Clear & Present Danger: Future of Media and Information
Recognizing a campaign liability when he sees one, Donald Trump is frantically trying to distance his campaign from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – but at least 140 former members of his administration helped produce it. Also, let’s be real: Trump’s policy platform “Agenda 47” looks pretty similar. He owns this reactionary mess.
Project 2025 is an explicit policy roadmap to transform the U.S. into a dystopian right-wing autocracy, providing a step-by-step plan to undermine the rule of law, challenge the separation of powers, eliminate the separation of church and state and annihilate civil liberties. Some of the most well-known elements of Project 2025 include:
Detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants
Legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people
Gutting Medicaid
Making abortion and birth control difficult – if not impossible – to access
Hobbling public education
Cutting climate research
Giving billionaires tax cuts at the expense of middle class families
What’s less understood is how Project 2025 would endanger news and communications. Obsessed with the idea that “Big Tech” has “colluded with the government to attack American values and advance ‘wokeism,’” the authors would impose extensive antitrust regulation to establish social and political control, not for economic reasons.
Similarly hostile to public broadcasting, its authors propose to interrupt an important source of reliable news in this country by stripping the funding and legal status of PBS-TV and NPR. There’s a recommendation for “a ‘reexamination’ of the relationship with the Correspondents’ Association to possibly grant access only” to “friendly” journalists rather than those who might challenge the party line.
Tellingly, Project 2025 has almost nothing to say about artificial intelligence, nor privacy and safety protections for Americans using AI, apps, other tech platforms and the internet. Hell, they already have Elon Musk banning “White Dudes for Harris” on X because the reactionaries are all about silencing voices they don’t like.
The creepy “1984” vibe is unmistakable. The vision for a second Trump administration seems pulled directly from Orwell’s book – the government controls information, spinning out revisionist history to match its preferred narrative. There is no objective truth; it will be whatever the people in power say it is. The power of technology may be used to spread misinformation, disinformation and outright propaganda and maybe even surveil residents without adequate security.
We know that Trump and his MAGA minions have already eroded faith in trusted, factual journalism sources by calling them “the enemy of the people” and “fake news.” Trump seeks to enshrine that distrust by limiting the ability of the media to hold government officials up to scrutiny. As the Brookings Institution says, Project 2025’s “suggestion to restrict journalists’ access to executive decision-making and relevant public discussions should send alarming signals about the willingness of [the] authors to let government be held accountable.”
Let’s come together in November to ensure the media won’t be constrained or censored by an authoritarian agenda or an autocrat.