We are two weeks into President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice against Iran, and the president is already suggesting his administration should shut down news outlets for producing critical reports — or even consider treason charges based on spurious claims of collusion with America’s enemies.

Though U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully bombed a wide array of Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has followed through with its strategic doctrine by closing the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down a major channel for the global energy and fertilizer trades.

As a result, Trump is begging/demanding foreign navies bail him out by sending ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, deploying additional troops and ships to the region for unknown reasons, lifting sanctions on Russia in hopes of lowering the price of oil, denying reports that a Pentagon investigation preliminarily found the U.S. military accidentally incinerated scores of Iranian schoolchildren with an errant missile — and railing against the American press for refusing to report that the war is going well.

Meanwhile, Trump’s hand-picked Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, is signaling to broadcast stations that they will face regulatory retribution if they don’t “correct course."

It’s all part of the authoritarian playbook Trump wields against news outlets that produce anything less than Fox News-style propaganda. The protections of the First Amendment ensure that those outlets could likely prevail in court — but fighting is expensive, and over the course of Trump’s second term so far, the corporate moguls who control them have proven unnervingly unwilling to do so.

Trump rails against press, demands government retribution

Last week, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly bemoaned that the network’s coverage is offering lockstep support for Trump’s Iranian “excursion.”

“Now it's, you cheerlead the war, support the military industrial complex, or … you're a loser,” she said on her podcast. “It's infuriating because we're talking about life and death. We're talking about American life or death. And this is a dereliction of duty.”

As Kelly suggests, when Trump turns his television to Fox, he is getting unhinged validation of his efforts. But the president is not satisfied with that. He wants every American news outlet producing the same Fox-style war propaganda.

Trump used what he baselessly described as “an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media” to denounce the press in a Saturday morning Truth Social post.“The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife 'Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War,” he wrote. “Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.”

In another post on Sunday evening, the president baselessly claimed that Iran had been “working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” to promote a fake, AI-generated video depicting a U.S. ship burning in the Persian Gulf.

“The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Trump posted. “The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they ‘win’ are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets.”

(In reality, responsible news outlets have been debunking that video, not distributing it, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.)

“It's pretty criminal because our media companies, who have no credibility whatsoever, are putting out information that they know is false, and it's a very dangerous thing for the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One later that night, “I think they could be in serious jeopardy."

Trump’s weekend anti-press binge followed coverage complaints from Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends weekend host who now heads the Pentagon, who used a press conference on Friday morning to gripe extensively about the banners he has seen on TV news coverage:

Yet some in this crew, in the press, just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines. I used to be in that business. And I know that everything is written intentionally.

For example, a banner or a headline: “Mideast war intensifies,” splashing on the screen the last couple of days, alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit, because that's what they do. What should the banner read instead?

How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. They know it and so do you, if it can be admitted.

Hegseth posited that an “actual patriotic press” would produce such coverage. He also decried a CNN report detailing how the Trump administration “failed to fully account for the potential consequences” of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he commented, referencing a Trump ally’s effort to take over CNN’s parent company with the help of the administration.

With Carr, a cause for alarm

It is disturbing enough that the president of the United States is a deranged authoritarian who responds to a faltering war by ranting about its coverage. But what makes it worse is that his administration is filled with apparatchicks eager to carry out his demands for retribution.

Carr, who was reportedly with the president at his Mar-A-Lago club over the weekend, responded to Trump’s initial post complaining about journalists who “actually want us to lose the War” by threatening the licenses of broadcast stations that produce critical coverage.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."

Carr was nonspecific about how broadcasters could avoid reprisal (and Trump had lashed out at newspapers, not broadcast networks, in his post), but he’s a hack who is typically willing to carry Trump’s water no matter how absurd the underlying complaint may be.

Trump signaled his approval for Carr’s threats in his Sunday evening “TREASON” post, writing, “I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations."

Stelter, in an extensive report drawing on comments from First Amendment lawyers, notes that Carr “has very little power to follow through” and that television stations, if they are willing to fight such attempted reprisals in court, “are not at serious risk of being banned."

“Any government action against a licensee would cause a protracted legal battle, even more so given the current media-bashing climate, because a station would likely cite Trump’s retributive streak and mount a First Amendment case,” Stelter wrote.

There is a strong argument that stations would be victorious if they fought Carr’s attempts to strip their licenses. But there were also strong arguments that ABC News and CBS News would be victorious if they fought the lawsuits Trump filed over their coverage in 2024. The problem was that rather than going to court on behalf of a free press, Disney and Paramount, their parent companies, decided it was in the interest of their broader business holdings to fold.

The advantage Trump and Carr have in their fight to cudgel the press into line is that it can be very expensive to fight the federal government on behalf of the First Amendment — and what the last year shows is that many people who own or control news outlets don’t care enough about such principles to do it. And Disney and Paramount had much deeper pockets to pay lawyers than an individual local broadcast news station does. Even Sinclair Broadcast Network, which owns or operates nearly 200 stations across the country, has a market cap of around $1 billion, compared to roughly $175 billion for Disney.

If Carr threatens the licenses of Sinclair stations, are its pro-Trump owners really going to go to the mat for the free press rather than using his complaints as an opportunity to push coverage even further to the right?

It’s also worth taking seriously Trump’s threats of treason charges against news outlets. The Justice Department is now staffed by loyalists like former Fox host Jeanine Pirro who are willing to follow through on his demands for political prosecutions. Those efforts keep failing — but they raise the cost of dissent and thus chill free speech.

And that’s what the president wants, as Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt made clear when she channeled him on Monday morning.

“The president has said enough with this coverage from other networks that are not telling you the truth, that are so negative about what’s going on,” she said. “This is a pro-America fight, and every network needs to get on board with that."

And if they aren’t, there will be consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters