Outside the Beltway

Attacking Centers of Truth

The media, the academy, and the courts, are all in the crosshairs.

Steven L. Taylor · Saturday, March 29, 2025 · 16 comments

I was listening to the latest installment (“Escalation“) of Liliana Mason and Thomas Zimmer’s podcast, Is This Democracy, this week, and it helped me clarify something I had been thinking about. Zimmer (IRC) noted that the Trump administration is actively attacking centers of truth in society, specifically the press, the academy, and the courts.

While I expect that some readers will scoff at what sounds like a pretentious proclamation, or rush to the comment box to provide a favorite example of how one or more of these entities have failed to be exemplars of truth. Still, the reality remains that in all of these realms, service to the truth, however imperfect, is central to their operations.

Plagiarism, which is the dishonest appropriation of the work of someone else and presenting it as your own, is a cardinal sin in both the media and academia. Depending on the severity of the theft, it can be a career death sentence. Likewise, making up a story or falsifying data is a sure way to be shunned in both settings.

The goal of a good journalist is to accurately report the news.

The goal of an academic is understanding and requires dedication to the truth.

While the exact nature of what is true, especially in some fields, can be part of a contested process, the goal is nonetheless present. And when it comes to experimental sciences, manufacturing false data is among the best ways to lose your job and not be able to get another one.

Again, there are people who do dishonest things in these areas. There are people who are malicious in their untruth. There are also some who make honest mistakes and think they are presenting the truth. But in the long run, and en masse, the truth is what matters in the press and in the academy.

One of the hallmarks of both professions is that others in the respective professions are looking critically at one another.

If an important news story appears to be untrue, others are likely to go and try to find out if, in fact, it is true or not. Or, if a big story is broken, it will attract additional eyeballs, which in turn will help confirm if the original story is true or not.

In academia, especially in the experimental sciences, the whole point of the scientific method is to create replicable experiments that can be tested. And while you can’t run certain social science experiments in this manner, there is the ability to look at research and address its underlying claims in public. It is the nature of the work.

In both cases, there is a profound professional desire not to be embarrassed by being wrong, especially in public. There is a reason, for example, Jeffrey Goldberg waited to see if he really had been added to a high-level text chain on Signal.

If we turn our thoughts to the courts, the goal of our system is to allow both sides of a claim to present evidence and arguments for their position. While it is certainly true that the lawyers for each side are not fully dedicated to the whole truth, insofar as their job is to only tell the parts of the truth that help their clients, and even to try and suppress parts of the truth that would harm them. Further, the way in which things like the rule of evidence, or other technical aspects of the process, may sometimes obscure elements of what is true, the process ultimately revolves around truth. Witnesses must tell the truth or face possible jail time. Lawyers who falsify evidence can lose their right to practice.

To underscore: perjury, i.e., lying to the court, is a crime. If you commit perjury in a federal court, for example, you can be sent to jail for up to five years.

These are all areas wherein the truth is supposed to be paramount and where dishonesty can have profound consequences.

Therefore, it stands to reason that authoritarians want to attack these arenas. There is the added ideological benefit of beating up on groups of people that many on the right don’t like. Who cares if a bunch of reporters and professors suffer? And, really, lawyers aren’t exactly popular across the political spectrum.

True to its authoritarian nature, the administration is attacking the press, the academy, and the courts by attacking lawyers.

So, AP, you don’t want to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America? No access for you!

But, if we like you, access for you! Specifically, this White House broke with standing practice and is determining who can be in the White House press pool. This is a way to reward positive coverage and punish coverage that the administration doesn’t like.

In his first term, recall that Trump called the press “the true enemy of the people.” He has argued for using the FCC to take the licenses away from networks he doesn’t like.

The attacks on the press haven’t mostly been things like taking privileges away from the AP. Indeed, in the whirlwind of everything that is going on, it is easy to forget a lot of what has happened.

Let’s not forget that several major newspapers obeyed in advance. WaPo and the LA Times had endorsements of Harris killed by their billionaire owners. We have seen Bezos exert very specific and unprecedented control over the editorial page. Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, in a move widely seen to be a capitulation to Trump.

Don’t forget that Disney settled a lawsuit with Trump over an ABC news piece.

Paramount appears willing to settle a similar case over a CBS Sixty Minutes story, although papers were filed to get the piece dismissed.

Via the AP:

CBS parent Paramount Global filed new motions in the past two weeks to get both the lawsuit and the FCC probe dismissed. Still, Shari Redstone, head of Paramount, is reportedly anxious for a settlement, much like Disney agreed to pay $16 million in December to end Trump’s lawsuit against ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. Complicating matters is Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance Media, which needs approval from the Trump administration.

The bit about Skydance is important, even if it seems to have nothing to do with the press. The bottom line is that the administration can use business pressure on companies like Paramount, since they need federal approval of the merger, so that Paramount will put pressure on CBS, and therefore on CBS News. More to the point, for both Paramount and Disney, settling these cases likely makes business sense. The fact that settling damages the quality of reporting and affects the behavior of the press is not a primary concern.

But the fact that Paramount and Disney believe that the Trump administration would use its regulatory power to force capitulation over news-related behavior is a known way that authoritarian governments function.

Further, the fragmentation of news coverage already allows the administration to get its word out the way that it wants. There is already a clear and deep connection between the administration and Fox News (as evidenced recently by how similarly the WH and FNC commentators talked about the Signal incident, especially in how they attacked Goldberg). Of course, the emergence of networks like OAN and Newsmax (for those who think the Foxies are squishes) helps. Trump has his Truth Social platform and, of course, Musk owns X, which is a powerful way to spread messages of use to the administration.

