JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Over the years, President Trump has accused the Biden administration, social media companies and journalists of censoring conservative ideas. During his address to Congress on Tuesday, he said he's ended that.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It's back.
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SUMMERS: But under this Trump administration, some speech can cost you. For example, the government is scrubbing the words diversity, equity and inclusion from websites after Trump declared DEI programs, quote, "immoral and illegal." Trump is also retaliating against news organizations, like The Associated Press, that have made coverage decisions that he doesn't like, and he's threatening to pull federal funding from colleges that allow what he calls illegal protests. To talk about all of this, we're joined now by NPR media correspondent and David Folkenflik. Hi there.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: So, David, when you look at all of these things that I just mentioned, do you see a consistent theme here?
FOLKENFLIK: Sure, I think that on the right there's been a belief in cancel culture, the idea that people could be targeted, taken down for things that were found to be offensive, particularly by folks on the left. There's clearly a new administration effort to uncork what has been - in some quarters been viewed as offensive speech and to kind of embrace and celebrate it. But in reality, I think what we're seeing is the desire to control the flow of information to the public from kind of a pro-MAGA, pro-Trump point of view, rather than to say that, hey, we welcome the fractious free flow of opinion and information from all sides.
SUMMERS: David, how does what we're seeing from the early days of the Trump administration differ from previous administrations when it comes to their policies on speech?
FOLKENFLIK: It's been an article of faith on the right, particularly among the MAGA right, that social media platforms have been really suppressing conservative speech. And one of the elements they point to is what happened during the pandemic. And during that time, you saw Biden administration officials really lobbying these social media platforms to tamp down on unfounded claims. And they did. Some of those claims turned out to be not utterly unfounded - the lab leak theory, for example. We just don't know at this time. Back then, it was dismissed. So that was taken as a real way in which Biden had performed some sort of censorship.
What Trump is doing is much less subtle than what happened under the Biden term. You're seeing Trump really tamp down on people's ability to speak freely pretty bluntly. One is the question of nonpartisan government officials speaking about their expertise, about the kind of research and data they've collected, and then the deep cutting back on what kinds of research they can conduct and talk about to the public. And then you're seeing private institutions being essentially pressured through the force of the government pocketbook against charting their own course on values on areas that they want to pursue for fear that they may cross the government and lose the funding.
SUMMERS: So, if freedom of speech is in the First Amendment, then how is this administration legally able to pursue these activities?
FOLKENFLIK: Look, every new administration is entitled to set its own priorities. It's why we have elections. That said, the coercion of speech and the kind of demands for fealty through rhetoric, it's not always clear that it's legal. One example, The Associated Press is suing Trump. He had them tossed out of these press pools that have been used for a century to kind of share coverage of the president and other major officials in sort of constricted circumstances because they weren't willing to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, his preferred term. The White House says, look, it's not a right, it's a privilege. But a Trump-appointed judge was somewhat sympathetic to what the AP had to say there. Even so, many folks aren't waiting around to find out. For example, PBS scrubbed DEI from its site, as have some major universities, in fear of the federal government coming down hard on them. And, you know, there is this tension between Trump's desire for kind of a control of the message from the White House, from the Oval Office, colliding with the - at least the spirit and perhaps even the law as embodied in the Bill of Rights.
SUMMERS: So David, then what do you think has been the impact on our society so far when you see these types of restrictions on speech?
FOLKENFLIK: They're broad ranging. And sometimes they may seem tough to pull together, but I think they're related. You've seen preemptive steps from the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post to essentially pull back on criticism of Trump, to kill, in each case editorials, endorsing Kamala Harris last fall but also to reshape their opinion pages. You've seen a constriction of certain kinds of valued information from government sources. And even if you dislike the mainstream media, we all need credible information. A weatherman I used to know in Baltimore posted online recently pointing out, you know, all the fancy information that we get in our weather apps originally comes from NOAA, you know, an atmospheric agency that does that research for us. Where's it going to come from if they can't gather the information and talk about it to the public? In that case, we're all kind of driving blind, or at least perhaps being driven in a self-driving Tesla.
SUMMERS: NPR's David Folkenflik, thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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