Trump has banned more media and started his own TV channel. In the process, he risks further eroding American democracy

Amid the tumult over US President Donald Trump’s latest assault on press freedom, it’s easy to lose sight of what exactly journalism is and why, when done well, it carries real weight.

Good journalism provides information that those in positions of power don’t want the public to know.

Yes, it’s important to recognise that beyond the president’s habitual bully-bluster schtick, the barring of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House violates the first amendment of the Constitution protecting press freedom. So outrageous is the ban that the three news outlets are suing to regain access to the White House, arguing the ban is unconstitutional.

And it’s heartening that the White House correspondents’ association has hit back by refusing to continue with the media pool operation in which one television network films events at the White House on behalf of all the networks.

At the same time Trump has launched Trump TV, a 24-hour YouTube channel that has already been a ratings flop.

It can’t be said too often that without a free press to report on how power operates in the United States, American democracy will be seriously eroded.

Media’s centrality to democracy

Equally important is to remind ourselves that without the work of journalists there is an awful lot that would be kept hidden from the public.

The leader of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage, only engaged in the bizarre stunt of resigning from parliament to contest a byelection for his seat because of journalists’ disclosures about large sums of undeclared money donated to him shortly before entering parliament in 2024.

Allegations that Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes in Afghanistan only became public because of the work of investigative journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie. They then successfully defended their reporting in a highly expensive defamation trial brought by Roberts-Smith.

So much of what we know about Trump, from the amount of money he has amassed since returning to the presidency in 2025 to his gold medal-level pettiness, comes from the work of journalists.

David Kirkpatrick’s article, “Trump’s profiteering hits $4 billion”, was published in The New Yorker on January 31 2026 while Mark Singer’s brilliantly withering profile, Trump & Me (2016), remains compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand Trump’s character.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book released earlier this year, Regime Change, contains numerous jaw-dropping revelations about the second Trump presidency. Yet the authors believe much more remains to be revealed.

These are recent examples. There are many earlier ones, but the passing of time has a way of smoothing over the circumstances by which we learn new information.

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, the then president, Harry Truman, did not tell the public how many people had been killed or how they had died.

A reliable figure for the number who perished was not provided until the following August, when The New Yorker published John Hersey’s epic article, “Hiroshima”.

It was an Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who a month after the bomb was dropped provided the first eyewitness account of its impact on the city and the alarming effect on those near the blast who had survived. What he called “the atomic plague” and was later confirmed to be radiation sickness was denied at the time by the US military.

No one denies the deadly effects of nuclear weapons today. But several months after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima (and three days later, Nagasaki), the head of the Manhattan project, General Leslie Groves, addressed a Senate committee on atomic energy. He said doctors assured him radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die”, according to Lesley Blume’s 2020 book, Fallout.

Many more revelatory examples can be found in the lists of the 20th century’s outstanding journalism in both the United States and Australia, compiled by journalism academics at New York University and RMIT respectively.

Of the three news outlets barred by Trump, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) is a left-leaning cable TV news outlet that consistently critiques the president’s actions. It has in the past cut away from Trump’s live broadcasts when it believes he is lying. It has continued to do this since being barred.

CNN is a centre-left cable TV news outlet whose chief White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, gets up Trump’s nose because she asks him hard questions and refuses to be intimidated by him.

After she won a journalism award in July, he asked her why she “never smiles”. This week he berated her for asking him questions as he arrived at the United Nations General Assembly. “You shouldn’t be here!” To which Collins replied, “The United Nations allowed us in, sir”

Politico is a primarily online political outlet that has covered Trump’s presidencies closely and diligently. The president said Politico had received an “illegal and ridiculous” US$8 million subscription from the government during Joe Biden’s presidency. Politico has said this is false and “has been thoroughly debunked”.

Some might say, as Vice President J. D. Vance has, that the president has every right to object to news outlets portraying him and his administration negatively. Apart from the blindingly obvious point that the media can’t be free if it isn’t free to criticise the president of the day, Trump’s conception of “fake news” is anything he doesn’t like or doesn’t agree with.

Accountability is key

Even Fox News, which has carried a veritable lake of water for Trump over the years, earns his ire if its presenters are anything but totally loyal to him.

Trump has had a love-hate relationship with the news media since the 1980s. Back then he was both a primary target and a prime source of The New York Post’s infamous Page Six gossip column, according to Haberman’s 2022 biography.

No US president has attacked the news media as virulently as Trump. And yet, he craves its attention, especially television, which was the most powerful medium when he was growing up and through which he achieved global fame/infamy.

There is a double irony here: television, through the reality program, The Apprentice, was a key driver in Trump becoming a nationally recognised name in the 2000s, but the influence of television as a medium is rapidly dwindling.

Trump’s response to the TV networks’ refusal to film events at the White House is to bring in Trump TV. That may provide the all-important sound bites for his followers, but they may also magnify the view that all Trump cares about is his image while his plummeting opinion polls show Americans are increasingly worried about fuel prices and a stalemated war in Iran.

Irony aside, Trump’s actions remain a serious threat to American democracy.

Matthew Ricketson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.