The New York Times’ timid epiphany exposes how America’s media helped pave Trump’s road to authoritarianism, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
ON 31 OCTOBER, tucked away in the opinion pages of The New York Times, readers could finally find America’s paper of record acknowledging that – quelle surprise – President Donald Trump has some authoritarian tendencies which might be a little problematic for American democracy.
Somewhat like the police turning up days after the robber has already looted your house and sold all your possessions, The New York Times opinion editors tentatively asked a gentle question: Are we losing our democracy?
Well, yes, of course you are. And one of the reasons for this is that this article was written ten months after Trump started his authoritarian push, instead of before he was elected.
It is also clear from the moderate language and the tentative framing that the authors of this piece are terrified of the ramifications of naming Trump’s authoritarianism. This fear means it will likely be useless-business-as-usual for the newspaper going forward.
The New York Times, like almost all other mainstream news outlets, will almost certainly continue to contribute to America’s democratic slide towards authoritarianism, instead of doing what it should have done all along — standing up loudly against it.
Historians may look back at this piece’s laundry list of authoritarian alarm bells and wonder – rightly – why all its individual points have been reported about like they were totally normal happenstance in a democracy up until the point where they were laid out to show how Trump, lo and behold, is using an authoritarian playbook.
The list is compelling reading, but none of it is new information.
Trump is described as undermining American democracy by:
- stifling dissent and speech;
- persecuting political opponents;
- bypassing the legislature;
- using the military for domestic control;
- defying the courts;
- declaring national emergencies on false pretences;
- vilifying marginalised groups;
- controlling information and the news media;
- trying to take over universities;
- creating an authoritarian cult of personality;
- using power for personal profit; and
- manipulating the law to stay in power.
Just doing one of these things, which Trump has done constantly from day one of his second presidency, and threatened to do long before that, to give clear and consistent warning for what lay ahead, should have raised all the red flags and alarm bells at newspapers like The New York Times.
Yet, it is not until Trump has done all of these things every day for ten months that it warrants a cautious opinion piece noting “hey, hang on, wait, maybe we’re losing our democracy”.
While all this has been going on, the overarching coverage of Trump’s presidency by newspapers like The New York Times could be described as mealy-mouthed, desperate to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, restrained in its critiques of Trump’s open anti-democratic agenda. And always willing to publish whatever Trump says word for word – or fix his garbled mess to ensure it makes sense – as if they are Trump’s press secretary rather than his watchdog.
There is not enough space here to critique all the ways that the American news media have contributed to Trump boiling the frog of American democracy, so I will focus on two, which are particularly exemplified in this too-little-too-late New York Times editorial.
The first is the lack of attention to Trump’s relationship with American media. Point six on the list claims, ‘Trump controls information and the news media’.
This section starts by saying:
‘Democratic governments prize accurate information as a guide to decision-making. Authoritarians seek to suppress inconvenient truths.’
As well as firing the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics and ending climate data collection, Trump is described as taking ‘steps to control the media’. This includes forcing TikTok into the hands of his allies, suing news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and extracting multimillion-dollar payments from ABC, Paramount, YouTube and Meta to settle what the piece describes as ‘baseless claims’ that Trump was treated unfairly.
It is true that Trump has victimised the media to try to cow them into submission, to weaken their ability to act as guardrails for democracy. But what the piece conveniently doesn’t mention is that much of American media – mainstream and social media – does not need to be bullied into submission by Trump, because they are already his allies.
It is telling that The New York Times didn’t mention how The Washington Post defended Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House after – coincidentally – its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, was among donors who helped fund the garish ballroom Trump is building on top of the ruins.
They also didn’t mention that one of the world’s largest social media platforms, X, is owned by Trump’s ally and mega-donor, billionaire Elon Musk. They also didn’t mention how Meta owner, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has aligned himself with Trump.
If all those elephants in the room were not enough, an attempt to claim the media is a victim of Trump, when indeed large portions of it are co-conspirators and allies, the editorial, of course, did not mention the long-time, crucial support the Murdoch media have given to Trump.
Without the echo-chamber of Fox News, there would be no generation of American voters who have systematically been fed manipulative and often false information in support of Trump under the guise of “journalism”, while at the same time being told not to trust anything they see on any media channel that is not Fox News. It is not a stretch to say that without Fox News, there would be no MAGA movement.
On the topic of Trump’s media allies and manipulation of the masses, there is another noteworthy exclusion from the description of Trump’s authoritarian playbook: Trump’s prolific lying, his unending falsities, his manipulation of reality, his undermining of facts, his total and utter bullshit about everything, and, of course, his media friend’s defence of and contribution to these falsities.
Indeed, when you go through the list of 12 anti-democratic concerns, none of them would be possible without the Trump movement’s collective lies — a movement Trump’s media allies are part of. The Trump movement lies about marginalised people to turn their supporters against them. They lie about and deny Trump’s corruption even when we can all see it with our own eyes. They make things up to persecute political opponents, to justify the unjustified use of the military in domestic cities and to explain the murder of non-American citizens on boats.
Even when the authors get close to saying Trump lies, they still crab-walk away from it. This is despite the whole point of Trump stifling dissent and speech to stop people criticising him, including critiquing his lies. The piece even admits that Trump has declared national emergencies on “false pretences”. What are false pretences other than lies — bald-faced, never-ending, authoritarian-laced lies?
Democracy is killed by a loss of the truth. Put another way, authoritarianism relies on deception. Deception, which is often platformed uncritically by The New York Times.
These gaping omissions from this piece go a long way to explaining why The New York Times is not going to suddenly wake up and realise it’s been lacking in its defence of democracy in the face of Trump’s authoritarian push. Indeed, when you look closely at the byline, the newspaper carefully notes the piece was written by ‘the editorial board’, who are ‘a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom’.
It is separate from the newsroom. And even then, it’s still too scared to properly call an authoritarian spade a spade.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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