You'll miss the free press when it's gone

Republicans are suppressing stories on abortion-related deaths and attacking news outlets to try and control the flow of information. We really shouldn't let that happen.

Hello from my parents’ house in South Louisiana, where most of their neighbors have Trump bumper stickers on their pick-up trucks and the front page of the local paper looks like this today:

I showed the hippo headline to my mom, who nodded and said most people here “have their hands buried in the sand” about actual news—especially anything having to do with politics. Which does sound like a more peaceful way to live, until a Category 6 hurricane flings a tree through your house without much warning and drowns a few of your neighbors because Donald Trump defunded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which existed to give you a heads up about such things.

I was thinking about the concept of simply not reading news today, ironically, as I read that Texas’ Maternal Mortality Review Committee has been instructed to stop reviewing (and thus reporting) cases of women dying in the years 2022 and 2023—coincidentally the two years that directly followed the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. This news comes in the wake of ProPublica reporting that the state’s abortion ban has killed a third woman, Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother of young boys. Ngumezi died because the hospital denied her an emergency D&C procedure for a miscarriage, because it’s the same procedure used in first-trimester abortions, despite the fact that she was “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”

That makes five women in total—three in Texas and two in Georgia—who we know have died in the past two years as a result of state abortion bans. And Georgia similarly responded to ProPublica’s reporting by firing its entire maternal mortality review committee, because it couldn’t figure out who “leaked” the information about Candi Miller and Amber Thurman dying abortion-related deaths. Imagine the state caring more about who leaked that its abortion bans are literally killing women than the fact that women are dying in the first place.

Meanwhile, Trump and his thin-skinned billionaire buddies are launching full-scale attacks on the free press at a time when the news industry is already laying off journalists en masse and struggling to continue to exist. After admitting that he changed X’s algorithm to bury any posts that contain links to actual news, Elon Musk has been on a ketamine-fueled rage-posting binge for the past 48 hours about the media and how he wants to destroy us and control us and replace us with his own propaganda.

And as Musk floats the idea of buying MSNBC, here are some other headlines from the past fews days:

• Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s been appointed to Elon Musk’s made “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), said her new agency intends to defund National Public Radio (NPR), claiming it “spread nothing but Democrat propaganda”

• Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee for chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wants to use to his power to go after broadcasters that have been critical of Trump

• The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, after quashing the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris (as Bezos did with the Washington Post), went full MAGA and started sucking up to Trump on main

• House Republicans passed a bill that would allow the Treasury Department to kill any nonprofit they don’t like over supposd "ties to terrorism,” which is actually just a way for the GOP to “try to restrict what activists and nonprofit organizations can say or do,” per PBS. This especially endangers nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica and NPR, probably by design, because Republicans don’t like what they’re reporting.

Throttling the free press in order to control the flow of information is straight out of the authoritarian’s playbook. Take a look at Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the far-right dictator who destroyed democracy in the middle of Europe, whom Steve Bannon once called “Trump before Trump.” This was Orbán’s tip to American Republicans who came to see him speak two years ago at a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in Budapest: “Have your own media,” he told the audience, adding that TV personalities like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who’s literally paid by Russia to boost Trump, “should be broadcasted day and night.”

This past summer, Orbán’s pro-democracy challenger, Péter Magyar, tried to explain to the AP what it’s like to challenge the man who killed the free press in your country. “It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here,” he said. “This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.”

We already got a taste, through Musk’s purchase of X and manipulation of the algorithm to favor far-right meme accounts, of how much political power a man can gain simply by smashing and buying up news outlets and platforms and turning them into self-serving propaganda machines. It’s time for anyone who cares about the existence of a free press, and therefore basic democracy in this country, to start stepping up and supporting the news that you want to continue to exist. Subscribe to local and national newspapers; donate to ProPublica, which has been the most vital news source lately—particularly on abortion reporting—and is expanding its newsroom partnerships in Texas as we speak.

Trust me when I say that no matter how you feel about the mainstream media, you will miss public service journalism when its gone. It feels tempting to bury our heads in the sand and just look away for four years to protect our own inner peace, but if we do that, we will just find ourselves returning to an election that’s rigged even harder in favor of the billionaire broligarchy at the expense of literally everyone else.