There will be no reckoning in U.S. media for having once again greatly underestimated President Trump’s chances of electoral victory. And there will be no widespread effort by legacy media to understand better the electorate that moved to the right in November.
CBS News’s programming last weekend already suggested as much.
In an address in Munich on Jan. 14, Vice President JD Vance told European leaders that they’ve grown dangerously illiberal, citing as an example Scotland’s “buffer zone” law barring pro-life activists from demonstrating or praying within 600-plus feet of abortion clinics.
“[L]ast October,” he said, “the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called ‘safe access zones,’ warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”
“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said.
Love him or hate him, the man has a point, although many American journalists will tell you otherwise. The way they see it, the vice president is guilty of spreading “disinformation” regarding the Scottish law. Also, for some reason, these beneficiaries of our First Amendment believe that free speech should not be as free as Vance suggests.
This is our Fourth Estate, ladies and gentlemen.
First of all, the Scottish government did send letters in 2024 before enacting the “buffer zone” law, warning residents within designated zones that they could be prosecuted for engaging in pro-life activities within their own homes.
“In general, the offenses apply in public places within the Safe Access Zones,” the letter read. “However, activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area between the protected premises and the boundary of a Zone could be an offense if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and done intentionally or recklessly.”
So, Vance was correct — these letters were sent. If you stand at your window and pray within one of these zones, it seems to say, you might get a visit from the police. And Rachael Clarke of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service seemed to confirm as much with her non-denial denial of this.
“Absolutely none of us [wanted the law to include] having a private conversation in your own house,” she said. “However” — a mighty big however — “you can use a private dwelling or another private building in order to have exactly the same effect as if those people [stood] on a public highway.”
Scotland’s “buffer zone” laws are truly outrageous and would never be allowed in the U.S. But as bad as the American media’s knee-jerk defense of these laws was, it paled in comparison to CBS’s exaltation of Germany’s draconian censorship laws.
This began when CBS anchor Margaret Brennan asserted, falsely, that freedom of speech had paved the way to the Holocaust.
Vance, she said, “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Germany’s Nazi Party was known for many things — book burning and street violence against Jews, for example — but advocacy for free and open political speech was never one of them. What Brennan ignorantly suggested is colloquially referred to as the “Weimar Fallacy.” It’s not an obscure theory; it’s quite well known.
Later that same weekend, CBS highlighted Germany’s anti-speech laws, reporting approvingly on a “pre-dawn wakeup call” wherein law enforcement officials stormed a private residence over the posting of a supposedly offensive cartoon. Without a hint of reservation or concern, CBS noted approvingly that more than 50 such raids were occurring that moment all over Germany. Of 16 units tasked with policing online speech, one was investigating at least 3,500 cases, CBS reported.
Throughout the segment,“60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is seen mugging and laughing with German authorities as they detail their surveillance and censorship efforts, including the hotlines they created so that citizens could denounce their neighbors.
The segment even included comments from Josephine Ballon, CEO of a German nonprofit called HateAid, which purports to promote “human rights in the digital space and fight against digital violence.” Ballon notes that Germans have grown fearful of expressing political opinions online. But laughably she attributes this fear to online trolls rather than the threat of prosecution or pre-dawn police raids against those expressing disapproved opinions.
Nowhere in the CBS segment is it suggested that Germany has gone too far or that its efforts are extreme. Censorship is presented as a net positive. Meanwhile, the American vice president was portrayed elsewhere on the network as a villain for pointing out that Europe’s commitment to freedom of speech has been somewhat lacking.
This is just one more sign of what the media will look like in Trump 2.0. Major outlets won’t make much effort to understand or convey the perspective of the majority that voted to put Trump back into the White House. There will be no reckoning or retrospective by anchors, journalists or editors to understand how they missed Trump’s victory not once but twice.
Instead, we will see another four years of full-on anti-Trump resistance. If you thought the descent into political advocacy was terrible following Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.
