From Watchdogs to Lapdogs: Selling Out the Fourth Estate for Scraps at Trump’s Table

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Mary Anne Franks

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters in red MAGA hats, gas masks, and tactical vests swarmed the Capitol Rotunda. They broke windows, assaulted police officers with American flags, and climbed onto the statues of former presidents in their efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Donald Trump’s role in encouraging the violence, including his repeated lies about the election being stolen and his expressions of “love” for the insurrectionists, led multiple social media companies to remove or restrict his access to their platforms and services in the days that followed the riot. Meta, then known as Facebook, announced that was suspending Trump’s account indefinitely. Google suspended Trump’s YouTube account. After temporarily locking Trump’s account on the day of the riot, Twitter (now known as X) banned Trump’s personal account on January 8, 2021. Google and Apple removed the conservative social media site Parler from their app stores after reports that insurrectionists used it to plan the attack on the Capitol; Amazon removed the site from its web-hosting services later that same day, citing multiple violations of Amazon’s terms of service. Many mainstream media companies responded to the insurrection with in-depth, sustained coverage of the attack and its devastating aftermath, as well as unsparing analysis of the former President’s personal role in encouraging it. Among the most notable of these efforts was the Washington Post’s comprehensive three-part investigation into the planning, execution, and aftermath of the insurrection, which painstakingly documented how Trump’s construction of the “Big Lie” contributed to the catastrophic event and continued to destabilize the country in the months after. 

Four years later, the billionaire owners of those companies stood dutifully at attention in the very space where a mob came dangerously close to violently overthrowing the government, while the man who incited them – convicted felon, serial sexual predator, and prodigious liar Donald Trump - was inaugurated as the President of the United States for a second time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, X owner Elon Musk, and Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos were arranged around President Trump in the Capitol Rotunda in a tableau described by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as “supplicants” making an “official surrender” to Trump, evoking the surrender of Japanese forces to General MacArthur in 1945.

Google allowed Parler to return to its stores in 2022 and reinstated Trump’s YouTube account in 2023. Following the 2024 election, Google ended its diversity hiring goals and announced that it was evaluating other DEI policies. Soon after Trump took office for the second time, the company removed several events celebrating diversity from its default calendar settings, including Pride Month, Black History Month, and  Indigenous Peoples month. Two weeks after Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico was to be renamed the “Gulf of America,” Google implemented the name change in Google maps for U.S.-based users. 

Eleven days before the 2024 election, Jeff Bezos took the extraordinary step of preventing the Washington Post editorial board from endorsing Trump’s opponent in the presidential election, Vice-President Kamala Harris, despite the paper’s tradition of endorsing a candidate in almost every presidential election since 1976. This decision, along with Bezos’s donation of $1 million to Trump’s inauguration campaign and his attendance at a billionaires’ dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in December 2024, provided context for a sketch by Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes depicting Bezos and other tech titans prostrating themselves with bags of money at President Trump’s feet. After the Post refused to run the cartoon - the first time it had done so in Telnaes’s 17-year career at the newspaper – the Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist resigned from the newspaper. On February 26, 2025, Bezos instructed his staff that the editorial section of the Post would now be devoted to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars” would not be allowed. After a piece by longtime Post columnist Ruth Marcus criticizing this new editorial direction was spiked, Marcus too resigned from the paper. 

After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, which he later renamed X, he reinstated Donald Trump’s previously suspended account along with those of several neo-Nazis, child pornographers, and sexual predators, while banning or restricting accounts critical of him and disbanding the Trust and Safety Council. Musk altered X’s algorithm to promote his own content and routinely used the platform to threaten and harass critics and advertisers who had chosen to no longer do business with the company. While the platform had been infected with misogyny, racism, and misinformation long before Musk’s takeover, under Musk’s leadership the site became a firehose of conspiracy theories, deepfake porn, election lies, harassment, and racist propaganda. 

On July 13, 2024, after a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania, Musk announced on X: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” Musk proceeded to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to assist Trump’s election campaign. The day of the election, Musk “mount[ed] a full-court press” for Trump, “deploying his platform X to get out the vote for Trump, shout down the ‘legacy media’ and predict a ‘landslide’ for the GOP in Pennsylvania.” According to social media scholar Jess Maddox, Musk’s embrace of Trump took the “convergence of right-wing politics and the tech industry that has been going on for years” to an unprecedented new level: “When the head of a major platform is invested in the victory of one political candidate, of course that platform will come to push features, content, and ads to benefit their interests.” Under Musk’s ownership, X became, in the words of tech industry analyst Matt Navarra, the “MAGA megaphone.” 

Immediately upon taking office, Trump began plundering the American economy, purging government officials and replacing them with unqualified lackeys, dismantling the country’s infrastructure, brutally repressing dissent, extorting educational institutions and businesses, and violating virtually every democratic principle the United States has ever aspired to hold: freedom of speech, the right to due process, racial and gender equality, the rule of law, freedom of the press. How someone as incompetent, delusional, and cowardly as Trump could drive the United States off a fascist cliff so quickly and with so little resistance cries out for explanation. 

One significant part of this explanation is the failure of the U.S. media to fulfill its most vital role: to serve as a check on power. For the “fourth estate” to be “a source of power equivalent with that of other branches,” writes communication theorist Denis McQuail, the media must have “autonomy from the government and politicians; … a duty to speak the truth, whatever the consequences; and … primary obligations to the public and to readers.” It must, in other words, serve as the people’s watchdog against governmental repression and overreach. There are numerous examples in U.S. history of the press playing such a role, from monitoring the McCarthy hearings to investigating the Watergate break-in to coverage of the Vietnam War. 

The capabilities of the media to serve as the people’s watchdog has never been greater than in our current historical moment: the internet and other information technologies have made it possible for the public to receive and distribute reliable, significant information about events anywhere in the world at a speed and with a salience never before possible. Media and social media have extraordinary power to supplement and enrich each other in ways that enhance and preserve democracy. 

But instead, the radical potential of both media and social media has largely been domesticated by a consumerist, ahistorical, and fundamentally regressive view of “free speech” that ultimately serves the most radically anti-democratic forces: profit, patriarchy, and prejudice. Instead of watchdogs, we get X, Meta, Google, and the Washington Post deliberately amplifying Trump’s state propaganda, lapdogs eager to do the bidding of their fascist masters in the hope of receiving more treats. Or we get “balanced” outlets like the New York Times failing to sound the alarm during a fascist takeover, Sherlockian dogs who don’t bark in the nighttime because the criminal has a familiar face. Trump, Musk, and the agencies they have weaponized have attacked the media and social media outlets that have attempted to maintain quality and integrity standards with a barrage of frivolous lawsuits, investigations, and other punishments – all in the name of “restoring free speech.” 

The path forward, if there is one, will require abandoning the comforting fairy tale that the First Amendment has in the past and will continue in the future to robustly protect freedom of speech and the press, or that allegiance to “both sides” or “neutrality” will ever keep us safe from fascism. To survive our current catastrophe, we will need from the media (and our other institutions) an honest accounting of the failures and limitations of free speech law and a more courageous commitment to the substantive values of truth, democracy, and equality.

Mary Anne Franks is Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law, George Washington Law School; President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. You can reach her by e-mail at m.franks@law.gwu.edu.