https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/gutting-the-fourth-estate
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I detailed the threats, bribes, and blackmail Trump had likely deployed to control the press. I named and shamed hacks who covered up for him instead of covering him. They refused to investigate his ties to organized crime or his decades of financial corruption: serious matters that could bring him down.
I published my op-ed in a Canadian outlet, The Globe and Mail. One could not publish such sentiment here in the home of the free.
I debunked the myth that the media’s ceaseless Trump push was about ratings. Mafia and spy stories are ratings bonanzas. Covering Trump and Jeffrey Epstein would be a boon. But cable news rejected serious investigation in favor of running hours of Trump rallies and giggling over his tweets like a klatch of botoxed Riefenstahls.
There were exceptions, like veteran journalist David Cay Johnston, who covered Trump’s illicit activity for years: but he noted that the press censored him in 2016.
“Something more ominous seems to be guiding the skewed coverage,” I wrote. “Trump has named the media his enemy, despite its history as his friend. He has banned multiple organizations from his rallies. He has a history of litigation, is currently suing several outlets over articles on his wife, and is backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who sued Gawker out of existence.”
Ten years have passed. Like most outlets, the Globe and Mail locked their articles behind a paywall after Trump left office, contributing to the selective amnesia of 2026. Paywalls are toll roads to a gated community, one that the average American cannot afford to enter in an era of inflated prices and deflated expectations. Democracy relies on an informed citizenry. Pay-to-play democracy is no democracy at all. Bereft of well-researched resources, the public is told to rely instead on hallucinating robots.
Trump’s first term has been memory-holed. His dirty deeds are treated as discrete acts instead of as a continuum of crime with recurring players. His prior decades of illicit activity have vanished from the public domain: because there is no public domain.
The public domain was purchased and destroyed by oligarchs: purchased to be destroyed. The Thiel example I gave in 2016 was a preview. Musk bought and transmogrified Twitter. Google replaced its search engine with AI. Other outlets, unable to profit off paywalls, sold themselves to plutocrats who erased their archives.
And now the media complains? More preposterously — now Trump complains?
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This week, Trump banned CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House. The outlets that long acted as Trump’s friend — refusing to cover the Epstein case; misleading audiences by turning the purposefully plodding DOJ cases into a soap opera while knowing that the villain, Trump, would prevail; and using the old Trump tactic of covering crime with scandal — were pronounced his enemy.
It’s offensive: Trump should be thanking these outlets for service on his behalf.
Trump has long attacked media who support him, creating a mirage of dissent to cloak the reality of compliance. When Trump called for a ban on CNN in his first term, CNN’s then-boss, Jeff Zucker, had a framed Trump tweet on his wall. Trump’s tirades bestow unearned credibility on bad actors. Outlets remade Trump mafia associates — Corey Lewandowski, Michael Cohen, and Lev Parnas, to name a few — into “pundits” analyzing the very criminal they once served. (And in Cohen’s case, returned to serving.) Federal indictment became a cable news resume boost.
This corrupt synergy is one reason Americans stopped watching.
The new media ban would appear to be another case of kayfabe were it not for the joint lawsuit the organizations filed. CNN, MSNow, and Politico are flawed, but they have not capitulated to the extent the Washington Post has under Jeff Bezos or CBS under Bari Weiss. But that’s speculation: Trump’s team may have chosen the outlets at random. The real attack is not on these outlets, but on the First Amendment itself.
In 2016, Trump’s goal was to control the media. In 2026, it is to destroy the media. He recognizes it as a depreciated asset. Trump is a corporate raider doing what corporate raiders do. He seeks to destroy the media much as he seeks to destroy the US itself.
Trump has been honest about his goals, stating in 2014 that he sought to destroy the US and then employing the playbook of Project 2025 to do it. In some respects, the mainstream media dug its own grave and threw the rest of the country in with them. It’s hard to find sympathy for access journalists who crave access to an autocrat. It’s harder when they are bad at their jobs. Are we supposed to mourn the plight of people who couldn’t figure out if Mitch McConnell was dead or alive for three months?
The answer is, well, yes. The ban may be reversed, and the three outlets may carry out their reporting with heightened sycophancy, but that the ban happened at all indicates a broader strike. Trump usually does not swing straight at the First Amendment. He and his backers erode it like termites: buying out news stations, rigging algorithms, threatening excessive litigation, and deploying threats of violence at individuals — until there is nothing left to protect.
They bank that journalists will have little loyalty to each other. The role of an access journalist is to serve the regime. Access journalists are often preselected from families with deep ties to regime players. Maggie Haberman, whose mother was a top executive at Rubenstein PR, the agency that represented Trump, Kushner, and Epstein, is an example of the court stenographers they seek. She should not be judged by her mother’s profession, but by her continuation of it on her own initiative.
One reason Trump’s backers strenuously opposed diversity in newsrooms is because it made the reporter more likely to be removed from elite, nepotistic circles — and potentially harder to control. The demand for insularity is what motivated mass firings of Black journalists prior to and after Trump’s reinstallation. “Access journalism” is not about the journalist having access to the regime, but the regime having longtime access to the journalist. It is a common prerequisite in mafia states.
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Why then care about an attack on elites united by the courage of their lack of convictions? Because the ban is wrong on principle, even when the banned lack principles — and because the goal is to supplant everyone with hallucinating robots.
A failed journalist is a human being. One can critique their coverage and parse their propaganda. The goal of a technofascist regime is to replace reporting with sycophancy and silence. The only guaranteed way to do that is to eliminate people.
Banning reporters is wrong. It doesn’t matter which reporters. I don’t care who you are. Let me repeat: I don’t care who you are. No one does anymore. Hallowed halls turned hollow as media institutions were gutted of the bravery that made them real. There is little to admire. But there is something to protect: the potential for change.
My advice for the banned reporters is to get a library card. You do not need access to the White House. You need access to history. History is what they want to ban most.
Journalism is the first draft of history. Many have failed their first draft, but that doesn’t mean they can’t try again. Consider the ban a learning opportunity. There is a wealth of information on the crimes of the Trump cohort that has been documented but not explored in depth. There is also a wealth of information on the Democrats’ crimes and complicity, if you would prefer to focus on that. Corruption is not a partisan matter. The public deserves context, research, rigor.
The public deserves its memory back.
Trump is not the sole despot who seeks to get rid of reporters — or seeks to get rid of all of us. He is a test run for full dystopian rule, one in which we are rid of even the people we dislike, one in which recent history is not paywalled but deleted altogether. That is why Trump’s attack on free speech is no longer primarily the terrain of backstage lawyers and shadow algorithms, but the brazen order of an autocrat.
We have reached a point where catastrophes are so rampant, it often feels there is little to do but discuss them and record that discussion. But that can be a powerful move. It is impossible to build a future without an accurate sense of the past. One cannot solve a problem if few will admit it exists. A problem like that becomes a crisis. A crisis like that becomes a catastrophe. All of this could have been avoided had more people told the truth early — and had officials acted on the warnings of those who did.
My guess is that White House access will be restored for the outlets in question, possibly by the time I publish this piece. Press utility is dwindling to the symbolic, but it lingers. Until, one day, Trump and his backers may decide they do not need the media at all. It may happen after the backers decide they do not need Trump, either. The men who steal the future need a mouthpiece. It does not have to be human.
An AI mouthpiece can’t blow the whistle. A person with a soul still can.
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Current state of the Fourth Estate: Rotting structure of “El Bandido” (The Bandit) in a New Mexico ghost town. And no, we’re not renaming New Mexico.
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