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Saturday, September 19, 2026, reporters from CNN, MSNBC, and Politico arrived at the doors of the White House only to discover that their credentials had been deactivated, before being escorted out by the Secret Service. The day before, Donald Trump had announced their exclusion, accusing them of spreading false information, and had hinted that the New York Times and the Washington Post might soon suffer the same fate. A few days later, a federal judge, appointed by the president himself, paused that decision and allowed the journalists concerned to return to the White House. Nevertheless, to this day the head of the executive continues to prevent these journalists from following him on his travels, and thus from covering him as is customary in the United States. With crucial midterm elections a month away, this open conflict with the President of the United States is probably only beginning.
Since returning to power in 2025, several decisions taken by his administration outline a deliberate strategy to undermine one of the historical pillars of the American Republic, enshrined in the constitutional marble by James Madison when he was a Virginian representative in 1791: a free press independent of any power.
During his first term, the confrontation manifested mainly through insults, the president constantly yelling “fake news,” whether during or after his victorious campaign. In his second term, even though he did not abandon the jibes, Trump adopts a much more formidable strategy, as he acts directly on the concrete conditions of information production. Pete Hegseth, the vociferous Secretary of Defense—renamed Secretary of War without Congress’s approval—thus attempted to bar access to the Pentagon for journalists he deemed too critical of his actions. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the equivalent of France’s ARCOM, headed by another ardent Trump ally, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened the licenses of networks whose coverage he disapproved. Finally, several major media outlets were sued by Donald Trump himself for sums running into billions of dollars. The novelty is not Trump’s hostility toward the press, but the repeated use of administrative, regulatory, economic, and judicial instruments that directly influence his operation.
The CBS affair helps illuminate the mechanism put in place by the new administration. During the 2024 campaign, after the broadcast of an interview with Kamala Harris, Trump had accused the network of manipulating the edit in favor of his rival and demanded up to $20 billion in damages. Despite the manifest absence of any legal basis, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, ended up settling for $16 million. It was noteworthy that its merger with Skydance Media, for more than $8 billion, still awaited federal government approval. At the same time, the network announced the deprogramming of its flagship host and enduring Trump critic, Stephen Colbert. This episode illustrates the vulnerability of major media groups: a newsroom may be legally protected, while the company that owns it depends, for far greater financial interests, on decisions made by an administration that its journalists and comedians are required to cover and critique.
Brendan Carr thus became one of the key figures in this new relationship between the media and the government. It was following one of his warnings to ABC that the network decided in September 2025 to suspend the comedian Jimmy Kimmel for an “indefinite” period. The head of the FCC judged that he had made indecent remarks about the assassination of ultra-conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Carr also warned ABC that he could act in two ways: “the easy way or the hard way.” However, a few days later, faced with a strong public reaction, Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air and his show posted record audience numbers. The very popular series South Park drew from this episode a sharp satire parodying Carr as a mobster in the president’s pay, and it itself achieved historic audience figures in the process.
The irony is all the greater given that, in February 2025 in Munich, J.D. Vance had chosen to present himself as a defender of freedom of expression, claiming that Europeans suffered less from Russian and Chinese threats than from their intolerance of criticism. After accusing the Biden administration of fostering censorship, he promised that the Trump administration would restore, in turn, freedom of expression. Nineteen months later, the memory of that harangue can only be thought-provoking.
But reducing the affair to merely another contradiction within the MAGA movement would miss the point. Indeed, historically in the United States, freedom of the press is not merely a right granted to certain segments of the population: it protects the people’s right to information as a whole. It belongs to the very definition of the republican project that began exactly 250 years ago, in 1776.
Montesquieu and the press: the discovery of a new power
The history of American freedom of expression begins even before the founding of the United States, on the other side of the Atlantic. Between 1729 and 1731, the philosopher Montesquieu spent almost eighteen months in England, where he was swept up by the feverishness of a political life in stark contrast to a France still marked by the waning reign of Louis XIV. There, where prior censorship had disappeared since the expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695, he moved in political circles, attended Parliament sessions, observed party struggles, and read opposition press. In his Notes on the English, he summarizes his observations: “England is now the freest country in the world; I do not exclude any republic from it.”
Among his readings is The Craftsman, a newspaper linked to two major politicians, Bolingbroke and William Pulteney, fierce opponents of Robert Walpole’s government. Montesquieu notes with evident amusement an practice unimaginable in the Kingdom of France: before publication, the journal’s articles were submitted to three lawyers to determine “whether there is anything that offends the law.” In the preparatory manuscript of The Spirit of the Laws, this observation becomes a principle: “There, those who would write against the power of the executive would not trouble themselves with whether it would be offended, but they would consult lawyers to see if the offense would be among those punished by the law.” In a republic, the crime of lèse-majesté cannot exist; on the contrary, there exists a right, and almost a duty, to offend those in power.
