The Trump Administration is ramping up its ongoing effort to curtail press freedom. While much attention has been paid to ABC’s cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! under pressure from Trump’s media enforcer, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendon Carr, the Pentagon has announced draconian new restrictions on the press.
Last week, as the Boston Globe noted, it said “credentialed journalists at the military headquarters” will be required to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release….Journalists who don’t abide by the policy risk losing credentials that provide access to the Pentagon.”
You read that right.
Reporters will now have to obtain permission from the individuals they are covering before publishing stories about them or anyone else.
This seems like the kind of thing which we might expect from the Kremlin in Moscow or from Communist China. Or, maybe in a parody of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, but the Trump Administration is making it an American reality in 2025.
Let’s face it. Neutering the press is one way of neutering democracy.
And defending the press is an important way to defend democracy. It is not easy to do so at a time when officials regularly accuse reporters of peddling fake news, and when public confidence in the news media is at an all-time low.
However, it has never been as crucial for Americans to push back against the kind of restrictions on the press that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is imposing as it is right now. They are, as Kevin Baron, the former vice president of the Pentagon Press Association, puts it, “100% an attempt to kill transparency and funnel all public information through the government, which goes against every constitutional principle of free speech you can imagine.”
Before discussing those restrictions further, let me elaborate on the importance of press freedom for the health of democracy.
Let’s start with Thomas Jefferson’s 1878 tribute to the press. “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people,” he said, “the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Twelve years later, as if foreseeing the present moment, Jefferson observed, "Our citizens may be deceived for a while, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."
Alexander Hamilton also believed that "the liberty of the press consists in the right to publish, with impunity, truth, with good motives and for justifiable ends" was essential in making it possible for the public “to know the truth about its government and leaders” and to make informed electoral choices.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln “loved newspapers for what they were and for what they could do for him in politics.” But he was also quite vexed by what he perceived as animosity from some leading publishers.
During the Civil War, Lincoln even allowed his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, to shut down two New York newspapers after they published a forged presidential proclamation calling for 400,000 more troops through either voluntary enlistment or a new draft. Lincoln believed that doing so would undermine the war effort.
However, Lincoln did not do more to control the press because he understood its importance in facilitating dissent in a democratic republic.
A little less than a century later, the renowned Judge Learned Hand described the role of the press and its operation this way: “News is history; recent history, it is true, but veritable history, nevertheless; and history is not total recall, but a deliberate pruning of, and calling from, the flux of events. Were it possible,” Hand added, “by some magic telepathy to reproduce an occasion in all its particularity, all reproductions would be interchangeable.”
“But,” Hand explained, ”there is no such magic; and if there were, its result would be immeasurably wearisome, and utterly fatuous. In the production of news, every step involves the conscious intervention of some news gatherer, and two accounts of the same event will never be the same.”
That is how a free press feeds a free people. It does so by offering differing accounts of public events and allowing the public to see the political world from different angles.
And in 1971, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black gave, I think, an articulation of the role of the press in the United States that allows us to see clearly the danger of what Pete Hegseth is doing at the Pentagon. “In the First Amendment,” Black wrote, “the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy.”
“The press,” Black continued, channeling Jefferson, “was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
Black concluded that “Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints.”
That brings us back to the Pentagon’s new policy concerning the press. It imposes the very kind of prior restraint that Black understood would mean the death of press freedom and of democracy itself.
That policy is detailed in an eighteen-page document issued on September 18. In one sentence, it says, “DoW remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But in the next, it offers its own Kafkaesque version of transparency: “DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
One might reasonably ask how likely it is that any such official will authorize the release of information that “bares the secrets of government” or exposes “deception in government?”
Moreover, reporters covering the Pentagon will no longer be allowed on several floors of the building unless they have a government escort. In the past, journalists could walk the halls independently.
As Hegseth described them, the new guidelines make clear that “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do.” The press, he said, “is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home.”
What Hegseth would have us forget is what Jefferson, Lincoln, Hand, and Black knew. If the press is not free to do its job, then the people will not be able to run the government, including the Pentagon.
That, I suspect, may be exactly what the Secretary of War and his colleagues in the Trump Administration hope to achieve.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.