15.5: 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. Politicians brusquely refuse to comment or question reporters’ professionalism or integrity. Reporters delight in exposing scandals for the world to see. Politicians relish when their journalistic foes make embarrassing errors and are forced to eat crow. (Sometimes this animosity gets physical: Montana Governor Greg Gianforte once body-slammed a reporter the day before an election.)

It can be challenging to see this relationship between politicians and reporters as a healthy one. But this tension, like many other seemingly dysfunctional aspects of American politics, is mostly by design. The freedom of the press was enshrined in the First Amendment because the Founders recognized that media had to be a formidable adversary to government. It had to be capable of holding politicians accountable by asking tough questions and getting on their nerves (if not goading them into body slams). 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 freedom. With very few exceptions (such as military secrets which could endanger the lives of Americans if published), information is not subject to prior restraint: the government cannot prevent its publication. Post-publication, news outlets may be used for publishing false information that damages someone’s reputation (which is called libel when published in print and slander otherwise). However, libel and slander laws are notoriously loose in the United States, particularly when public figures are involved. This gives 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 newspapers’ ability 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.

White House Press Secretary Karine JeanPierre prepares to take questions from reporters during a White House daily briefing in 2024.

A crucial component of the American news media’s ability to check the government is its private nature. A few news outlets, including National Public Radio and the Voice of America, depend wholly or partly on government funding, but most are owned and operated by private individuals or corporations. This privatization contrasts starkly with much of Europe, where public media make up a large share of the media ecosystem. Proponents of private media argue that public ownership and makes 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 public media effectively hold politicians accountable in some countries (such as Denmark, South Korea, and the United Kingdom), other countries (such as Hungary, Iran, and North Korea) clearly suffer from a lack of privatization and media independence.

Yet media privatization is not a panacea. Private media may be freer 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 can be influenced by their owners also raises concerns. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 led to speculation that he might dissuade it from reporting negatively on Amazon’s business practices. When 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 primary opponents. In 2022, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (which he renamed X) brought controversial changes to the platform. When Musk became a major player in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, some worried his ownership of X would prompt the platform to limit political expression. These and other incidents demonstrate the potential for conflicts of interest to influence private media.