Montesquieu did not quite invent the “fourth power” – the term Carlyle would later attribute to Burke would come later. He does, however, glimpse, alongside the three powers of the State, a social force capable of observing them all. The press does not legislate, does not govern, and does not judge; yet it makes visible the acts of those who do. Its independence is therefore not a professional privilege granted to journalists, but the sine qua non condition of its active participation in the balance of powers within the republic.
Or, at the moment of the American founding, Montesquieu was the most cited and invoked author in political debates; partisans and opponents of the new regime brandished The Spirit of the Laws, even if they drew sometimes opposing conclusions.
Jefferson and Madison: the press guiding the people
The first amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791 and chiefly drafted by James Madison, greatly expands the scope of freedom of expression. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 protected freedom of debate within Parliament; it concerned only members of Parliament. The American text, by contrast, prohibits Congress from restricting the free speech of any citizen. The protected speech ceases to be merely that of the representative and becomes the speech of the entire people.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two central figures of the American foundation, gradually assign this freedom a distinctly republican function. In their view, the prohibition of censorship cannot by itself resolve the status of freedom of expression. It matters to ask how a free press can maintain the sovereignty of the people, even once their representatives are elected.
As early as January 1787, Jefferson proposed, from Paris where he was stationed, a response of profound radicalism. While a portion of American elites, fearing social upheaval following tax revolts, accused the press of throwing oil on the fire, Jefferson reminded them that “the people are the only censor of their rulers” and that, to avoid revolts, they must be provided with full information on public affairs “through the channel of newspapers.” If he had to choose between “a government without newspapers” and “newspapers without a government,” Jefferson would choose the latter without hesitation. The risks posed by newspapers pale in comparison to the evils that would arise from their disappearance.
This conviction is all the stronger because he would never idolize the press. Having become president, he would complain at length about its lies and slanders. His argument is all the more forceful: freedom of the press is not justified by the virtue of those who write, but by the danger of letting those who govern decide the critique they might face. If citizens become “indifferent to public affairs”, he warns, Congress, legislatures, judges, and governors will all become “wolves”, as in the monarchic Europe he so well knows.
Madison arrives at the same conclusion, but starting from a different difficulty: how could a republic as vast as the new United States remain free? In 1791, he writes in the National Gazette that “public opinion fixes the limits of every government” and that it constitutes “the true sovereign of every free government”. But an opinion can only become public if it travels through multiple channels. In a striking line of thought, Madison ties together roads, internal trade, representatives going back and forth between the capital and their districts, and, above all, the “free press” whose newspapers travel to “all the people.” These channels of opinion diffusion, though diverse, symbolically compress the geography: the press politically brings together those whom geography separates. The Post Office Act of 1792 would reflect this by granting newspapers subsidized postal rates. In a nation that keeps expanding westward, the free press emerges as one of the most powerful elements of national cohesion.
It is precisely this republican conception of the press that came under threat as early as 1798, in the midst of the quasi-war at sea with Directory France, when John Adams and the Federalist majority passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act indeed allowed pursuing authors of writings “false, scandalous and malicious” against the government, Congress, or the president—but not the vice president, who was none other than Jefferson, Adams’s intimate foe. Jefferson and Madison understood that the problem went beyond the journalists targeted: if those in power could themselves determine which critique aimed at them was admissible, the people would no longer freely have the means to judge them, and the First Amendment would be drained of its substance. They responded with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, but it would take Jefferson’s election in 1800 for the law to be buried.
Who owns the means of forming opinion?
For Trump, the issue is no longer necessarily to ban a publication, as his distant predecessor did, but to influence the environment in which it becomes possible. The journalist remains legally free, but the dependencies surrounding him soon become a function of his allegiance to the power in place. The approach has a European precedent. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, defeated in the spring, the press was less censored than bought up by power allies, then regrouped in 2018 into the KESMA foundation. Far from abolishing the state’s power, the modern form of capitalism has placed its regulatory power at the center of the economic game.
The current reshaping of the American media landscape shows this with particular clarity. David Ellison now controls Paramount Skydance, owner of CBS, and who has also just acquired Warner Bros. Discovery for about $110 billion, an operation that will bring CNN into the same group. The Department of Justice and the FCC had already given their approval to several aspects of the operation, and the remaining states opposed to this merger came to terms on September 21 by signing an agreement with Paramount. In the envisaged structure, the Ellison family, very close to Donald Trump, and the RedBird Capital investment fund would control all voting rights.
