Welcome back to the political scene from the New Yorker for the second episode of our special series, How Bad Is It?

Where staff writer Andrew Morant and I sit down for a health check on the state of our democracy.

Yeah, I would say health, not super excellent. Maybe not at the point

where I would keep us home from school, but... Worse than the last time we talked? Yeah, I would say

a little worse. Well, today we're going to talk specifically about the media and President

Trump's attacks on it. Trump has ensuing news outlets and calling us the enemy of the people

for basically the

entire time that I've been in journalism. But what's changing now is how the media is responding

to those attacks. For example, we have Paramount, who appears to be preparing to settle a lawsuit

with Trump over CBS News, edits to a 60 minutes interview of Kamala Harris, even though experts have

said that this lawsuit has

no teeth. Yeah, that's even what CBS's lawyers said at first. You had ABC settling another

potentially baseless lawsuit. You had meta throwing money to Trump seemingly without needing to.

So this seems like a reversal of the media standing up to Trump and kind of starting to

maybe acquiesce. It's a really concerning turn in the relationship between the government and the

press, one that mirrors authoritarian countries around the world. Particularly in Hungary,

where Viktor Orban has been in power for more than a decade. The strong man appears primed to

take that assault on the media to an entirely new level.

So the Hungarian parliament is about to vote on this bill that would basically allow them to crack down on any news outlet that receives any kind of foreign funding at all.

Which means like subscriptions and stuff, right?

Everything. It's a huge step beyond where they were.

And Hungary is a place I've been going to and reporting from.

...