When the executive turns the regulator against the press

The Hill reports that President Trump has called on the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on NBC's Meet the Press after host Kristen Welker offered what amounts to a routine journalistic assessment — that his endorsement record this cycle is, in her word, 'mixed.' That is the provocation. The response, if it is pursued in earnest, is something of a different order entirely.

I am told this by the report and not by any personal recollection, but the pattern requires no modern expertise to read. When the holder of executive power invites a licensing authority to investigate a broadcaster for the content of its coverage, he has not merely criticized a journalist. He has suggested that the permission to broadcast — a permission that flows, however indirectly, from the government — may be conditioned on the character of the news that broadcaster chooses to report. That is not the posture of a republic. That is the posture of a court that expects its flattery.

I have always held that the liberty of the press is among the safeguards of free government, not because every editor is virtuous — few men in any trade are uniformly virtuous — but because the remedy for a partial press is a competing press, not a silenced one. The moment the executive discovers that it may punish unfavorable coverage through regulatory channels, every broadcaster in the country receives a lesson that requires no further elaboration. The chill settles without a single license being revoked.

The Hill further notes that this episode is creating difficulty within the President's own party. I infer — and mark this as inference, not recollection — that elected members of that party who privately regard the move as constitutionally imprudent find themselves reluctant to say so aloud. That reluctance is itself instructive. When faction loyalty makes a legislator hesitant to defend the boundaries of the office against the occupant of that office, the faction has already displaced the compact. The Republic does not belong to any party; it belongs to the citizenry that constituted it.

I am no engineer of broadcasting law, and I will not pretend otherwise. The mechanics of FCC jurisdiction in the present age are well beyond anything I could responsibly pronounce upon. But the civic shape of the question is as old as the idea of republican government: may the executive use the levers of administrative power to punish speech that displeases him? The answer the Founders reached, at considerable cost, was an unambiguous no — not because they trusted the press, but because they distrusted the alternative more deeply.

My counsel to the citizenry and to those who serve in the legislature is this: the test of institutional character is not what a government does when the press is kind to it, but what it does when the press is not. If the FCC proceeds under executive pressure against a broadcaster for the content of a news segment, that precedent will outlast this administration, this Congress, and every personality presently attached to either. Precedents, once established in the conduct of government, become the grammar by which future power speaks. Guard them accordingly.