The problem here is structural: an increasing share of institutions tasked with informing the public belongs to fortunes whose activities, investments, and industrial operations themselves maintain multiple lines of influence with the federal state. The question of press independence thus shifts from the content of articles alone to the ownership of the tools that enable their production. Americans are acutely aware of these heightened risks, since the latest opinion polls indicate that the federal government has never seemed so corrupt to them.
This is where the ongoing disappearance of local newspapers becomes decisive. Since 2005, nearly 3,500 American newspapers have vanished. In other words, roughly 50 million people now live in counties with no regular local source of information. The movement continues to accelerate, as in a single year more than 130 titles disappeared.
The political consequences are catastrophic. A study published in the Journal of Communication compared similar counties except that in some of them a local newspaper had disappeared: the closure was accompanied by a 1.9-point drop in votes for candidates from different parties, a sign of increased nationalization of electoral behavior. When local information recedes, citizens rely more on national news and partisan cues.
Madison’s intuition proved right. The press, according to him, should tighten the vast American territory by circulating the experiences and particular interests of citizens. In the absence of these information relays, the country seems to widen continually. Local newspapers are often mocked for being mostly descriptive, with opinion pieces reserved for the papers in large cities. Yet it is this factual nature of local sheets that allowed citizens in counties located thousands of kilometers apart to share certain minimal truths. With the disappearance of local newspapers, the very possibility of forming a common people wanes.
France: when the press is not sold but bought
In the United States, the fragility of the press today has two sources: political power and economic power. The Trump administration exerts direct pressure on access conditions, licenses, and judicial proceedings, while the accelerated concentration of the media landscape places entire newsrooms in a structural dependence on fortunes whose industrial interests are tied to the federal state. In France, the political threat is incomparably more limited; economic power dominates. As economist Julia Cagé has shown, the press has been undergoing for two decades a deep crisis of sales and advertising revenue. Yet it has never attracted as much interest from the wealthiest. It is by no means a contradiction: owning a deficit-making media can remain rational as long as its value is not measured solely by profits but by the influence it yields in shaping public debate.
Powerful men and women know that a media outlet carries a political value that its bottom line cannot measure. Balzac expressed it under the July Monarchy: in Lost Illusions, Claude Vignon notes that “the Journal, instead of being a sacred thing, has become a means for the parties; from a means, it has become commerce; and like all commerce, it is without faith or law.” The sentence is less interesting for its contempt of journalism than for the contradiction it reveals: the press is simultaneously a commodity and a power. If it indeed needs money to exist, it nonetheless allows the investor to acquire something that would be hard to obtain elsewhere: the capacity to influence public opinion. Yet, in political regimes based on elections, that capacity to influence is perhaps the most precious “commodity.”
This brings us back to Montesquieu. The modern press cannot be considered the sole expression of individual liberty. Since it helps make visible the actions of the rulers, prioritizes information, and organizes public debate, it wields a non-negligible influence on the political body. That is why the republic, as a regime built on the balance of powers, must guarantee its independence from the executive and from private interests. After the press’s compromise under Vichy, the Conseil national de la Résistance already asserted the need for an independent press “with respect to the State, the powers of money, and foreign influences.”
A free press, a republic
In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu summarized the relationship between nobility and monarchy with a famous formula: “No monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch; but there is a despot.” In other words, a regime does not simply depend on the institutions its constitution enumerates: it depends on the independent forces that keep authority from becoming unlimited.
One could today twist his formula: No free press, no republic.
Jefferson and Madison did not defend the press because they imagined journalists to be wiser than other men. They knew it could lie, slander, exaggerate, and divide. Madison acknowledged in 1800 that “a certain degree of abuse” is inseparable from its proper use and that it is “better to let a few harmful branches grow than to prune them at the risk of damaging those that bear good fruit.” In short, the price to pay for a truly free press is small in comparison with the benefits it provides. Since the people are sovereign, they must have the means to know and to judge continually those who exercise power in their name.
The contemporary danger mainly arises from the possible combination of powers. When political power can act on a few media companies that themselves form an oligopoly, we return to the question Jefferson and Madison raised in their time: who forms the opinion of the people whose government derives its legitimacy from them? In Munich, J.D. Vance urged Europeans not to fear their own people. Today, he is a member of an administration that refuses to allow journalists to practice their trade inside the White House. Not fearing one’s own people requires giving them the means to know what their rulers are actually doing and to form their judgment without depending on their whim—or on that of a few private powers.
Elections are essential to any republic; however, they never suffice to maintain liberty. The people exercise their sovereignty when they choose their rulers. But, as Rousseau rightly observed, is a people free only during elections, then becomes enslaved again? Certainly not. The people preserve their sovereignty only if they exercise it every other day, through a free and independent press that scrutinizes those to whom they have delegated a portion of their power for a time. Much to the current occupant of the White House’s chagrin.