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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Examining Trump's War on the Media, and a Warning from Hungary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.23.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is the second installment of “How Bad Is It,” a recurring series in which the staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to conduct a health check on American democracy. They discuss how Donald Trump has bullied media companies, why it’s troubling that some outlets are seeking to settle lawsuits with the Administration, and how the role of social media in public discourse has changed during the second Trump Administration. Plus, an interview with the prominent Hungarian journalist Márton Gulyás, who’s on the show to discuss a new bill making its way through the Hungarian parliament which is designed to quell the free press, and what a potential crackdown may tell us about the future of American media. 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:13.3

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

0:18.0

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

0:22.8

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

0:27.5

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

0:32.4

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

0:37.0

for basically the

0:38.0

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

0:42.4

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

0:47.4

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

0:53.4

said that this lawsuit has

0:54.8

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

1:00.7

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

1:07.4

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

1:13.1

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

1:17.9

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

1:22.6

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

1:26.6

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

1:29.6

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.

1:40.1

Which means like subscriptions and stuff, right?

1:42.7

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

1:46.0

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

...

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