(This is part three of a multi-part series proposing an oppositional strategy to the Trump regime. Read part one, and part two.)
Over the next four years, we’re about to be inundated with a flood of lies—including from federal agencies themselves. We sadly can’t count on legacy media outlets to give us the unvarnished truth, as many of them are owned by wealthy men eager to collaborate with President Donald Trump’s regime. So in order to separate truth from lies, the anti-Trump opposition should make sure to include a healthy amount of oppositional press in our media diets, and to take reporting from non-oppositional press with a grain of salt.
In his second and final term in the White House, President Donald Trump is consistently communicating the (false) message that his extreme actions and policies are defensible, given his election victory. Of course, while Trump was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote along with the Electoral College, he did so with the smallest margin of victory of any popular vote winner since Richard Nixon in 1968. Trump’s claims of having the popular support to justify ruling with an iron fist should be contextualized by the fact that he told nearly 31,000 lies during his first term.
As the Washington Post documented in 2021, the frequency of Trump’s lies accelerated the longer he was in office. The outlet reported that while he told an average of six lies per day in 2017, he told an average of 16 lies per day in his second year in office. That climbed to 22 false or misleading claims per day by 2019, and 39 lies a day by 2020.
“Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later,” the Post wrote.
For the vast majority of Americans who aren’t trained journalists, and the millions of Americans who haven’t been formally educated in media literacy, it will be a daunting task to learn the truth amid the dizzying flurry of lies coming from the Trump regime. It’s entirely possible that Trump could do as former President Richard Nixon did and replace the people in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with Republican loyalists eager to paint a rosier economic picture than the data shows. Trump could also simply defund the BLS (as Canada under the Conservative Party did in 2015) and make the job of gathering economic data impossible if he finds it too difficult to fudge the numbers.
And in late January, Trump officially issued the executive order that implements the “Schedule F” changes to the civil service proposed in the authoritarian far-right Project 2025 playbook. This means he will now have free rein to pack federal agencies full of political stooges who will put loyalty to him over truth and facts. So while .gov web domains were considered among the most reliable, that will no longer be the case until at least January of 2029.
Journalists will have their hands full digging through the piles of lies propagated by Trump and his apparatchiks, and it will be incumbent on ordinary Americans to rely on reporters unencumbered by pressure from collaborationist owners currying favor with the regime to give them the full truth. While it’s important to state that this doesn’t mean completely writing off reporting by legacy media outlets with compromised ownership, it’s still important to diversify our media diets to make sure that the media we consume is primarily produced by people who have nothing to gain by lying, or by laundering lies from the regime.
How Trump’s collaborators are weakening the Fourth Estate
The Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has emerged as one of the most eager collaborators with the Trump regime. Semafor’s Max Tani, who covers the media, wrote that Soon-Shiong enlisted the help of longtime Republican operative Eric Beach to help recruit far-right voices for the LA Times’ opinion section. Before his work helping Soon-Shiong, Beach ran the Great America PAC, which backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020. He notably had to pay a $25,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission after accepting money from two undercover journalists posing as emissaries of a Chinese donor purportedly trying to spend $2 million influencing elections.
As Occupy.com reported previously, Soon-Shiong—a billionaire medical technology entrepreneur—has relied on the FDA’s blessing for his products to be approved for public consumption. He also once sought a role as a “health care czar” in Trump’s first administration roughly a year before he bought the LA Times. Beach’s addition as an informal advisor to Soon-Shiong comes on the heels of the LA Times’ owner hiring pro-Trump CNN pundit Scott Jennings as an opinion columnist in November.
It’s important to acknowledge that the LA Times’ news section has been doing objectively great reporting in the wake of the recent wave of wildfires, and the opinion section and the news sections are different departments. Still, the audience of a publication owned by someone whose business interests intersect with the federal government should read any coverage of the Trump regime with a healthy amount of skepticism. Soon-Shiong unilaterally killed the LA Times’ endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris and personally nixed the paper’s planned editorial criticizing Trump’s Cabinet appointments, which means that the largest state’s largest newspaper is incapable of holding the regime fully accountable.
As much as the LA Times has pulled its punches with Trump, the New York Times has been noticeably downplaying some of the regime’s most extreme actions and doing what City University of New York journalism professor emeritus Jeff Jarvis describes as “bothsidesing” and “smart-washing.” Whereas the former term is used to create false equivalence and moral ambiguity when there is none, he uses the latter term to describe papers like the Times assuming that Trump and his administration are more brilliant than they actually are. Jarvis keeps a close eye on both the Times and the Washington Post, and documents some of their worst offenses using the #BrokenTimes and #BrokenPost hashtags on Bluesky.
Jarvis lamented that the national newspaper of record framed Trump’s openly totalitarian ambitions as a “muscular vision of presidential power,” and skewered a puff piece by the paper’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, in which Baker wrote about Trump’s second inauguration in the vein of a royal coronation. And he characterized the Times’ watered-down description of billionaire Elon Musk’s viral inauguration day gestures—which fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat described as a “Nazi salute” that was “very belligerent”—as “naziwashing.” To contrast, the Guardian plainly called them “back-to-back fascist salutes.”
The Times’ most damaging move, however, may be against one of its own now former columnists. In December, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman announced he was leaving the Times after more than two decades as a top opinion columnist, where he wrote two weekly columns and produced a weekly newsletter. Krugman told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in January that while he initially didn’t want to leave, he was effectively marginalized by his editors and felt he had no choice but to walk away.
“I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” Krugman told CJR. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.”