Shifting to higher education, the administration is clearly willing to use federal dollars to try and force universities into silence and capitulation. This is, I would note, the kind of thing that Viktor Orbán did in Hungary as he purposefully moved his country in an illiberal direction. The goal is to force a potential center of independent thought and criticism into submission and silence.

The move to severely curtail indirect costs, as I discussed here, is a blatant attempt to punish these institutions and to force them into a defensive, if not submissive, posture.

The notion that Columbia University had to make curricular changes as demanded by the Trump administration so as to allow talks to remain open over federal grant dollars is ridiculous, unprecedented, and chilling.

I note that while I have been writing this, James Joyner has posted a lengthy, link-filled piece on the topic of the administration’s attack on higher education, so I commend that as further evidence to my point.

And while major research schools will have to deal with the loss of funding for research, I fear that at some point they will weaponize federal financial aid. They could very easily state that if certain schools have policies they don’t like, those schools would no longer be eligible to receive those funds to pay for a student’s tuition. The student would then go somewhere else. Or, they might say that federal financial aid is only usable for certain majors. If you think schools are tripping over themselves to capitulate over grant funding, just wait and see how they stumble and fall if enrollments are threatened.

All of this is going to result in a less educated population, less innovation, and less power for the United States.

Damaging higher education will, without any doubt, lead to poorer educational outcomes. Indeed, the current Republican rhetoric on this topic will, no doubt, discourage some citizens from seeking degrees. The ongoing irony that all of these people attacking higher education all (or almost all) have degrees, often multiple ones, from elite institutions. That fact is just one piece of evidence that this is all a dishonest attack.

But these dishonest ideologues are underestimating how much innovation comes from university labs. They also seem not to understand that while, yes, the federal government is subsidizing it all, the ROI is significant. They also miss that the freedom afforded to researchers at universities leads to new knowledge and understanding that might not happen in a corporate lab, which is often very narrowly focused. Moreover, a lot of very smart and capable people work in university environments for less money than they would make in the private sector because they like working in academia.

But let’s be crass about American power for a moment. Forget all of the high-falutin talk about truth and knowledge. The American university system has drawn very smart and capable people worldwide to come get educated in the US and to stay in the US to work and innovate. The benefits here have been huge to US power and the US economy.

One of the grand ironies of all this is that this is why people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are in the US and not back in South Africa.

American universities have been a way to enhance American economic prowess since the end of the Second World War. Again, in simple power terms, you know, making America great and all, do you want really smart people wanting to come to the US to study and maybe stay and work, or do you want the opposite?

We are likely about to see a reverse brain drain, as very smart people start to see Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. to be more appealing places to work.

There is also the soft power of educating millions of international students over time to think fondly of the United States when they go back home after studying here. Not to mention the economic significance of international students in the US. I expect a lot of schools are going to find their enrollments down in the Fall, because what parent would send their child to the US to study, given the way we have seen immigrant students being terrorized?

It is not hyperbole to say that if I am a parent of a child from Latin America, do I want to risk even the slightest possibility that my son might get sent to a prison in El Salvador for having the wrong tattoos?

I know this post is long, but I add that the ongoing attacks on big law firms are an attack on truth. Please note, I understand that big law firms are not sympathetic entities. But the issue is not about crying a river for rich attorneys. The issue that one of the few arenas for mounting attacks on the administration is the courts. Going to court requires an attorney. And if firms are afraid that they will suffer substantial losses of business as a group, or be largely unemployable as individuals, then they will think twice about filing suit against the administration. They certainly will be less willing to do pro bono work on behalf of petitioners who need such free legal help to challenge the federal government,

Indeed, David French wrote about this in a column published today.

It is a cornerstone of American democracy, enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: People have the right to challenge the actions of their leaders. Countless citizens, companies and others have exercised that right by filing lawsuits against the U.S. government.

This has been happening for more than 200 years. But the barrage of at least 150 lawsuits against the second Trump administration, challenging many of its policies and personnel decisions, is perhaps unmatched in U.S. history. And in dozens of cases, judges have ordered the administration to pause or reverse actions at the heart of President Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Trump and his administration’s lawyers are fighting in court, but they are also pursuing a much more ambitious and consequential goal: deterring lawyers from suing his administration in the first place.

[…]

Regardless, Mr. Trump’s moves have the potential — and perhaps the goal — to undermine people’s ability to challenge their government. “It is the president’s deliberate intent to chill the nation’s largest law firms from representing cases that he dislikes,” said Cecillia D. Wang, the national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has joined with major firms to bring cases against the administration. “I think you will see some law firms starting to back away.”

I recommend the whole piece. It notes, among other things, the degree to which this is all part of Trump’s retribution against those he doesn’t like, while sparing those he does. The message is pretty damn clear.

Please note that these are attacks on First Amendment rights.

See also the following.

• WaPo: Law firms refuse to represent Trump opponents in the wake of his attacks.
• FIRE: Trump’s attack on law firms threatens the foundations of our justice system.
• The NYT: As Firms Sue to Stop Trump’s Executive Orders, a Split Emerges in Big Law.

If the administration is successful in dissuading some significant portion of firms from challenging it in court, this will further erode the rule of law. The bottom line is that as long as Congress is controlled by the Republicans, the only way to try and check the executive is via the courts. So anything that makes court challenges less likely and/or less efficacious, the more that the administration can act with impunity. Even if the Democrats win control of one or both chambers in the mid-terms, the courts will remain a key battleground.

So, yes, I get it. The press reports things that people don’t like. Professors are obnoxious know-it-alls. Lawyers are well, lawyers. So, who cares if they all get bruised a bit?

You should care if you value truth and understand how it connects to a democratic society.

But if you are a bully who thinks power and wealth are more important than justice and truth. If you think that a world of “alternative facts” is fine, then you probably didn’t read this far anyway.