

A crucial component of the American news media’s ability to check the government is its private nature. Though some news organizations, including NPR and the Voice of America, are wholly or partly dependent on government funding, most are owned and operated by private individuals or corporations. This privatization contrasts starkly with many other countries, particularly in Europe, where publicly-owned news organizations make up a much larger share of the media environment. Proponents of private media argue that public ownership and oversight make media less of a “watchdog,” capable of alerting the public to government corruption and misdeeds, and more of a “lapdog,” beholden to the government’s whims. Although some countries (such as Denmark, South Korea, and the United Kingdom) do a decent job of holding politicians accountable while relying heavily on public media, others (such as Hungary, Iran, and North Korea) clearly suffer from a lack of privatization and media independence.

Media privatization, however, is not a panacea. Privately owned news organizations may be better equipped to criticize government due to their lack of dependence on public funding, but this also means they must rely on other sources of revenue to stay in operation. This revenue often takes the form of advertising and subscriptions, which can make private media less willing to cover stories in ways that might displease their advertisers or subscribers.

The extent to which private media are influenced by their owners’ predilections also raises concerns. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013 led to speculation that his ownership might dissuade the Post from reporting negative information about Amazon’s business practices. When former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched his presidential campaign in 2019, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News — a company founded and still owned by its namesake — instructed his reporters not to investigate Bloomberg or any of his Democratic opponents (but to continue investigating President Donald Trump). Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022 brought major and controversial changes to the platform’s policies for content moderation and account verification, prompting questions about whether Musk was saving Twitter or sabotaging it. These and other incidents demonstrate the potential for conflicts of interest to influence private as well as public reportage.