CJR described Krugman as a “lone voice in the wilderness” as a progressive voice in an increasingly right-wing opinion section. The Times’ op-ed page regularly features voices like Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, and conservative pundits like David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Thomas Friedman (who enthusiastically backed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq), and Bret Stephens. Krugman was also openly critical of what he called the Times’ “real negativity bias” toward former President Joe Biden.
“You know, if the price of gas goes up to five dollars, that’s all over the pages,” Krugman told CJR. “If it comes back down to three dollars, not a peep, right?”
Interestingly, Friedman appeared to bolster Krugman’s argument that the Nobel laureate was being singled out for heavy editing by telling CJR that he personally had “not experienced any change in the editing of my column” since Friedman started working with Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy. And as I wrote for Occupy.com in October, the Times played a significant role in elevating JD Vance by relentlessly promoting his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir when it was first released, and eventually allowing him a regular opinion column.
It isn’t just newspapers cozying up to the Trump regime, but also some of the biggest broadcasters. Journalist Oliver Darcy, who writes the Status newsletter covering the media, reported that the day before Trump’s second inauguration, CNN CEO Mark Thompson held a call with the network’s biggest voices to make it clear that he wanted coverage to be toned down. Thompson instructed on-air talent to be “forward-thinking” and to not “pre-judge” the incoming president, in contrast to his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, who “threw the weight of CNN at Trump.” When none of the hosts on the call pushed back, Darcy reported that Thompson’s message to—as the Daily Beast’s Sean Craig wrote—“treat the president with kid gloves” had been heard loud and clear.
Darcy, who worked at CNN for seven years, told WNYC’s “On the Media” podcast that there was a “very stark difference” between how his former employer covered Trump in his first term and how the network has been covering him since he won the 2024 election:
One of the noticeable things, for instance, during inauguration coverage was that none of the CNN anchors pointed out that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take that office. They didn’t point out that he was twice impeached. So you had a lot of right-wing extremists and a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists stuffed in the Rotunda. People like Tucker Carlson, an extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene, an extremist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist, on and on it went. In the previous iteration of CNN, you would have seen that called out pretty forcefully. That acting rotunda for years after January 6th, you have a lot of people who pushed the big lie, who even in Tucker Carlson’s case, suggested that that insurrection was a false flag, that you have them now gathered at the citadel of American democracy, welcoming Donald Trump back to power. And Jake Tapper was pretty tame.
Other major broadcast outlets are also showing signs of capitulation. After Trump sued ABC News over George Stephanopoulos for saying the president had been “found liable for rape” of writer E. Jean Carroll, the network chose to settle by making a $15 million donation to his presidential library and $1 million more for legal fees. This is despite US District Judge Lewis F. Kaplan stating that while Trump was technically liable for “sexual abuse,” that’s essentially the same thing as rape as the public understands the term.
Now, CBS News may be the next major network to settle with Trump, who sued the network for $10 billion in response to its editing of Harris’ interview with “60 Minutes” journalist Bill Whitaker. Trump claimed that in airing one version of Harris’ answer about Israel’s bombing of Gaza on “60 Minutes” and another version on “Face the Nation,” the network was engaging in “election interference.” The Wall Street Journal reported that CBS may settle with the president not because his claims have merit, but because its parent company Paramount needs approval from his administration for a planned merger with Skydance. The Journal’s sources said Paramount executives acknowledged they would “likely need to offer concessions to win approval” from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission.
Oppositional journalism needs your support
In the wake of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cancelling the paper’s endorsement of Harris in the 2024 election, more than 250,000 paying subscribers cancelled their monthly payment. Earlier this month, Bezos announced he would be laying off roughly 100 workers (approximately 4 percent of the Post’s workforce) even though with a personal net worth of more than $248 billion he could easily shoulder the burden of the paper’s payroll in perpetuity. It’s not known if those 250,000 former Post subscribers took their money to another publication or if they divested from supporting journalism altogether, but those subscription dollars would be much better served by helping oppositional publications and journalists unafraid to plainly speak the truth about the Trump regime.
Occupy.com of course will continue being an oppositional voice and welcomes reader support as a registered nonprofit not beholden to any corporate owners. ProPublica, which is also a nonprofit, has lately been doing important accountability-focused journalism covering both Trump and his Cabinet appointees. The nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation is similarly covering the regime as well as the Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress from a healthcare policy perspective, and with an oppositional voice. But there are many journalists who are doing important oppositional reporting while maintaining a new level of control of their style, substance, and editorial perspective via the newsletter approach.
- Legal journalist Chris Geidner, who used to cover the federal courts for BuzzFeed News, now publishes the “Law Dork” newsletter. Geidner is a critical voice that helps break down developments in the federal judiciary in layman’s terms.
- Parker Molloy, who used to work for Media Matters and now publishes “The Present Age,” is one of the best media critics writing today. Her incisive writing helps shed needed light on legacy media’s right-wing shift, and as a transgender woman, her essay on the transgender athlete discourse is a must-read.
- Independent journalist Marisa Kabas, who is the author of “The Handbasket” newsletter, does excellent political reporting and commentary and recently broke the major scoop that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget was freezing all federal grant funding (which was later corroborated by the Washington Post).
- KT Nelson’s “The Idiot Box” newsletter provides smart oppositional content combined with a healthy dose of humor, which is just as effective and important as hard reporting.
These are just a few examples, but I encourage everyone reading to please consider finding ways to support oppositional press however you can. As important as it is to criticize the collaborationists who own legacy media outlets and to read their reporting with caution, it’s just as essential to lift up, promote, and celebrate the talented and brilliant writers who are committed to being an oppositional voice, whether they write for a publication or publish a newsletter. We’ll need their voices more than ever over the next four years.
Oppositional journalism needs your support, follow Free Press Unlimited.
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