Name: Jarvis: 'Major media failing at their task to inform and protect the public' | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T17:14:17.000Z
Duration: 13 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are.

When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people.

They just make them up when there are none.

The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them.

The left-wing media doesn't want to solve problems.

That was President Donald Trump during his first stint in the White House.

Back then, it seemed that hardly a day went by without the president lashing out at what he called the fake news media.

That kind of loud vitriol has been toned down during Trump 2.0, but journalists and media observers are now ringing the alarm over different kinds of attack on the press.

Besides defunding public media outlets like PBS and NPR, the president has filed a flurry of lawsuits in response to unflattering reporting that he calls fake news.

He filed the first of them in 2024 while he was running for re-election.

He sued ABC, claiming its anchor had defamed him when he said a jury found Trump had raped E.

In reality, he had been found liable for sexual abuse.

ABC's parent company, Disney, settled with Trump and agreed to pay $15 million towards his future presidential library.

Later that year, Trump filed another lawsuit, this time against CBS News, over the editing of a 16-minute interview with Kamala Harris.

Paramount, CBS' parent company, settled just weeks ago, saying it would pay $16 million to the library.

Trump escalated his legal campaign against the media this week with a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and its owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The paper had published a story about Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

On Truth Social, the president posted, His words, not mine, I insist.

He went on, And to figure out where this is going, I'm joined now by Jeff Jarvis.

He's a journalist, writer, and media commentator.

He's also the author of the book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet.

Now, what is President Trump trying to achieve with these lawsuits on media outlets?

I think first off, it's distraction from the Epstein story.

Oddly, he's only drawing more attention to it, but that's the way he operates.

Toddlers, when they get angry, stomp their feet and throw their toys around.

Donald Trump threatens to, and often does, file suit.

You'd have to look at media to see how well it's working, how much do they pay attention to that.

The fascinating thing here, of course, is that Rupert Murdoch, who I think is the most malign influence in English-speaking democracies around the world, is the corporate entity that made Donald Trump, along with NBC and his entertainment guys.

And so I think it's surprising in a sense that he would go after Murdoch, but in a sense, he doesn't need Murdoch anymore.

He's making lots of money in crypto whatsoever.

So he takes out his anger, whoever is in his face at the moment.

I want to look at the Murdoch case in a second, but let's first look at the ones that have been settled, the ones with Paramount and Disney, because frankly, Trump's cases were never the strongest, but the companies are seemingly just bending the knee.

Why are they settling and not fighting when the chances to win are not that slim?

This is the essence of fascism in America.

And so you have major law firms, major universities, Harvard and Columbia, major entertainment empires, Paramount and Disney, indeed bending at the knee and only getting kneecapped.

They cancel Stephen Colbert, which is a magnificent show.

They do everything they can to make up to him.

Heck, once again, I got to bring up Rupert Murdoch.

He has an entire network devoted to slathering all over him, and that doesn't protect you either.

Do you expect Rupert Murdoch then to settle as well?

Of course, Rupert Murdoch had to settle in the case of the slander of voting machines and the companies that make them.

In this case, no, he's got an excellent case.

Donald Trump is certainly a public figure.

This will get thrown out of court eventually.

And I still have a little bit of hope that that'll be the case, though God knows when this gets to a Supreme Court, in this case, when our court has been taken over by the right wing, I can't have 100% confidence this will go nowhere.

But I think that Murdoch's lawyers, who were very good, will fight this and win in the lower courts handily and quickly.

You mentioned Stephen Colbert there, a producer at 60 Minutes who was at the core of the suit against Paramount shortly after or around the time of the election, stepped down saying that he could not be the journalist he wanted to be anymore.

Are we watching news organizations being intimidated already into pulling their punches in their reporting on the president, you think?

Indeed, we are, and not just in direct ways, also in many subtle ways.

Now day after day after day, I use the hashtag Broken Times to look at the kind of coverage that they do, trying to normalize what is happening in this country right now.

The Washington Post is even farther down the slope, and one by one, the last talent at the Post is leaving under the Murdochian managers who are there now.

Public radio, which has just had the money pulled off from underneath them, has gone more cautious.

Major mass media in this country is not serving the purpose of the public.

That happens at the same time that mass media is fundamentally, in my view, dead.

That era is over, and we're going to see, after a period of much chaos probably, a replacement coming in other voices and other ways.

But for now, what we have is major media failing at their task to inform and protect the public.

Is that because most of the outlets that you just mentioned have broad corporate interests behind them?

It's not the case, of course, for public media.

So why are we not seeing more resistance?

Why are we not seeing the fourth estate, as you're suggesting, living up to its true function?

I think it's a good question, and there's a lot of nuance here.

One is that we have this myth of objectivity, especially in American media, which happened when mass media took over, when we used to have 46 daily newspapers in New York alone.

The plurality of voices that existed in media are long gone, and media thought that they had to serve everyone all the same, and so they became tapioca in their voice.

At the same time, I think you see something like the New York Times is trying to convince itself that it is not owned by its liberal readers.

The major support of the New York Times now is not advertising, but is subscription.

When that happens, the newsroom realizes that the readers are the boss, and they want to kind of prove to the readers that you don't own us, and see, we irritate you every day.

So there's pressure from the right against the New York Times, has been there for years calling them fake news, especially Donald Trump, and now there's pressure from the left who are profoundly disappointed in how the New York Times is covering our world.

You mentioned that, you know, the media as we know it is dead, and Trump is waging a war against it.

It does look, right now, as if he's winning.

Could he, in the process of doing this, maybe inadvertently be opening space for something else, something more robust to emerge?

I think Trump has long since won against the media, and he doesn't need us anymore.